If species do in fact evolve, Covington wonders, what proof can there be of God's handiwork? The young naturalist soon marks the sailor out as an adequate aide, a 'willing accomplice' to what the grown Covington will later consider 'a great murder.' By murder he means less the massive plundering of birds and beasts ('stopping the hearts of small life') than the undermining of Biblical truth.

But three years later, in 1831, Covington is still only an odd-job boy and ship's fiddler on a barque named after a 'beagle-hound.' This boat, though, will prove his career salvation, for its cosseted passenger is Charles Darwin. Already six feet tall and bursting with innocence, ambition, and faith, he dreams of glory. At 12 young Syms Covington escapes his father's slaughterhouse and England for life at sea. Darwin's Shooter, Roger McDonald explores the evolution not just of flora and fauna but of friendship and belief. Years later, in Sydney’s Watson’s Bay in beset middle age, Covington awaits the arrival of the first copy of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, which contains the scandalous theory of evolution.In Mr. And we travel on to the Galapagos Islands, with their huge turtles and armadillos and remarkable finches. Mr Darwin’s Shooter re-creates the voyage of the Beagle, where Covington spends time exploring - and collecting specimens - inland. When next he returns to sea it is to serve on the Beagle. But Phipps’ catechising can’t repress Covington’s passage into manhood, nor prevent him chasing the exotic native maidens of Tierra del Fuego. He leaves Bedford as a lad of 13 and goes to sea with the evangelical sailor John Phipps and becomes one of Phipps’ ‘lads’. But its greatest triumph is Covington himself, the boy who looked up at the beckoning figure of a yellow-haired Christian in the stained glass window in his boyhood church of Bedford, and sought to follow. This is a novel of scientific discovery, of religious faith, of masters and servants, and of the endless wonder of the natural world. It was on this voyage that Darwin collected the information that gave birth to his controversial Theory of Evolution. Last century Charles Darwin set out on a voyage in the Beagle that would change forever the way human history was viewed. The story of Syms Covington, Darwin’s manservant on the Beagle and afterwards. From the winner of the Miles Franklin Award.

Mr. Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald