Eddie Bosham, the not entirely English agent, is in prison on a murder charhe. But he's not worried. He's innocent and, anyway, he has hidden proof of a ghastly scandal that could bring down the monarchy.
Taking up his memoirs from where he was left, marooned on the Galapagos Islands , we find Eddie offering young Charles Darwin an explanation of why the finches on the islands vary. Rescued by an American whaler and set ashore in Acapulco , he makes his way to Texas . Staunchly loyal to whichever will win, he spies for General Santa Anna at the Alamo and, with the help of Emily Morgan, the ravishingly beautiful Yellow Rose of Texas, for Sam Houston at San Jacinto .
In cahoots with the seemingly prom Kate, Eddie works the Mississppi riverboats as a cardsharp. Caught cheating, he is forced to jump ship and he inadvertently joins infamous Cherokee Trail of tears. Westward ho, he stumbles across the secret that will launch the Californian Gold Rush. Finally, having traversed the girth of a nation, his disgraceful saga ends, back east, at a highly inflammatory revivalist meeting. And that's not all – while writing these memoirs, he has been paid to spy on Darwin , whose theories have aroused the interest of the Home Office.
A heady cocktail of fact and fiction, Birth of a Mation is a brilliant exploration of the lacunase in official histories. And it demonstrates, as Eddie Bosham does to Darwin , that it is the fittest who survive. But the fittest are not necessarily the biggest or strongest…
