Full Fathom 5000

Bell’s book is eminently readable, from start to finish, and cleverly mixes the scientific detail of the discoveries with personal anecdotes from the ship’s log and crew journals, and puts them into the historical perspective of what was (still is) a formative period of international exploration, empire, and scientific advancement. * Richard Jones, Royal Entomological Society *Graham Bell has written a tale which successfully intertwines the scientific and the human…It is a book to be enjoyed if you have a taste for extreme human endeavours, like a 19th Century equivalent to the sort of ideas and ideals that propelled the US space programme to the moon. Highly recommended. * Stephen Kenneth Donovan, Geology Today *

Graham Bell, FRS, is James McGill Professor in the Department of Biology at McGill University. As an evolutionary biologist, his research interests focus on revealing the mechanism of natural selection, explaining the main features of life cycles, and investigating the maintenance of biodiversity. He helped to found the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, and he served as its first President from 2005 to 2007. His work has been recognized by his election to Fellowship in RSC (1994), Honorary Fellowship of St. Peter’s College at Oxford (2003), and Fellow of the Royal Society (2016). Bell served as Director of the Redpath Museum from 1995 to 2005 and Chair of the Biology Department at McGill University from 2011 to 2016. He was President of the Royal Society of Canada from 2013 to 2015. His most recent book is The Evolution of Life (Oxford University Press, 2015).