The Voyage of the Beagle refers to the five-year survey expedition of the ship HMS Beagle which set out on December 27 1831 and is the title commonly given to Charles Darwin's Journal and Remarks published in 1839 as a book which brought him considerable fame and respect. Darwin's book, also known as his Journal of Researches is a vivid and exciting travel memoir as well as a detailed scientific field journal covering biology, geology and anthropology that demonstrates Darwin's keen powers of observation, written at a time when Westerners were still discovering much of the rest of the world. It also hints at ideas that Darwin would later develop into the theory of evolution.

Contents

1 Start of the voyage 2 Publication of Darwin's book 3 Contents - where Darwin went. 4 Sources 5 External links

Start of the voyage

At the age of 22 Charles Darwin was given the opportunity to join the expedition as a gentleman's companion to the captain Robert FitzRoy who himself was only 26 years old and conscious of the stresses on a captain having had to take temporary command of the Beagle during its previous voyage after the captain committed suicide. Darwin was to be a paying passenger, and as well as giving companionship would receive full facilities for his own researches as a naturalist.

The custom was for the ship's surgeon to take the position of naturalist, many having natural history work as their primary aim, and the Beagle's surgeon quite reasonably felt he was being supplanted. He was sufficiently disgruntled to leave the ship at Rio de Janiero, and Darwin assumed the quasi-official duties of naturalist, getting nicknamed Philos, while several others on board including the new acting-surgeon and FitzRoy made sizeable collections for the Crown which the Admiralty placed in the British Museum.

Publication of Darwin's book

On the Beagle's return on October 2, 1836, Darwin had been invited by FitzRoy to contribute the natural history section to the captain's account of the Beagle's voyage, and using his field notes and the journal which he had been sending home for his family to read, completed this section by September 1837. As well as writing his own account of the voyage and the previous expedition of two ships, FitzRoy had to edit the notes of the previous captain of the Beagle. The account was completed and published in May 1839 as the Narrative of the surveying voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle in four volumes with Darwin's Journal and Remarks, 1832—1836 as the third volume, the fourth volume being a lengthy appendix. Darwin's contribution proved remarkably popular and the publisher, Henry Colburn, took it upon himself to reissue the same text in August with a new title page as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the various countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle apparently without seeking Darwin's permission or paying him a fee. The book went through many editions, the best known being the second edition of 1845, and was published with several different titles.

Contents - where Darwin went.

The book's list of contents outlines where Charles Darwin went:

• Preface

1. St. Jago -- Cape de Verd Islands
2. Rio de Janeiro
3. Maldonado
4. Rio Negro to Bahia Blanca
5. Bahia Blanca
6. Bahia Blanca to Buenos Ayres
7. Buenos Ayres and St. Fe
8. Banda Oriental and Patagonia
9. Santa Cruz, Patagonia, and The Falkland Islands
10. Tierra del Fuego
11. Strait of Magellan. -- Climate of the Southern Coasts
12. Central Chile
13. Chiloe and Chonos Islands
14. Chiloe and Concepcion: Great Earthquake
15. Passage of the Cordillera
16. Northern Chile and Peru
17. Galapagos Archipelago
18. Tahiti and New Zealand
19. Australia
20. Keeling Island: -- Coral Formations
21. Mauritius to England

Sources

• Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Michael Joseph, the Penguin Group, London 1991 ISBN 0-7181-3430-3

• Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin (including Robert FitzRoy's 'Remarks with reference to the Deluge), Penguin Books, London 1989 ISBN 0-14-043268-X

External links

• Free eBook of The Voyage of the Beagle http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3704 at Project Gutenberg
• Voyage of the Beagle http://charles-darwin.classic-literature.co.uk/the-voyage-of-the-beagle/ Full Text.
• full text http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_darwin/voyage_of_beagle/index
  .shtml
• full text, various formats http://www.nzetc.org/etexts/DarJour.html

	Topics relating to Charles Darwin
	Family: Erasmus Darwin (grandfather) - Josiah Wedgwood (maternal grandfather) - Emma Darwin (wife) - William Darwin; Anne Darwin; Etty Darwin; George Darwin; Elizabeth Darwin; Francis Darwin; Leonard Darwin; Horace Darwin; Charles Waring Darwin (children) - Francis Galton (cousin)
	Contributions to evolutionary biology: Evolution by means of natural and Censored page.
	Books: The Voyage of the Beagle - The Origin of Species - Censored page
	Named in honour of Darwin: Darwin Medal - Darwin, Australia - Charles Darwin University, Darwin College, Cambridge