
A Profoundly Momentous Journey: Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle
On December 27, 1831, after Charles Darwin and Captain Robert Fitzroy shared a final lunch of mutton chops and champagne ashore, the Beagle got underway. Darwin’s firsthand account of the journey, The Voyage of the Beagle, is one of history’s greatest true adventure stories. The voyage was supposed to last two years, but it ended up stretching out to five.

A native Vermonter and current resident of Putney, Tim Weed is an award-winning novelist and lecturer. He is the author of four books of fiction, including The Afterlife Project, named a best book of 2025 by Library Journal and the Toronto Star. His work has won multiple Writer’s Digest Annual Fiction Awards and has been shortlisted for the Prism Prize for Climate Literature, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, and many others. Tim’s latest novel, The Gatepost, is his first book set in Vermont. He is on the core faculty of the Newport MFA in Creative Writing, is co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, and has lived and worked in more than twenty-five countries on every continent except Antarctica.




