Darwin`s Armada tells the stories of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker & Alfred Wallace, four young amateur naturalists from Britain who voyaged to the southern hemisphere during the first half of the nineteenth century in search of adventure & scientific fame. It charts their thrilling voyages to the strange & beautiful lands of the southern hemisphere that reshaped the young mariners` scientific ideas & led them, on returning to Britain, to befriend fellow voyager Charles Darwin. All three crucially influenced the publication & reception of his Origin of Species in 1859, one of the formative texts of the modern world. For the first time the Darwinian revolution of ideas is seen as a genuinely collective enterprise & one that had its birth in a series of gripping & human travel adventures. Many of the most urgent ecological & social issues of our times are seen to be prefigured in this compelling story of intellectual discovery.