The Beagle has become synonymous with Charles Darwin and his groundbreaking title On the Origin of Species. But how did Darwin come to be on board? For the first time in a single volume all the various strands of the Beagle story have been woven together to reveal the circumstances that set the expedition in motion and the characters who circumnavigated the world together. Enriched with first-hand commentary from personal letters and diaries, and the official narrative of the voyage, as well as artworks, sketches and charts produced by the shipboard artists and surveyors, James Taylor has produced a thoroughly engaging and informative account that will appeal to historians, scientists, art lovers, and anyone with a sense of adventure.

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Between 1492 and 1504, Christopher Columbus made four attempts to find the East by heading West. In the process he lost a fair number of ships; on his last journey alone he lost no fewer than four. Although Columbus also left written documentation of where his boats had gone down, no one has been able to locate even one of the wrecks. (His reports were probably inaccurate, perhaps willfully so--he was frequently less than truthful about his adventures in the New World.) In the mid-1990s, an American expatriate living in Panama--an aging surfer dude who ran a Scuba-diving outfitting shop and diving school--a Panamanian real estate agent, and an American on vacation with his son all claimed to have been the first to locate the remains of a small ship lying in fairly shallow waters in a small gulf in Panama. No one took the discovery seriously, since it had not been made by a team of established archeologists and scientists. Finally, in 2002, the authors of this book--journalists and amateur divers--decided to investigate. They organized a team of American scientists, all of them experts in carbon dating and underwater shipwrecks, who established not only that the Panama wreck was the oldest ever found in the entire Western Hemisphere--dating from around 1500--but that it was very likely the remains of one of Columbus' last ships, the Vizcaina. To be published on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' death, THE VOYAGE OF THE VIZCAINA is a riveting account of shipwreck and adventure, giving readers the story of how the wreck was found and salvaged. Working backward, Brinkbaumer and Hoges combine archaeology and history to recreate the circumstances of the fourth journey, which began in 1502 and ended in 1504. This book is unique in its extensive use of detailed findings to frame its fascinating discoveries and conclusions about exploration in the New World, as well as about the genius and shortcomings of the man known as the Admiral, and credited with the greatest discovery of all time.