James Morrow's Galpagos Regained centers on the fictional Chloe
Bathurst, an unemployed Victorian actress who finds work on Charles
Darwin's estate, nurturing the strange birds, exotic lizards, and giant
tortoises he brought back from his trip around the world.
When Chloe gets wind of the Great God Contest, sponsored by the Percy
Bysshe Shelley Society--10,000 pounds to the first petitioner who can
prove or disprove the existence of a Supreme Being--she decides that Mr.
Darwin's materialist theory of speciation might just do the trick. (If
nature gave God nothing to do, maybe he was never around in the first
place.)
Before she knows it, her ambitions send her off on a wild adventure--a
voyage by brigantine to Brazil, a steamboat trip up the Amazon, a
hot-air balloon flight across the Andes--bound for the Galpagos
archipelago, where she intends to collect the live specimens through
which she might demonstrate evolutionary theory to the contest judges.