Enjoyable, quick-reading book about a man largely overlooked by history and the history of science: Robert FitzRoy, captain of the H.M.S. Beagle. This book tells of his career prior to the famous voyage, and of his later suicide (FitzRoy was a devout Christian and did not deal well with Darwin's views on evolution). It gets a little portentious at times - every chapter in parts one and two end with some variation of "Little did he know that he was setting into motion events that would CHANGE THE WORLD", but that's forgiveable. The book also loses track of FitzRoy towards the end - probably because history loses track of him. The book largely uses FitzRoy's own writing as source material, so if he wasn't writing anything for a span of ten years, there's not a lot a biographer can do. This space is filled with a description of what Darwin was doing at the time (i.e. prepping Origin of Species), which is a bit of a double-bind... the book would feel incomplete without it, but it's a story that we already know, and it draws focus away from FitzRoy, the main subject. Overall, a quick and interesting read that provides a nice backdrop to a major event in the history of science, but not really essential reading. ( )