Charles Darwin · 1839 · global

The five-year voyage of HMS Beagle, 1831 to 1836, as recorded by the young naturalist Charles Darwin: a survey of the coasts of South America that became a circumnavigation of the world. This route follows the Beagle from Plymouth down the Atlantic to Brazil and Patagonia, around Cape Horn to Chile and the Galapagos, across the Pacific to Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia, through the Indian Ocean and around Africa, and home again. Along the way Darwin gathered the observations, on fossils, earthquakes, coral reefs and the strange island creatures of the Galapagos, that would grow into the theory of evolution by natural selection.

1. 1
   Plymouth

   On 27 December 1831, after months of delay, HMS Beagle sails from Plymouth on a five-year voyage to chart the coasts of South America and circle the globe. Aboard as gentleman naturalist is the twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin, prone to seasickness, with no inkling that what he sees on this voyage will one day overturn the understanding of life on Earth.

2. 2
   Cape Verde

   At Porto Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, Darwin makes his first tropical landfall. Examining a white band of seashells running through the volcanic cliffs, far above the present sea, he begins to grasp the immensity of geological time and the slow rising and sinking of the land, ideas that will shape everything that follows.

3. 3
   Rio de Janeiro

   In the rainforest around Rio de Janeiro, Darwin is overwhelmed by the riot of tropical life, collecting beetles, spiders and plants in numbers no European cabinet has seen. He also witnesses at close hand the cruelties of slavery in Brazil, which fill him with a lasting horror and indignation.

4. 4
   Montevideo

   Along the shores of the Rio de la Plata and the pampas of Argentina, Darwin rides with gauchos and meets the caudillo Rosas. In the cliffs at Punta Alta he digs out the gigantic bones of extinct beasts, ground sloths and armoured glyptodonts, strangely akin to the living animals of the same country.

5. 5
   Port Desire

   Surveying the bleak, wind-scoured coast of Patagonia, the Beagle anchors at Port Desire and rows far up the Santa Cruz River into the interior. Everywhere the land tells the same story of slow upheaval, raised beaches and gravel plains, and the bones of vanished creatures lie scattered across the desert.

6. 6
   Tierra del Fuego

   At the storm-lashed end of the continent, in Tierra del Fuego, Darwin meets the native Fuegians and is shaken by how differently human beings can live. The Beagle returns three Fuegians taken to England on the previous voyage, and threads the great channel that now bears the ship's name.

7. 7
   Valparaiso

   Based at Valparaiso, Darwin ranges deep into the Andes, finding fossil seashells and petrified forests high in the mountains. At Concepcion he lives through a tremendous earthquake that raises the whole coast by feet in a moment, and sees with his own eyes the force that, over ages, lifts ocean beds into mountain ranges.

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   Galapagos

   In the Galapagos Islands, on the equator, Darwin meets a strange world of giant tortoises, marine iguanas and fearless birds. He notes, almost in passing, that the mockingbirds and finches differ from island to island. Only later will he understand what it means: that species are not fixed, but change and branch through time.

9. 9
   Tahiti

   Across the vast emptiness of the Pacific the Beagle comes to Tahiti, where Darwin climbs into the green interior and admires both the islanders and the order the missionaries have brought. Around the island he studies the coral reefs, and forms his elegant theory of how atolls grow as the land beneath them slowly sinks.

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    New Zealand

    At the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, Darwin finds a raw frontier of whalers, missionaries and Maori. He is unsettled by much of what he sees, but marvels at the great kauri forests and notes again how the creatures of these long-isolated islands differ from all others in the world.

11. 11
    Sydney

    In the young colony of New South Wales, Darwin rides inland across the Blue Mountains and puzzles over the platypus and the kangaroo, animals so unlike those elsewhere that he half wonders whether two creators had been at work. He visits Hobart in Tasmania and King George's Sound before leaving Australia behind.

12. 12
    Cocos Islands

    At the lonely Cocos or Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean, a ring of coral barely above the waves, Darwin finds the perfect proof of his reef theory: a living atoll built grain by grain by tiny creatures upon a slowly sinking mountain, the open sea its only horizon.

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    Cape Town

    Rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the Beagle puts in at Cape Town, where Darwin meets the astronomer John Herschel, one of the great scientific minds of the age. Their talk of the mystery of mysteries, the origin of new species, settles into Darwin's mind as the voyage turns at last for home.

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    St Helena

    On the remote Atlantic island of St Helena, where Napoleon died in exile, Darwin wanders the heights studying its peculiar plants and shells. The long sea miles give him time to order his thoughts, his notebooks and specimen cases crammed with the raw material of a revolution not yet imagined.

15. 15
    Bahia

    Driven by Captain FitzRoy's need to perfect his measurements of longitude, the Beagle recrosses the whole Atlantic back to Bahia in Brazil for a final reading, a last look at the tropics, before turning north at last for the long run home.

16. 16
    Falmouth

    On 2 October 1836, after four years and nine months and a circuit of the entire globe, HMS Beagle drops anchor at Falmouth and Darwin steps ashore in England for the last time as a traveller. In his baggage are the notes and specimens from which, more than twenty years later, will come On the Origin of Species, and a new account of life itself.