An essay that deals with snapshots from the journey of modernity, opening with the "brave new world" of Miranda from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" to close with Scott Fitzgerald's "Gatsby". Examining the course of modern self-consciousness, the author finds that "the magic of the 'new world' is delivered ready with its remote future".
At the core of the essay are the parallel narratives of two iconic personalities of the 19th century: the journey of the British Empire ship Beagle (1835), on which the young naturalist Charles Darwin embarked, and the journey of the American whaling ship Acushnet (1841), on which the twenty-two-year-old Herman Melville is a crew member. Both later record their experience from their stay in the Enchanted Islands or the Galapagos Islands. These islands, "as rearranged by Darwin's scientific curiosity and Melville's imaginative writing, are presented as the ultimate [...] place where the whimsicality between magic and demystification will take place. Darwin will discover there a paradise to study natural history, partly replacing the demystification of the natural world with the founding magic of his study, while Melville will find the point where the promise of the New World is definitively refuted. For one, the Galapagos are a beginning, an opening to the world and the magic of creation; for the other, a haunted land, a cursed place".
Completing his journey through the adventure of the new world in modern thought and imagination, D. Kapsalis will focus on a third perspective that complements the perspectives of Darwin and Melville: it is the perspective of the narrator Marlow in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", who encounters the most atrocious aspects of imperial politics and ideology.