A long-listed finalist for the 2009 Walkley non-fiction book of the year
"‘Completely fresh... a 'group biography' with a structural simplicity of the highest order of elegance. McCalman transports us.’ - Sydney Morning Herald
Darwin’s Armada tells the geographically expansive account of the rise of evolutionary theory, tracing 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.
Encounters with the landscapes, habitats and peoples of South America, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, South-East Asia and Antarctica moulded the young mariners’ minds and reshaped their scientific ideas.
For the next forty years, this little group became a fighting vanguard in the war of ideas and the accompanying social revolution that Darwin’s theory of evolution caused. Collectively they challenged the conservative clerical establishment to become among the most distinguished and influential scientists in Britain and the Western world.
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, uncooperative 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.”
Darwin’s Armada is both a gripping adventure story and a brilliantly enlightening work of history, portraying the Darwinian revolution as a collective enterprise forged in Australasia. It shows, for the first time, the Darwinian revolution of ideas as a genuinely collective enterprise, one that had its birth in a series of gripping human travel-adventures in the South Seas.
Many of the most urgent ecological and social issues of our present times are prefigured in this compelling story of intellectual discovery.
Darwin's Armada by Iain McCalman, published by Penguin, RRP $49.95
Review by Moriane Morellec, a student at the University of Western Australia in Perth and Walkley Foundation intern.
