Evolution's Captain
Chapter One
Port Famine, Strait of Magellan, August 2, 1828. It is mid-winter at the bottom of the world. Snow drives at gale force
across the small vessel at anchor. Daylight comes as a few gloomy
hours of crepuscular dimness, and the afternoon is already growing
dark. Four years later in this same anchorage, in this same
vessel even, a young man of unusually sunny temperament -- the
twenty-four-year-old Charles Darwin -- will write in his journal:
"I never saw a more cheerless prospect; the dusky woods, piebald
with snow, were only indistinctly to be seen through an
atmosphere composed of two thirds rain & one of fog; the rest,
as an Irishman would say, was very cold unpleasant air."
Alone in his cabin beneath the poop, the vessel's commander, a
man still in his twenties, is in the last stage of despair. For him time
has lost its swift flow; it has flattened into an unending, intolerable
stasis. He sees no relief. He has been in these desolate waters for
two years: years more stretch ahead. Home -- England, a place as
distant as Earth from this cold Pluto -- is beyond imagining,
beyond regaining.
He raises to his head a small pocket pistol. He is certain of
this now, eager for it, and his finger at last tugs with resolve on
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