Title: This Thing of Darkness
First published: 2005
Description: The year is 1828.
Brilliant young naval officer Robert Fitzroy is given the captaincy of HMS *Beagle*, surveying the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, aged just twenty-three. But Fitzroy hides a dark secret: hereditary manic depression that can strike at any time. He is seized by two ambitions -- that he can prove, contrary to the spirit of the age, that black and white men are equal; and that he can prove the truth of the Book of Genesis. To this end, he takes a passenger: a young trainee cleric and amateur geologist named Charles Darwin. This is the story of a deep friendship between two men, and the twin obsessions that tore it apart, leading one to triumph and the other to disaster... 

*This Thing of Darkness* is not just an epic historical novel. By turns gripping, funny, satirical and heartbreaking, it is also a novel about race, religion, science and colonialism that sheds many a light on the state of our world today. It is also one of history's great untold true stories, a tale of men under sail who were prepared to risk their very lives to get at the truth.
Subjects: Ship captains, Beagle Expedition (1831-1836), Seafaring life, Fiction, Voyages and travels, History, Naturalists, Fiction, historical, Fiction, historical, general, Argentina, fiction, Chile, fiction, Beagle Expedition (1831-1836) (uri) http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50077067 (uri) http://viaf.org/viaf/sourceID/LC|n50077067
Places: Patagonia (Argentina and Chile), South Atlantic Ocean
People: Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Robert Fitzroy (1805-1865)
Time periods: This novel is closely based upon real events that took place between 1828 and 1865., 19th century