Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution [Hardcover]

Iain McCalman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2009

A group portrait of the three British voyagers who became fierce defenders of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Award-winning cultural historian Iain McCalman tells the stories of Charles Darwin and his most vocal supporters and colleagues: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Beginning with the somber morning of April 26, 1882—the day of Darwin’s funeral—Darwin’s Armada steps back in time and recounts the lives and scientific discoveries of each of these explorers. The four amateur naturalists voyaged separately from Britain to the southern hemisphere in search of adventure and scientific fame. From Darwin’s inaugural trip on the Beagle in 1835 through Wallace’s exploits in the Amazon and, later, Malaysia in the 1840s and 1850s, each man independently made discoveries that led him to embrace Darwin’s groundbreaking theory of evolution. This book reveals the untold story of Darwin’s greatest supporters who, during his life, campaigned passionately in the war of ideas over evolution and who lived on to extend and advance the scope of his work.

16 pages of color illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In delightful prose, University of Sydney historian McCalman tells the intertwined stories of Charles Darwin and three younger 19th-century explorers who came together to make the case for evolution and aid its relatively rapid acceptance around the world. The younger three were greatly influenced by Darwin's 1839 description of his travels on the Beagle and wanted to follow suit. McCalman devotes a section to the travels of each: Darwin on the Beagle; botanist Joseph Hooker's journeys around Australia and Antarctica; biologist Thomas Henry Huxley's excursions around Australia and New Guinea; and zoologist Alfred Russel Wallace's years in the Amazon and throughout Southeast Asia. Although there's little that hasn't been told previously, McCalman does a good job of detailing the hardships each suffered while also demonstrating the scientific growth each underwent and explaining how their shared experiences brought them together. Once Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the other three became his biggest and most public supporters, and their tireless efforts changed Darwin's reputation from being the Devil's Disciple to one of England's most respected scientists. 16 pages of color illus.; maps. (Aug. 17)
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From The New Yorker

This geographically expansive account of the rise of evolutionary theory traces the lives and travels of four titans of nineteenth-century biology: Darwin, the botanist Joseph Hooker, the physiologist Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Russel Wallace, a fearless globetrotter whose dangerous and often unpleasant journeys in the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago were the source of biological epiphanies and tens of thousands of specimens. Though these stories have been told before, McCalman’s central conceit—that the four naturalists, who all travelled at length in the Southern Hemisphere, share “a special bond of the ‘salt’ ”—supplies a fresh, antipodean perspective. McCalman evokes the physical hardships and social intricacies navigated by his heroes—flammable ships, uncoöperative captains, and, on Antarctica, “legions” of penguins so dense they could be breached only by “kicking them to right and left”—and also the feel of an era when “adventure and science went hand in hand.”

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (August 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393068145
• ISBN-13: 978-0393068146
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #788,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Evolution sets sail, September 25, 2009

By 

Jay C. Smith (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution (Hardcover)

Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution
Readers have many new books on Charles Darwin and evolution to choose from in this bicentennial year of Darwin's birth. Darwin's Armada surely must rank among the better ones suitable for a broad audience. It consists of five parts. The first four recount the exploration expedition experiences of Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. The fifth describes the events surrounding the publication of Darwin's and Wallace's papers on evolution and the subsequent battles to win support for their theory.

The first four sections serve as good short biographies for significant parts of these men's careers, particularly useful to readers not already versed in the lives of one or more of them. McCalman, a distinguished Australian professor, places emphasis on their southern Pacific experiences, though not exclusively. None of the four was an accomplished naturalist when they first set out on their respective voyages, and one of the values of McCalman's accounts is to show how they learned on the job. He highlights how Darwin and Wallace, in particular, developed evolutionary insights from their observations of animals and plants in isolated island habitats.

McCalman underscores the social class differences among these men, and illustrates how class affected their careers and interactions with the scientific community. Darwin was from a distinguished family, but Wallace fit with the working-class and was self-educated. Hooker and Huxley fit in between, and both struggled financially at times.

I found Part Five "The Armada at War, 1859-82" to be the most rewarding. It shows how the connections among these men coalesced and why they mattered. Hooker and Darwin became friends since the mid 1840s and Hooker served as the principal sounding board for the ideas Darwin was developing about evolution. Huxley, whom Darwin first met in 1853, had to be won over, but he ultimately became the most effective publicist for Darwin's views.

The action intensifies in 1858 when Darwin received Wallace's paper "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type," which closely aligned with Darwin's own ideas about evolution, not yet published. Darwin's friends, particularly Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell, were concerned that Darwin not be pre-empted, and they quickly arranged for the joint reading of Darwin and Wallace papers at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. McCalman provides a fine account of that proceeding. He concludes that Darwin's friends had sought to advance Darwin's position versus that of Wallace, but that without their efforts Wallace's paper would likely have received no hearing.

McCalman does a good job of summarizing certain similarities and differences between the ideas of Darwin and Wallace. He mildly suggests that social class played a role in the ascendency of Darwin as the recognized innovator. Darwin clearly had one advantage: he had the leisure in 1858-1859 to pull together his thoughts into On the Origin of Species, while Wallace was still busy trying to earn a living collecting in the Malay Archipelago. Darwin would later help to arrange a government pension for Wallace.

The book begins and ends with Darwin's 1882 funeral at Westminster Abbey, a venue promoted by Huxley, ever the publicist. Huxley, Hooker, and Wallace were among the pallbearers.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars rollicking history, September 9, 2009

By 

Nigel Kirk (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution (Hardcover)

McCalman offers another perspective on Darwin's humanity and his travails in the synthesis of his great theories. Hooker, Huxley and Wallace cajoled and drove Darwin to complete The Origin and then helped him to defend it. McCalman captures the mood of the period and each scientist's journey is an insight into the cogitations of an innovative thinker. This history is very readable - one can smell the sea air, feel the debilitating aspects of long ocean voyages and empathise with Darwin as he gathers evidence from around the world. If McCalman's armada sparks a deeper interest in the life and times of Darwin, try the insightful biography by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evolution, The Backstory, September 16, 2009

By 

Michael A. Schumann "Book Addict" (Bloomington, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful book. It is well written and easy to read.

The author retells the stories of men whose names are often well known to students of the Life Sciences, but whose lives are not. In retelling the stories of these men whose work gave rise to the Theory of Evolution, the book brings to life the process by way of which the concept of evolution was developed and refined. Along the way, it utterly destroys the tired old Creationist/ID claim that the whole idea of evolution is "only" just one man's "theory", and not backed by any evidence.