Beagle ; the writings published as his first book, the Journal of Researches ; and the genesis of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Writing between regimes of world-knowledge, Darwin mediates scientific observation through the language of aesthetics, and seeks to understand the convergence of disparate scales of geological and human history.
Figure 1: Diagram of H. Beagle reproduced with permission from John van Wyhe ed. Beagle see Fig. The first two voyages, furthering the chronometric and hydrographic survey of the globe, corrected measurements of longitude and charted the southern coasts of South America. On the first voyage, , the Beagle accompanied H. Robert FitzRoy captained the second, solo voyage, , on which Darwin was a passenger. The Beagle went out a third time to survey the coasts of Australia in , under John Clement Wickham and John Lort Stokes, before retirement to coastguard duty as a floating customs and excise base on the Essex marshes.
The aristocratic Captain FitzRoy nephew of the fourth Duke of Grafton and the third Marquis of Londonderry sought someone who would be an acceptable table companion as well as a competent geologist.
After several other candidates were canvassed, John Stevens Henslow, Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge , recommended his twenty-two-year-old former student Darwin, who came on board as a gentleman amateur, his equipment and expenses paid for by his father. McCormick left the Beagle in high dudgeon four months after it set out, his professional ambition overridden by the well-connected gentleman passenger Browne Figure 2: Map of the circumnavigation of H. During the first year of the voyage, the Beagle sailed southward along the Atlantic coast of South America, from Bahia to Tierra del Fuego.
It spent shuttling between Tierra del Fuego , the Falkland Islands , and the continental southern Atlantic coast before threading the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific in June Darwin never got over being seasick and disliked being cooped up on the ship.
