Aficionados of the shipping forecast, who hear poetry in Dogger, German Bight and the rest, may have been put out last year to find Finisterre, the sea area around north-west Spain, renamed FitzRoy, writes Graham Anderson.

All is now forgiven. As Peter Nichol's splendid book explains, the new name was a belated accolade to the captain of HMS Beagle, the ship that took Charles Darwin on his famous voyage.

A deserved accolade, for Robert FitzRoy was the intrepid seaman/surveyor who charted the terrible waters of Tierra del Fuego for the Admiralty, and who later became (after a brief and unsuccessful spell as Governor of New Zealand) the first chief of the newly instituted Met Office. He was a deeply religious, multi-talented, aristocratic workaholic, whose career reached its zenith all too soon and sank into a long and disappointing decline. And the accolade is belated, in that he has become one of the overlooked figures of Britain's bristling century of Empire-building. Like many a brilliant man, he had a number of telling weaknesses. He was inclined to make his own rules as he went along; his judgements could be precipitate; he could become dangerously unbalanced if he felt unappreciated by his masters.

Peter Nichols, an experienced hand as both sailor and author, makes abundant use of FitzRoy's (and Darwin's) journals. The sea-faring episodes off the southern tip of South America are frighteningly vivid. Not quite as convincing are his explorations of FitzRoy's often tormented soul. Nichols will sometimes make a bold supposition without offering much in the way of evidence, or he accounts for a complex psychology with rather broad strokes. But poor, brave and, to the modern sensibility, often wrong-headed FitzRoy came to an undeservedly sorry end. So three hearty cheers for this sympathetic and stirring account. Shannon, Rockall, Fisher . . . and, yes, Fitzroy!