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This is nuts. Darwin's all famous now, right? His name comes up now and again. But before he was, he wasn't. He was a confused, pimply, brash, confused, and also pimply kid. He got his real start on this snoopy-sounding HMS Beagle. Sailed around the world in the aftermath of a failed romance and a list of ups and downs, he did.
He's 22. It's the 1830s. Already dropped out of med school, already pissed off Dad, already decided to just suck it up and become a man of the cloth, get himself a real nice Anglican parish in the countryside. And he's got this scheme: over summer break he and this guy Ramsay are gonna get a boat, sail down to the Canary Islands, do the fashionable thing for landed gentry, you know, botanizing, entomologizing, maybe geologizing. It's big. It's on. He's up.
But comes time to get ready annnnd ... Ramsay dies. The guy's not yet 40, not too old. It's a surprise death. The expedition, clearly, is off. He's down.
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