DARWIN, Charles; Robert FitzRoy; Phillip Parker King.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle, First edition, in the original cloth, including the first issue of Darwin's first published book, Journal and Remarks. Darwin later described the voyage of the Beagle as "by far the most important event in my life" and as having "determined my whole career" (Life and Letters I, p. 61).The Narrative records two surveying expeditions undertaken by the Adventure and Beagle. Volume I contains Captain Phillip Parker King's account of the first expedition, from 1826 to 1830. Volume II, with its appendix bound separately as issued, contains FitzRoy's account of the second voyage, from 1831 to 1836, during which the Beagle travelled to South America, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere. Volume III is Darwin's own account, later published separately in the same year as the Journal of Researches and now generally known as The Voyage of the Beagle. Hill describes it as "famous as the genesis of [Darwin's] theory of evolutionary biology", while Freeman observes that it "is undoubtedly the most often read and stands second only to On the Origin of Species as the most often printed" (p. 31).The preliminaries to Darwin's volume were printed before his election to the Royal Society on 24 January 1839, and consequently his name appears without the initials "F.R.S." on the second title. The binding is Freeman's variant a, with the authors' names on the spines and the publisher's imp

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