The Voyage of the Beagle
My wife has been reading Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle to me during trips, and we finished it just as we approached the last exit from the highway, on Monday. I'd read it twice before (we used my old Doubleday Anchor edition, which still survives) but it had been decades ago.
When people ask me for good original books from the Age of Sail, this is one of three that come to mind; the other two being Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and Captain William Bligh's A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty. Melville's White Jacket; or, The World on a Man-of-War is also good, if you don't mind your story fictionalized.
One can no longer read this book without looking ahead to Darwin's discovery that plant and animal species evolved over time. The hints are all about him, especially on his visit to the Galapagos Islands. But what these pages also contain are many previous discoveries, many of them geological, including the theory of the origin of atolls and barrier reefs that we hold to today. Geology is a main interest in his observations, and he is constantly being reminded of the vast amounts of time that the geological record was showing him. Especially how things that were once at the bottom of the ocean are now high in the mountains.
It was thinking about the vastness of time, and its processes, that was the groundwork for the concept of evolution.
So, quickly, HMS Beagle was on a scientific survey and mapping expedition, its second, and circumnavigated the world. The voyage lasted five years, from 1831-1836, and surveyed the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America, the Galapagos, some South Sea islands, New Zealand and Australia. Darwin was an attached "naturalist" to the expedition. His journal was turned into a travelogue, and has been in print ever since.
This is a scientific classic. My one caveat is that if your eyes glaze over when geology and biology are discussed, well, this isn't for you.
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Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. I, P. H. Sheridan
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
By Air Express to Venus, Roy Rockwood
Ways of Nature, John Burroughs
Surface Detail, Iain Banks