Charles Darwins Beagle Diary

On 27th December 1831, HMS Beagle set out from Plymouth under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy on a voyage that lasted nearly 5 years. The purpose of the trip was to complete a survey of the southern coasts of South America, and afterwards to circumnavigate the globe. The ship's geologist and naturalist was Charles Darwin. Darwin kept a diary throughout the voyage in which he recorded his daily activities, not only on board the ship but also during the several long journeys that he made on horseback in Patagonia and Chile. His entries tell the story of one of the most important scientific journeys ever made with matchless immediacy and vivid descriptiveness.

The Beagle Diary was used to write Darwin's famous book 'Voyage of the Beagle' (1839). The narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836. Darwin describes each day of the voyage, some in intimate detail, during the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe.

In 1831, Charles Darwin embarked on his first voyage. Though he was a scientist by profession, he was an explorer at heart. While journeying around South America for the first time aboard a ninety-foot-long ship named the Beagle, Charles collected insets, dug up bones, galloped with gauchos, encountered volcanoes and earthquakes, and even ate armadillo for breakfast! The discoveries he made during this adventure would later inspire ideas that changed how we see the world. Complete with mesmerizing map work that charts Darwin's thrilling five-year voyage, as well as "Fun Facts" and more, Charles Darwin's Around-the-World Adventure captures the beauty and mystery of nature with wide-eyed wonder.

An illuminating and lively narrative of Charles Darwin’s formative years and adventurous voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. Winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Biography/Memoir Charles Darwin—alongside Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein—ranks among the world's most famous scientists. In popular imagination, he peers at us from behind a bushy white Old Testament beard. This image of Darwin the Sage, however, crowds out the vital younger man whose curiosities, risk-taking, and travels aboard HMS Beagle would shape his later theories and served as the foundation of his scientific breakthroughs. Though storied, the Beagle's voyage is frequently misunderstood, its mission and geographical breadth unacknowledged. The voyage's activities associated with South America—particularly its stop in the Galapagos archipelago, off Ecuador’s coast—eclipse the fact that the Beagle, sailing in Atlantic, Pacific and Indian ocean waters, also circumnavigated the globe. Mere happenstance placed Darwin aboard the Beagle—an invitation to sail as a conversation companion on natural-history topics for the ship's depression-prone captain. Darwin was only twenty-two years old, an unproven, unknown, aspiring geologist when the ship embarked on what stretched into its five-year voyage. Moreover, conducting marine surveys of distance ports and coasts, the Beagle's purposes were only inadvertently scientific. And with no formal shipboard duties or rank, Darwin, after arranging to meet the Beagle at another port, often left the ship to conduct overland excursions. Those outings, lasting weeks, even months, took him across mountains, pampas, rainforests, and deserts. An expert horseman and marksman, he won the admiration of gauchos he encountered along the way. Yet another rarely acknowledged aspect of Darwin's Beagle travels, he also visited, often lingered in, cities—including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, Lima, Sydney, and Cape Town; and left colorful, often sharply opinionated, descriptions of them and his interactions with their residents. In the end, Darwin spent three-fifths of his five-year "voyage" on land—three years and three months on terra firma versus a total 533 days on water. Acclaimed historian Tom Chaffin reveals young Darwin in all his complexities—the brashness that came from his privileged background, the Faustian bargain he made with Argentina's notorious caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, his abhorrence of slavery, and his ambition to carve himself a place amongst his era's celebrated travelers and intellectual giants. Drawing on a rich array of sources— in a telling of an epic story that surpasses in breadth and intimacy the naturalist's own Voyage of the Beagle—Chaffin brings Darwin's odyssey to vivid life.