Darwin Embarks on Beagle: The Journey to Evolution

A 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with no formal scientific training boarded a ten-gun brig at Plymouth on December 27, 1831, for what was supposed to be a two-year surveying voyage. Charles Darwin nearly did not make the trip. Captain Robert FitzRoy initially rejected Darwin based on the shape of his nose, which FitzRoy, an amateur physiognomist, believed indicated a lack of determination. Darwin father had also opposed the voyage, relenting only after his brother-in-law Josiah Wedgwood argued that the experience would be valuable. HMS Beagle was ninety feet long, carrying seventy-four people on a mission to chart South America coastline. Darwin official role was gentleman companion to Captain FitzRoy, who feared the isolation that had driven the previous Beagle captain to suicide. Darwin paid his own expenses and shared the captain cabin. The voyage lasted not two years but five, taking Darwin along the coast of South America, to the Galapagos Islands, across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand, and home via the Cape of Good Hope. The Galapagos stop, lasting only five weeks in September and October 1835, proved transformative. Darwin observed that finches on different islands had distinct beak shapes adapted to local food sources, and that giant tortoises varied by island. He did not recognize the full significance of these observations until years after returning to England, when ornithologist John Gould identified the finches as distinct but closely related species. Darwin spent twenty years developing his theory of evolution by natural selection, publishing "On the Origin of Species" in 1859 after learning Alfred Russel Wallace had independently reached the same conclusion. The book sold out its first printing in a single day. The Beagle voyage made Darwin the most influential biologist in history; the ship was eventually reduced to a customs watchtower in the Essex marshes.