Saddled with Darwin

In the 1830s, Charles Darwin travelled on The Beagle to South America, where he made many of the discoveries of fossils in the Andes and of animals unknown in Europe that led to his theory of evolution. All of Darwin's research expeditions were made on horseback, and sometimes he rode as far as 600 miles at a stretch. Toby Green undertook to retrace (as closely as possibly) these steps, travelling an amazing 9,000 miles from the tropical haze of northern Brazil, through Uruguay to the expanses of Argentinian Patagonia, up the length of Chile from the near-Arctic grandeur of Tierra del Fuego to the Atacama Desert in the north, and finally to the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin made some of his most famous discoveries. Travelling mostly on horseback (although forced for large stretches to walk), Toby Green set out to re-visit the places first written about by Charles Darwin, to see if they have changed and to reassess their importance in the light of 20th century developments in evolutionary theory.
In the spirit of Bruce Chatwin he befriended many local people, all of whom took him (and his horses) in, unquestioningly offering them shelter, food, assistance and astonishing insights into their lives, and voicing a uniform concern about the extraordinary and damaging changes to the environment over recent years. This is a book of astonishing confidence - and one which will appeal to many different readers: the armchair traveller, the Darwinian, the horse lover and the environmentalist.