Talk About Books

From Russia to the jungles of South America to the Himalayas, an intrepid explorer’s travels make for exhilarating reading. I n a period roughly encompassing the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, a handful of very young European men crisscrossed the world on ships and changed the way we think. Exhibiting an almost mad degree of assurance, they beguiled committees, sea captains and patrons to take great risks and accommodate their often eccentric needs. Joseph Banks on the Endeavour, Georg Forster on the Resolution, Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Joseph Hooker on the Erebus and Thomas Huxley on the Rattlesnake seemed to have a hypersensitivity to the ideas around them and, influenced by their exotic surroundings, brought these to bear on the great scientific questions of the day. Darwin’s observations of earthquakes, finches and coral atolls were influenced by his reading of Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus, while Humboldt took the wo