What Darwin Saw: The Journey That Changed the World
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In 1831 a 22-year-old naturalist named Charles Darwin stepped aboard the HMS Beagle as a traveling companion of an equally youthful sea captain called Robert FitzRoy. The Beagle’s round-the-world surveying journey lasted five long years on the high seas. The young Darwin noticed everything, and proved himself an avid and detailed chronicler of daily events on the Beagle and onshore. What Darwin Saw takes young readers back to the pages of his journals as they travel alongside Darwin and read his lively and awestruck words about the wonders of the world. We follow Darwin’s voyage, looking over his shoulder as he explores new lands, asks questions about the natural world, and draws groundbreaking conclusions. We walk in his footsteps, collecting animals and fossils, experiencing earthquakes and volcanoes, and meeting people of many cultures and languages. We examine his opinions on life in all its forms. We consider the thoughts of this remarkable scientist, who poured his observations and research into his expansive theories about life on Earth. In this exciting and educational account, Charles Darwin comes alive as an inspirational model for kids who think and question the world around them.
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I know, I know. It looks like a comic book. It sounds like a comic book.
It's not a comic book.
Or, at least, it's not your grandfather's comic book. So to speak.
What Darwin Saw is the story of Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, a trip that changed the way people saw the world. It looks like a comic book. It sounds like a comic book.
But this is no Superman here. The text enclosed in little speech balloons comes from primary sources, often. This is the textbook comic book. Or a comic book textbook. Something like that.
A sample: A view of the Amazon, with monkeys and parrots and frogs hanging from trees, alligators swimming close to Darwin's rowboat, and in the speech balloons coming from Darwin's mouth: “Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests, undefaced by the hand of man.” Huh? I am imagining the reaction of a fifth grader.
The pictures tell the story, or help tell the story. All the complex ideas are made clearer with the pictures in this book.
The book concludes with an author's note explaining the making of the book and a bibliography.
