Harry Thompson

This Thing of Darkness

Published 2005 · 697 pages

The year is 1828. Brilliant young naval officer Robert Fitzroy is given the captaincy of HMS Beagle, surveying the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, aged just twenty-three. But Fitzroy hides a dark secret: hereditary manic depression that can strike at any time. He is seized by two ambitions -- that he can prove, contrary to the spirit of the age, that black and white men are equal; and that he can prove the truth of the Book of Genesis. To this end, he takes a passenger: a young trainee cleric and amateur geologist named Charles Darwin.