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In 1831 a twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin sailed from Plymouth on HMS Beagle as the captain's gentleman companion, and spent nearly five years exploring…
In 1831 a twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin sailed from Plymouth on HMS Beagle as the captain's gentleman companion, and spent nearly five years exploring South America, the Galápagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia. His journal records it all: fossils of giant extinct mammals, an earthquake in Chile, the people of Tierra del Fuego and the strange birds and tortoises of the Galápagos.
Context and significance
First published in 1839, this was the book that made Darwin known, and it is far more readable than his scientific works: an adventure told by a curious young man. The observations he made here led, twenty years later, to On the Origin of Species.
About the author
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) left medical school in Edinburgh because he could not bear to watch operations, and studied at Cambridge to become a clergyman. Instead, at twenty-two, he joined the five-year voyage of HMS Beagle, described in The Voyage of the Beagle, which gave him the observations of a lifetime.
Back in England he worked for twenty years at his country home in Kent before a letter from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had reached the same idea, pushed him to publish On the Origin of Species in 1859. He went on to write The Descent of Man and books on barnacles, orchids and earthworms, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.