When Charles Darwin came to write down the account of his epic five-year round-the-world trip on the HMS Beagle in 1836, he had a tricky balancing act to perform. On the one hand the young adventurer wanted to provide an engaging account of the many dramas he’d experienced, from Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia to the Galapagos and Tahiti. On the other – as the ship’s amateur naturalist, not long out of a three-year term at Christ’s College, where I now myself study – he felt duty bound to record the many painstaking scientific observations he’d made.

Over the years there have been many efforts to reconfigure Darwin’s 500-page account of his journey, The Voyage of the Beagle, to make it more appealing for a general audience. The latest of those attempts, by the journalist and author Peter Mason, is arguably the most ambitious of all, and potentially the most controversial.

Mason has taken out almost all scientific elements of the book to leave a fine piece of travel literature, shorn of any significant mentions of flora, fauna, or geological formations. It’s a bold move, and one that risks incurring the wrath of those who see Darwin’s text as next to sacred – including, possibly, many members of Cambridge University’s Darwin Society, of which I am currently president. So, what made Mason think that a classic such as The Voyage of the Beagle needed altering in any way?

“I struggled through the first few passages about the egg laying habits of the booby and the eating habits of crabs”

“It all stemmed back to my first reading of the book about five years ago,” he says. “I mainly found the scientific bits just plain boring. I struggled through the first few passages about the egg laying habits of the booby and the eating habits of crabs, but eventually found myself skipping ahead until the next bit of exciting travel narrative began again.”

Not long afterwards, he says, the idea came to him that other people must surely have had the same experience. When he spoke to the odd acquaintance who’d read the book, they either confessed that they’d gone through a similar skim-reading process or that they’d not even been able to get through to the end.

Reasoning that as a Guardian journalist of 30 years standing, he was in as good a position as anyone to make the book more “readable,” Mason decided to take the drastic action of abridging it. The resulting 181-page version, Charles Darwin’s Great Adventure: Voyage of the Beagle Without the Science, is, he argues, an improvement on Darwin’s first take, revealing it as “a very good travel book indeed.”

I’ve read Mason’s version, and I have to say I enjoyed it. But I wonder if can he deny that much of the wonder of the original lies in Darwin’s scientific observations, at a particular time in history when our understanding of the natural world was greatly expanding. “Perhaps for a few people it might – and especially for those with a deep interest in evolution who would like to see where Darwin’s thinking began,” he counters. “But for the vast majority of readers, in my view, the science doesn’t really add much to their appreciation of the book. What they want to read about is the adventures that Darwin experienced.”

Mason’s view is that although The Voyage of the Beagle proved to be a bestseller in its day (and has been reprinted many times since) there’s a certain element of emperor’s clothes about the book, and that in reality the unexpurgated version is tedious for the lay reader. “I still think it’s been worthwhile trying to make it more accessible. The point of creating this new version is to reach a new set of people who otherwise might not come to the book at all.”

“Darwin had a great human intelligence and considerable talent as a writer.”

When I put it to him that readers of this new version are unlikely to gain much understanding of Darwin the scientist, he agrees quite readily. “You’re right, a reader of this edition wouldn’t understand Darwin the scientist from this book. But then you lose some things and gain others. What I’m trying to reveal is that there was more to Darwin than his scientific intelligence – that he also had a great human intelligence, which shines through most noticeably in his travel stories. And he also had considerable talent as a writer, which is not something I think has generally been recognised.”

So, if people do read this edition, does Peter think they’ll go on to search out more of Darwin’s work?“I suspect not, but at least they will have had a close encounter with the man and his ideas, and that can only be a good thing. And they’ll also have had the pleasure of reading a cracking piece of travel literature, which is what The Voyage of the Beagle becomes when you take the science away.”

I have to confess that, despite my position within the Darwin Society, I came to the book for the first time through reading Mason’s new version. I would no doubt have read the longer edition in due course, but I certainly feel it’s done no harm to me – or my view of the great man – to encounter it in this fashion. Maybe others will agree.

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