Audiobook · read by volunteers
Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
Read by Roger Turnau, Scott Robbins, Leon Mire, Gilles Lehoux, Catharine Eastman, J. M. Smallheer, M.C.Y., Claude Banta, Shubda, Rob Whelan · 48 chapters · 21 h 50
About the book
At twenty-two, Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle as a young naturalist for what was supposed to be a two-year survey of South America. The voyage lasted nearly five years, and it changed him and the history of science. In this vivid memoir and scientific field journal, he describes the volcanic islands of the Atlantic, the forests of Brazil, the plains of Patagonia, the peaks of the Andes, its coral islands and the strange animals of the Galápagos. He writes about earthquakes, fossils, rocks, insects and birds, but also about the people he met and the customs he found. His keen powers of observation and his sense of wonder make the journey a thrilling read. Ten LibriVox volunteers share the forty-eight sections, which run to almost twenty-two hours. A classic of travel and natural history, written by a scientist at the start of his great career.
Introduction
Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and died in 1882. He is best known as the naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection, set out in On the Origin of Species in 1859, transformed our understanding of life. Before that, as a young man with a gift for collecting and a restless curiosity, he joined a surveying expedition aboard HMS Beagle.
The Voyage of the Beagle, also known as Darwin’s Journal of Researches, was first published in 1839. It is at once a lively travel memoir and a detailed scientific field journal, full of observations on animals, plants, rocks and peoples. The book was written at a time when he was still working out the ideas that would make him famous, and readers can sense the questions that were taking shape in his mind.
It is also a book of its period. Darwin writes about the people he meets, about slavery and about colonial encounters, and his views, though often more humane than those of many contemporaries, are not always ones that a modern reader will share. The geological and zoological descriptions are exact, while the narrative passages are often unexpectedly lively, with comic mishaps and moments of awe.
This LibriVox recording has a preface and forty-seven further sections, since the long chapters are divided into parts, and lasts almost twenty-two hours. Ten volunteers share the reading. It is a substantial commitment, but it offers a rare chance to travel through the nineteenth-century world with one of the most careful and curious observers who ever lived.
Public domain
Charles Darwin died in 1882: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text