Odyssey

Odyssey
Author: Tom Chaffin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 164313907X

An illuminating and lively narrative of Charles Darwin’s formative years and adventurous voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. Winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Biography/Memoir Charles Darwin—alongside Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein—ranks among the world's most famous scientists. In popular imagination, he peers at us from behind a bushy white Old Testament beard. This image of Darwin the Sage, however, crowds out the vital younger man whose curiosities, risk-taking, and travels aboard HMS Beagle would shape his later theories and served as the foundation of his scientific breakthroughs. Though storied, the Beagle's voyage is frequently misunderstood, its mission and geographical breadth unacknowledged. The voyage's activities associated with South America—particularly its stop in the Galapagos archipelago, off Ecuador’s coast—eclipse the fact that the Beagle, sailing in Atlantic, Pacific and Indian ocean waters, also circumnavigated the globe. Mere happenstance placed Darwin aboard the Beagle—an invitation to sail as a conversation companion on natural-history topics for the ship's depression-prone captain. Darwin was only twenty-two years old, an unproven, unknown, aspiring geologist when the ship embarked on what stretched into its five-year voyage. Moreover, conducting marine surveys of distance ports and coasts, the Beagle's purposes were only inadvertently scientific. And with no formal shipboard duties or rank, Darwin, after arranging to meet the Beagle at another port, often left the ship to conduct overland excursions. Those outings, lasting weeks, even months, took him across mountains, pampas, rainforests, and deserts. An expert horseman and marksman, he won the admiration of gauchos he encountered along the way. Yet another rarely acknowledged aspect of Darwin's Beagle travels, he also visited, often lingered in, cities—including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, Lima, Sydney, and Cape Town; and left colorful, often sharply opinionated, descriptions of them and his interactions with their residents. In the end, Darwin spent three-fifths of his five-year "voyage" on land—three years and three months on terra firma versus a total 533 days on water. Acclaimed historian Tom Chaffin reveals young Darwin in all his complexities—the brashness that came from his privileged background, the Faustian bargain he made with Argentina's notorious caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, his abhorrence of slavery, and his ambition to carve himself a place amongst his era's celebrated travelers and intellectual giants. Drawing on a rich array of sources— in a telling of an epic story that surpasses in breadth and intimacy the naturalist's own Voyage of the Beagle—Chaffin brings Darwin's odyssey to vivid life.

HMS Beagle

HMS Beagle
Author: Keith S Thomson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2003
Genre: Beagle Expedition
ISBN: 9780753817339

Adventure, shipwreck, storms and survival on the high seas

The Voyage of the Beagle

The Voyage of the Beagle
Author: Charles Darwin
Publisher: Hayes Barton Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 1906
Genre: Beagle Expedition
ISBN:

Opmålingsskibet "Beagle"s togt til Sydamerika og videre jorden rundt

The Falklands Saga

The Falklands Saga
Author: Graham Pascoe
Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing
Total Pages: 994
Release: 2024-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1803816902

The Falklands Saga presents abundant evidence from hundreds of pages of documents in archives and libraries in Buenos Aires, La Plata, Montevideo, London, Cambridge, Stanley, Paris, Munich and Washington DC, some never printed before, many printed here for the first time, in English and, where different, in their original languages, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Latin or Dutch. It provides the facts to correct the fallacies and distortions in accounts by earlier authors. It reveals persuasive evidence that the Falklands were discovered by a Portuguese expedition at the latest around 1518-19, and not by Vespucci or Magellan. It demonstrates conclusively that the Anglo-Spanish agreement of 1771 did not contain a reservation of Spanish rights, that Britain did not make a secret promise to abandon the islands, and that the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790 did not restrict Britain's rights in the Falklands, but greatly extended them at the expense of Spain. For the first time ever, the despairing letters from the Falklands written in German in 1824 to Louis Vernet by his brother Emilio are printed here in full, in both the original German and in English translation, revealing the total chaos of the abortive 1824 Argentine expedition to the islands. This book reveals how tiny the Argentine settlement in the islands was in 1826-33. In April 1829 there were only 52 people, and there was a constant turnover of population; many people stayed only a few months, and the population reached its maximum of 128 only for a few weeks in mid-1831 before declining to 37 people at the beginning of 1833. This work also refutes the falsehood that Britain expelled an Argentine population from the Falklands in 1833. That myth has been Argentina's principal propaganda weapon since the 1960s in its attempts to undermine Falkland Islanders' right to self-determination. In fact Britain encouraged the residents to stay, and only a handful left the islands. A crucial document printed here is the 1850 Convention of Peace between Argentina and Britain. At Argentina's insistence, this was a comprehensive peace treaty which restored "perfect friendship" between the two countries. Critical exchanges between the Argentine and British negotiators are printed here in detail, which show that Argentina dropped its claim to the Falklands and accepted that the islands are British. That, and the many later acts by Argentina described here, definitively ended any Argentine title to the islands. The islands' history is placed in its world context, with detailed accounts of the First Falklands Crisis of 1764-71, the Second Falklands Crisis of 1831-3, the Years of Confusion (1811-1850), and the Third Falklands Crisis of 1982 (the Falklands War), as well as a Falklands perspective on the First and Second World Wars, including the Battle of the Falklands (1914) and the Battle of the River Plate (1939), with extensive details and texts from German sources. The legal status of the Falklands is analysed by reference to legal works, to United Nations resolutions on decolonisation, and to rulings by the International Court of Justice, which together demonstrate conclusively that the islands are British territory in international law and that the Falkland Islanders, who have now (2024) lived in their country for over 180 years and for nine generations, are a unique people who are holders of territorial sovereignty with the full right of external self-determination.

Bulletin

Bulletin
Author: New York State Museum and Science Service
Publisher:
Total Pages: 594
Release: 1903
Genre:
ISBN:

Population: 485

Population: 485
Author: Michael Perry
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 006185297X

“Part portrait of a place, part rescue manual, part rumination of life and death, Population: 485 is a beautiful meditation on the things that matter.” — Seattle Times Welcome to New Auburn, Wisconsin (population: 485) where the local vigilante is a farmer’s wife armed with a pistol and a Bible, the most senior member of the volunteer fire department is a cross-eyed butcher with one kidney and two ex-wives (both of whom work at the only gas station in town), and the back roads are haunted by the ghosts of children and farmers. Michael Perry loves this place. He grew up here, and now—after a decade away—he has returned. Unable to polka or repair his own pickup, his farm-boy hands gone soft after years of writing, Perry figures the best way to regain his credibility is to join the volunteer fire department. Against a backdrop of fires and tangled wrecks, bar fights and smelt feeds, Population: 485 is a comic and sometimes heartbreaking true tale leavened with quieter meditations on an overlooked America.

Parliamentary Papers

Parliamentary Papers
Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons
Publisher:
Total Pages: 670
Release: 1883
Genre: Bills, Legislative
ISBN: