Did Darwin work out evolution in the Galápagos?

No. He spent five weeks there in 1835 and left with specimens he had not carefully labelled by island. The mockingbirds, not the finches, first prompted him to write down a doubt, and the significance of the finches emerged in London afterwards through John Gould's identifications. Natural selection as a mechanism came later still, and On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859, twenty-four years after the visit.

What was the Beagle actually sent to do?

It was an Admiralty hydrographic commission: complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and carry a chain of chronometric measurements around the world so that longitudes could be reconciled. Natural history was not the mission. Darwin sailed as a self-funded gentleman companion to Captain FitzRoy and as a naturalist, not as an official member of the scientific establishment.

Is the route line on this map the Beagle's actual track?

No. The ports and their dates are documented, but the lines between them are approximations, mostly great circles or simplified coastal lines. The real survey track doubled back along the South American coast for over two years and cannot be drawn as a single forward line. Darwin's own path also diverges from the ship's: he was ashore for roughly three years and three months of the voyage.

Darwin — HMS Beagle, Second Voyage, 1831 — 1836

27 December 1831 01 / 16 Devonport Plymouth, England

The third attempt to sail. Two earlier departures in December were driven back into Plymouth by south-western gales. Rookmaaker's day-by-day itinerary numbers day 1 as 28 December because it counts where Darwin slept, not when the ship weighed; the sailing date is Darwin's own.

“After having been twice driven back by heavy southwestern gales, Her Majesty's ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain Fitz Roy, R. N., sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831.” — Charles Darwin

Twice driven back by heavy south-western gales before this sailing The Beagle sails. Commission: survey Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and carry a chain of chronometric measurements round the world.

16 January 1832 02 / 16 Porto Praya, St Jago Santiago, Cape Verde

The ship's first landfall. Rookmaaker records Darwin sleeping ashore from 20 January, four days after the Beagle came in — the first of many places where the ship's date and the naturalist's date are not the same date. A white band of shells and coral bedded high in the sea cliff here gave Darwin his first field test of Lyell's slow uplift.

“The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the sea, wears a desolate aspect. The volcanic fires of a past age, and the scorching heat of a tropical sun, have in most places rendered the soil unfit for vegetation.” — Charles Darwin

First landfall. Darwin reads a raised shell bed in the cliff as evidence of elevation.

28 February 1832 03 / 16 Bahia Salvador, Brazil

First tropical forest. Darwin's diary for the following day records him walking into it alone and failing, cheerfully, to find words for it. He returned to Bahia four years later at the end of the voyage to re-check the ship's chronometers against the same meridian.

“I have been wandering by myself in a Brazilian forest: amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking; the general luxuriance of the vegetation bears the victory, the elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers.” — Charles Darwin

First Brazilian rainforest.

4 April – 5 July 1832 04 / 16 Rio de Janeiro Brazil

Three months, most of them ashore, while the Beagle returned to Bahia to settle a chronometric dispute. Darwin lodged at Botafogo and collected relentlessly. He also recorded, with unconcealed anger, the slavery he saw in Brazil — a subject on which he and FitzRoy quarrelled badly enough that Darwin briefly expected to have to leave the ship.

“I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate.” — Charles Darwin

Content note: Slavery, and a first-hand description of a person being tortured

Three months collecting. Darwin and FitzRoy quarrel over slavery.

26 July 1832 05 / 16 Montevideo Río de la Plata

The Plata estuary became the voyage's hinge. For the next two and a half years the Beagle worked back and forth along this coast, and Montevideo served as the base from which Darwin made his long inland rides across the pampas.

“In the morning we got under way, and stood out of the splendid harbour of Rio de Janeiro.” — Charles Darwin

Base of operations for the South American survey.

6 September 1832 06 / 16 Punta Alta Bahía Blanca, Argentina

Darwin dug great extinct mammals out of a low cliff — Megatherium and its relatives — lying in recent-looking gravel alongside shells of species still living in the bay. Extinct giants in beds no older than the molluscs on the beach: the find that made the fixity of species a question he could not put down.

“I employed myself in searching for fossil bones; this point being a perfect catacomb for monsters of extinct races.” — Charles Darwin

Fossil megafauna excavated beside shells of still-living species.

16–18 December 1832 07 / 16 Tierra del Fuego Beagle Channel

The Beagle returned three Fuegians — Jemmy Button, York Minster and Fuegia Basket — taken to England on the first voyage and educated there at FitzRoy's expense. The mission left with them collapsed within months. Darwin's published reaction to the Fuegians he met is among the harshest writing in his book, and it should be read as what it is.

“It was without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld: I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilized man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, inasmuch as in man there is a greater power of improvement.” — Charles Darwin

Content note: Colonial violence and dehumanising nineteenth-century description of Indigenous people

Return of the three Fuegians. The mission fails within the year.

26 February 1833 08 / 16 Falkland Islands South Atlantic

The Beagle arrived shortly after Britain had reasserted control of the islands, and returned again in March 1834. Darwin found the treeless peat landscape bleak and the great stone runs geologically puzzling.

“These islands, situated in the same latitude with Tierra del Fuego and only between two and three hundred miles distant from it, having a nearly similar climate, with a geological formation almost identical, with favourable situations and the same kind of peaty soil, yet can boast of few plants deserving even the title of bushes; whilst in Tierra del Fuego it is impossible to find an acre of land not covered by the densest forest.” — Charles Darwin

First of two visits; the second follows in March 1834.

23 July 1834 09 / 16 Valparaíso Chile

Base for Darwin's Andean journeys. Riding over the cordillera he found fossil seashells and a stand of petrified trees at great altitude — marine beds lifted into the high passes, and forest that had once stood at sea level. The scale of vertical movement implied was the strongest confirmation he had yet had of Lyell.

“When morning came, everything appeared delightful. After Tierra del Fuego, the climate felt quite delicious—the atmosphere so dry, and the heavens so clear and blue with the sun shining brightly, that all nature seemed sparkling with life.” — Charles Darwin

Andean traverses. Marine fossils and petrified trees found at altitude.

20 February 1835 10 / 16 Concepción Chile

Darwin was lying in a wood ashore when the great earthquake struck; he reached the ruined city with FitzRoy in early March. Afterwards they measured mussel beds left stranded above the new high-water mark. He had just watched the land rise — the process he had been inferring from fossils, happening in a couple of minutes.

“A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid;—one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.” — Charles Darwin

Coastline measurably uplifted; shell beds left stranded above the new tide line The Concepción earthquake. The coast is measurably higher afterwards.

15 September – 18/20 October 1835 11 / 16 Galápagos Islands Archipelago, Pacific

Five weeks, four islands landed on. The birds were famously unafraid of people. It was the mockingbirds, differing island by island, that first made Darwin write down a doubt — not the finches, whose significance emerged later and largely from John Gould's work in London on specimens Darwin had not labelled carefully enough by island. The archipelago posed the question. It did not answer it.

“The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width.” — Charles Darwin

approximate Five weeks in the archipelago. The mockingbirds raise the question.

November 1835 12 / 16 Tahiti Society Islands

Darwin liked Tahiti and said so. He climbed inland, and began thinking seriously about how coral reefs form — the subsidence theory that would become his first solid scientific reputation, published before anything on species.

“At a distance the appearance was not attractive. The luxuriant vegetation of the lower part could not yet be seen, and as the clouds rolled past, the wildest and most precipitous peaks showed themselves towards the centre of the island.” — Charles Darwin

Coral reef structure begins to take shape as a theory.

January 1836 13 / 16 Sydney New South Wales, Australia

Darwin rode inland to Bathurst across the Blue Mountains. Watching a platypus and, separately, the marsupials, he turned over the question of why Australian animals should answer European ones so exactly in function and so little in form — the kind of question that only has an interesting answer if species are not independently created.

“Upon seeing more of the town afterwards, perhaps my admiration fell a little; but yet it is a fine town. The streets are regular, broad, clean, and kept in excellent order; the houses are of a good size, and the shops well furnished.” — Charles Darwin

Inland ride to Bathurst. The marsupial problem.

April 1836 14 / 16 Cocos (Keeling) Islands Indian Ocean

The reason the Beagle came here at all was Darwin's coral question, and FitzRoy had the crew sound the lagoon and the outer slope for him. The atoll fitted the subsidence model: a fringing reef that kept growing upward while the island under it sank away. He was right, and it was confirmed by drilling only a century later.

“Captain Fitz Roy found no bottom with a line 7200 feet in length, at the distance of only 2200 yards from the shore; hence this island forms a lofty submarine mountain, with sides steeper even than those of the most abrupt volcanic cone.” — Charles Darwin

Soundings taken. The subsidence theory of atolls confirmed to his satisfaction.

May–June 1836 15 / 16 Cape Town Cape of Good Hope

Darwin and FitzRoy called on John Herschel at the Cape, then the most eminent astronomer alive and already writing about the 'mystery of mysteries', the replacement of extinct species by new ones. Darwin would quote that phrase on the first page of the Origin.

“The little town of Simon's Bay offers but a cheerless aspect to the stranger. About a couple of hundred square whitewashed houses, with very few gardens & scarcely a single tree, are scattered along the beach at the foot of a lofty, steep, bare wall of horizontally stratified sandstone.” — Charles Darwin

Meeting with John Herschel at the Cape.

2 October 1836 16 / 16 Falmouth Cornwall, England

Darwin left the ship at Falmouth and travelled overland to Shrewsbury, arriving home late at night and going to bed without waking the house. Day 1,740 of Rookmaaker's count. The specimens went to specialists; the notebooks stayed with him; the species question opened in earnest the following year.

“To my surprise and shame I confess the first sight of the shores of England inspired me with no warmer feelings, than if it had been a miserable Portugeese settlement.” — Charles Darwin

Darwin leaves the ship. Day 1,740 of the voyage.

Darwin

Devonport

The voyage in brief

Ship's Log

Landfalls & Plates

Reckoning

Difficulty

The route today

How to read the route

How the world was understood

Primary Sources

Further Reading

On Screen

Questions

Did Darwin work out evolution in the Galápagos?

What was the Beagle actually sent to do?

Is the route line on this map the Beagle's actual track?

Editorial note

Darwin

Devonport

The voyage in brief

Ship's Log

Landfalls & Plates

Reckoning

Difficulty

The route today

How to read the route

How the world was understood

Primary Sources

Further Reading

On Screen

Questions

Did Darwin work out evolution in the Galápagos?

What was the Beagle actually sent to do?

Is the route line on this map the Beagle's actual track?

Editorial note

Counting readers