“A powerful story played out against a beguiling landscape…that manages to convey just how heretical the theory of evolution was…. A meaty book…. Nichols has a finely tuned sense of history.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Nichols has done a first-rate job bringing to life a troubled man. His portrait of FitzRoy is sympathetic, engaging, and ultimately tragic. It is a well-written and lively tale, filled with insightful analysis and telling details.”
—Seattle Times
“Nichols delivers a dramatic, highly colored narrative about the head-on collision between two worldviews, one rooted in faith, the other in science.”
—Washington Post
“Fascinating…. Evolution’s Captain [has] a sense of drama that never lets up…further evidence of [Nichols’s] skill as a historian, researcher, and elegant writer.”
—Associated Press
“[It’s] hard not to share Nichols’s fascination with how FitzRoy…inadvertently set off a scientific controversy still flaring to this day.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A wonderful evocation of the tragic story of Robert FitzRoy, the Beagle’s captain who took Charles Darwin around the world and regretted it ever afterwards. The forgotten other half of the story behind the Darwinian revolution, FitzRoy has never before been treated with such an understanding eye.”
—Janet Browne, Darwin biographer and winner of the NBCC award for nonfiction
“Peter Nichols’s marvelous and intelligent new book tells the story of brilliant, tortured, and ultimately doomed Robert FitzRoy, who signed on Charles Darwin for an around-the-world surveying expedition and precipitated a scientific revolution. Evolution’s Captain is a fascinating and expert amalgam of history, science, anthropology, and seagoing adventure, and a gripping, penetrating account of one man’s struggle with his soul.”
—Derek Lundy, author of The Way of a Ship
“Engaging and fascinating…. FitzRoy’s extraordinary story is told beautifully.”
—The Times (London)
“Powerful and accessible…. Biography at its racy, compelling best. Nichols, an experienced yachtsman, brings an immediate sense of thrill and adventure to his subject and gives us a real historical page-turner.”
—The Observer
“Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle, was a much more interesting man than Charles Darwin: more complicated, more passionate, and driven so fiercely by principle that he could be said to have been destroyed by his own virtues…. Nichols knows about the strains of life on a small ship and he is…alive to the wildness of the sea and its ferocity.”
—New Scientist
“Nichols has done a magnificent job of bringing this awkward, intense, wrongheaded man to life. Crammed with fascinating and well-researched detail, the book has all the excitement of an old-fashioned nautical yarn as well as being an astute and convincing psychological portrait. Finally, Robert FitzRoy gets the sympathetic star billing he longed for all his life.”
—Sunday Tribune (London)
“Splendid…. The seafaring episodes off the southern tip of South America are frighteningly vivid…. Three hearty cheers for this sympathetic and stirring account.”
—Newsquest Media