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The Voyage of the Beagle
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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. The object of the expedition was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, commenced under Captain King in 1826 to 1830,—to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and of some islands in the Pacific—and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the World. On the 6th of January we reached Teneriffe, but were prevented landing, by fears of our bringing the cholera: the next morning we saw the sun rise behind the rugged outline of the Grand Canary island, and suddenly illuminate the Peak of Teneriffe, whilst the lower parts were veiled in fleecy clouds. This was the first of many delightful days never to be forgotten. On the 16th of January, 1832, we anchored at Porto Praya, in St. Jago, the chief island of the Cape de Verd archipelago.
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. The country rises in successive steps of table-land, interspersed with some truncate conical hills, and the horizon is bounded by an irregular chain of more lofty mountains. The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is one of great interest; if, indeed, a person, fresh from sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of anything but his own happiness. The island would generally be considered as very uninteresting, but to anyone accustomed only to an English landscape, the novel aspect of an utterly sterile land possesses a grandeur which more vegetation might spoil. A single green leaf can scarcely be discovered over wide tracts of the lava plains; yet flocks of goats, together with a few cows, contrive to exist. It rains very seldom, but during a short portion of the year heavy torrents fall, and immediately afterwards a light vegetation springs out of every crevice. This soon withers; and upon such naturally formed hay the animals live. It had not now rained for an entire year. When the island was discovered, the immediate neighbourhood of Porto Praya was clothed with trees, 11 the reckless destruction of which has caused here, as at St. Helena, and at some of the Canary islands, almost entire sterility. The broad, flat-bottomed valleys, many of which serve during a few days only in the season as water-courses, are clothed with thickets of leafless bushes. Few living creatures inhabit these valleys. The commonest bird is a kingfisher (Dacelo Iagoensis), which tamely sits on the branches of the castor-oil plant, and thence darts on grasshoppers and lizards. It is brightly coloured, but not so beautiful as the European species: in its flight, manners, and place of habitation, which is generally in the driest valley, there is also a wide difference.
One day, two of the officers and myself rode to Ribeira Grande, a village a few miles eastward of Porto Praya. Until we reached the valley of St. Martin, the country presented its usual dull brown appearance; but here, a very small rill of water produces a most refreshing margin of luxuriant vegetation. In the course of an hour we arrived at Ribeira Grande, and were surprised at the sight of a large ruined fort and cathedral. This little town, before its harbour was filled up, was the principal place in the island: it now presents a melancholy, but very picturesque appearance. Having procured a black Padre for a guide, and a Spaniard who had served in the Peninsular war as an interpreter, we visited a collection of buildings, of which an ancient church formed the principal part. It is here the governors and captain-generals of the islands have been buried. Some of the tombstones recorded dates of the sixteenth century. 12
Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man.
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Project Gutenberg transcription
In December 1831 a twenty-two-year-old naturalist named Charles Darwin left Devonport on a ten-gun brig bound for South America, with no official post and no salary, sharing the captain’s cabin and his dinners. Nearly five years later he came home having ridden the pampas with gauchos, crossed the Andes, felt an earthquake lift the coast of Chile, dug the bones of extinct giants out of a Patagonian cliff, and sailed among the Galápagos. The Voyage of the Beagle is the journal he made of those years: twenty-one chapters of landfall, ride, dig and measurement, from the Cape Verde Islands to the coral atolls of the Indian Ocean.
It is a travel book first and a scientific one second, which is why it still reads: Darwin is good company, curious about everything from phosphorescent sea to the price of an estancia, and honest about being seasick for years at a stretch. But the observations he recorded — fossils of vanished giants lying among the bones of living armadillos, tortoises and finches that differ from island to island, reefs that sink as the land beneath them subsides — became the evidence on which, twenty-three years later, he built On the Origin of Species. This text is the second edition of 1845, the version Darwin cut down for general readers, complete and unabridged. For background, see The Voyage of the Beagle. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #944.
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: Summary, Characters & Themes
This is a summary and analysis to The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin’s journal of the five years he spent aboard H.M.S. Beagle, read here in the second edition of 1845. It first appeared in 1839 as the third volume of the official Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle, and Darwin reworked it six years later, cutting technical matter and adding fresh observations, under the title Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. The short name it is known by now came later. In this text it runs to twenty-one chapters and something over two hundred thousand words. Darwin himself is covered at Charles Darwin on Wikipedia,
The voyage was a hydrographic survey, not a scientific expedition. Captain Robert Fitz Roy had been sent to carry a chain of chronometric measurements round the world and to chart the coasts of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Peru; Darwin came aboard as a gentleman companion with a taste for natural history, on the recommendation of his Cambridge teacher J. S. Henslow, and paid his own way. The Beagle sailed from Devonport on 27 December 1831 and anchored at Falmouth on 2 October 1836. In between, Darwin was ashore whenever the ship was working, sometimes for weeks at a time, riding with gauchos, sleeping in the open and posting crates of specimens home.
The shape of the book follows the ship. Each chapter opens with a list of its subjects and a date, then moves between landscape, weather, people, animals and strata with the ease of a letter written by someone who has just come in from a long walk. Darwin measures as he goes — the height of a pass, the depth of a lagoon, days of rain, the weight of a tortoise — and then asks why, in prose that rarely raises its voice. It is a young man’s book: confident, occasionally hasty, and openly delighted by beetles, spiders and the smell of a new country.
Four pieces of work in it mattered most. At Punta Alta, near Bahia Blanca, he dug out the bones of Megatherium, Mylodon and other extinct giants lying in the same ground as shells of living species, and asked why they had disappeared. In Chile he felt the earthquake that destroyed Concepción and saw that the land had been lifted several feet, which gave him a mechanism for the slow rise of the Andes. At Keeling Island he worked out a theory of coral reefs — fringing reefs becoming barrier reefs and barrier reefs becoming atolls as the land beneath them subsides — reasoning he remained proud of for the rest of his life. And in the Galápagos he noticed that the tortoises, mockingbirds and finches of neighbouring islands differed from one another, without yet drawing the conclusion that would make him famous.
The book sold steadily and made his name as a naturalist; the second edition was the one most readers knew before 1859, and its geology was taken seriously by people who doubted his later theory. Its darker passages — the old woman who dashed herself from a hilltop rather than be led back into slavery, and Darwin’s own remark that in a Roman matron this would be called love of freedom but in a poor negress mere obstinacy; the estate where the owner was ready to sell thirty families apart; the Fuegians he met and the mission he watched fail — are not asides. Darwin reports them with the same attention he gives a barnacle, and the gap between the observer’s sympathy and his century’s assumptions is part of what the book now records. It is the account of a world before the theory, written by the man who was about to change it. The complete text is available at Project Gutenberg #944.
Historical Context
The Beagle sailed in the great age of the Admiralty survey. After the Napoleonic wars the Royal Navy spent its peace charting coastlines, currents and anchorages across the globe, and the South American station was among the most active: the new republics of Spanish America had thrown off Madrid in the 1820s, and British trade and British ships followed closely behind. Brazil was still a slave empire — it would not abolish slavery until 1888 — while Britain had abolished it in its own colonies in 1833, the year after Darwin reached Rio, with an apprenticeship system that ran until 1838. In the Argentine interior, Juan Manuel de Rosas was fighting his frontier wars against the indigenous nations of the pampas, and the Beagle’s officers traded news of his campaigns along with their charts.
Natural science in 1831 was still largely a science of description. Species were widely held to be fixed since creation, and the question of why particular animals live in particular places was answered by climate, soil and the wisdom of the Creator. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, whose first volume Fitz Roy gave Darwin before they sailed, argued instead that the earth had been shaped by the same slow forces still visible — rivers, tides, earthquakes, volcanoes — acting over immense spans of time. Darwin read Lyell at sea and tested him on land. The fossil mammals that Cuvier had described from the Paris basin, and the extinct giants Richard Owen would name from Darwin’s own Patagonian bones, had established that species do go extinct; nothing yet explained how new ones arrive. That question was left open in this book, and Darwin spent the next twenty years trying to close it.
The book’s own history is part of the story. The 1839 volume was written in a hurry, largely from Darwin’s diary and letters, and it was the 1845 edition — the one printed here — that he rewrote with a general reader in mind, condensing the technical sections and adding material on the Falklands, the earthquake and the reefs. It sold well, was translated, and gave him a reputation as a geologist and traveller long before he was known as a heretic. Twenty-three years after the Beagle came home, in 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay from the Malay Archipelago that arrived at the same theory of natural selection; the following year Darwin published On the Origin of Species and the travel book was read backwards, as the evidence.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Charles Darwin: the narrator, twenty-two when the Beagle sailed and twenty-seven when it came home. He is the ship’s naturalist without a salary or a cabin of his own, seasick in the Atlantic and cheerful ashore; he collects beetles in Brazil, bones in Patagonia and the observations that will occupy him for the rest of his life. The voice is patient, exact and often funny.
- Captain Robert Fitz Roy: the Beagle’s commander, a surveyor of genius and a man of violent temper and strict faith, who had already charted much of Patagonia on an earlier voyage. He invited Darwin aboard, shared his cabin and his books, and argued with him about slavery and the Bible; he later became Governor of New Zealand and first head of the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade. The preface thanks him for the chance of a lifetime.
- Jemmy Button: a Fuegian from the Beagle Channel, taken to England in 1830, taught English and presented at court, then returned home in 1833 with a missionary and a cargo of tools. Darwin’s account of the return, and of the glimpse of Button’s life among his own people that the voyage allowed, is the book’s most uncomfortable episode: a test of whether civilisation can be handed to anyone, and what it costs to try.
- General Juan Manuel de Rosas: the Argentine strongman whose frontier Darwin rode through in 1833, and whose horsemen, forts and massacres fill the chapters on the pampas. Darwin is received by his officers, admires the discipline, and hears the war from one side only; the book keeps returning to what the advance of ‘civilisation’ is doing to the people already there.
- The gauchos: the plains horsemen who guide Darwin across the pampas, lasso wild horses, butcher the cattle they eat and read the ground like a text. Their competence and their casual cruelty are both recorded, and in their company Darwin learns how much of a continent is grass, bone and weather.
Core Literary Themes
- Deep time made visible: the book’s real subject is geology: shells on a hillside, a valley cut in steps, a coastline lifted several feet in an afternoon. Darwin keeps turning landscape into process, and by the last chapters the reader sees mountains as something still happening rather than something finished.
- Distribution and the island question: why do the Galápagos hold their own species of tortoise, mockingbird and finch, and why do they resemble South America rather than any nearer coast? The question is asked politely, answered provisionally, and left standing; it is the hinge on which On the Origin of Species would turn.
- Attention as a method: nothing is too small to record — a spider’s web with only two of its rays netted, the noise a butterfly makes, the way a sea-slug swims. The accumulation is the argument: Darwin builds his case out of details other travellers thought beneath notice.
- Civilisation, violence and the observer: slavery, the extinction of the Fuegians, the wreck of the mission at Woollya, birds shot for specimens: the book is a record of empire as well as of nature, and Darwin’s sympathy and his era’s assumptions are both on the page, often in the same paragraph.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Voyage of the Beagle?
This edition is built from the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1845 second edition, the text Darwin himself prepared for general readers. Nothing is abridged: all twenty-one chapters, the preface, the dated entries and Darwin’s footnotes are here, in the order he printed them, so the book can be quoted and cited as he left it.
The formatting is made for a screen. Chapters keep their own pages, the dated entries keep their breaks, the subject lists at the head of each chapter stay with the chapter they belong to, and the coral-reef argument in the Keeling Island chapter keeps its sections in order. The result reads like the book rather than like a web page that has been cut into pieces.
It takes about eleven hours to read — a chapter an evening for three weeks, or a month of slow Sundays. That is a long voyage and it is meant to feel like one: the book rewards being read in the order it was written, port by port. The EPUB opens anywhere, the AZW3 goes straight onto a Kindle, and the KEPUB is for a Kobo with proper chapter marks.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #944 — the complete 1845 text, twenty-one chapters and the preface, with Darwin’s footnotes.
- The 1845 edition, unmodernized — spelling, dates and punctuation are as printed, including the second edition’s own preface, so the quotations match the version scholars cite.
- Real chapter and entry structure — every chapter begins with its own list of subjects and its dated entries, and the tables in the Galápagos chapter are set as tables rather than as running text.
- Three formats, one upload — EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for Kindle, KEPUB for Kobo, all DRM-free, free to keep and free to move to another device later.
- On the Origin of Species — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Time Machine — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Frankenstein — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The Voyage of the Beagle has twenty-one chapters, one for each stretch of the survey and each landfall. This guide groups them into fourteen, from the Cape Verde Islands in January 1832 to the last legs home in October 1836.
- Chapter I: St. Jago — Cape de Verd Islands: The Beagle leaves Devonport on 27 December 1831 and reaches the Cape Verde Islands in mid-January; Tenerife is refused because of cholera. At Porto Praya Darwin sees a volcanic island stripped by heat, walks his first tropical grove, and finds dust on the ship’s sails that turns out to be full of microscopic shells. He notes insects as the first colonists of new islands, watches a cuttle-fish change colour, and ends with the discoloured streaks of the sea and the confervae that cause them.
- Chapter II: Rio de Janeiro: April to July 1832, and the first long stay ashore: an estate north of Cape Frio, forests loud with insects, and the moral shock of slavery — the old woman who dashes herself from a hilltop rather than be led back into slavery, the families the owner is ready to sell apart. Darwin’s happiest collecting is here too: planariae under stones, frogs that sing, phosphorescent beetles, a wasp killing a spider, and the webs of the Epeira, one of them built on a wedge of mesh instead of a circle.
- Chapter III: Maldonado: The Beagle works the Plata through 1832 and Darwin rides the country round Maldonado: the lazo and the bolas, partridges that sit still, an absence of trees that shapes every creature there, capybara, deer, and the tucutuco, a blind burrowing rodent he digs for and never sees alive. He describes the Molothrus with its cuckoo-like habits, the mockingbird, the carrion hawks, and a house struck by lightning whose bell-wires were fused into globules.
- Chapters IV–V: Rio Negro to Bahia Blanca: July to September 1833: estancias destroyed by Indians, salt lakes pink with flamingoes, General Rosas on the frontier, and a ride across the dunes to Bahia Blanca. There, in the cliffs of Punta Alta, Darwin digs the bones of Megatherium, Megalonyx, Scelidotherium and Mylodon out of the same beds as living shells, and broods on recent extinction, on the longevity of species, and on why large animals do not need lush country. Also here: two species of ostrich, the oven-bird, armadilloes, and an arrow-head far older than the horsemen who found it.
- Chapters VI–VII: The pampas, Buenos Ayres and St. Fe: A four-hundred-mile ride with a gaucho guide through uninhabited plain: Sierra Ventana, horses driven with the bolas, a hail-storm that kills young ostriches, a diet of puma flesh, and cardoon and thistles advancing over land that cattle have changed. Then St. Fe, a mastodon tooth, and the tooth of an extinct horse, which sets Darwin comparing the fossil mammals of South America with the living ones and asking what a drought can do to a species. The chapter closes with the jaguar, the scissor-beak and a revolution in Buenos Ayres.
- Chapters VIII–IX: Banda Oriental, Patagonia, Santa Cruz and the Falklands: Colonia del Sacramiento, the value of an estancia, cattle counted by eye, and a passage down the coast to Port Desire and Port St. Julian: guanaco, a fossil giant, and Darwin’s first full argument about the causes of extinction. Then the expedition up the Santa Cruz river in whale-boats, streams of basaltic lava, the condor’s habits and erratic boulders far from any rock that could have shed them; and the Falkland Islands, with wild horses, a wolf-like fox unafraid of man, and the violent geology of a coast where even the stones seem to have been thrown.
- Chapters X–XI: Tierra del Fuego and the Strait of Magellan: Good Success Bay, the first Fuegians shouting from the rocks, and the three who had been taken to England now returned to their own country with a missionary and a hut. Darwin calls the difference between savage and civilised man greater than between a wild and a domesticated animal, and then spends the chapter describing naked people on a frozen shore, a gale that nearly wrecks the ship, the Beagle Channel, and the failure at Woollya. The Magellan chapter follows: Port Famine, the ascent of Mount Tarn, edible fungus, giant kelp, glaciers, icebergs and a climate that keeps carcasses unrotted.
- Chapter XII: Central Chile: Valparaiso in July 1834, after the gloom of the south the air feels delicious. Darwin rides to the foot of the Andes, climbs the Bell of Quillota through shattered greenstone, inspects the mines and the state of the miners, visits Santiago and the hot baths of Cauquenes, and watches the puma, the hummingbirds and the two little birds the Chileans call el Turco and the tapacolo. It is the chapter in which the Andes first appear as a problem to be explained rather than a wall to be admired.
- Chapters XIII–XIV: Chiloe, the Chonos and the great earthquake: November 1834 to February 1835: the rainy island of Chiloe, a boat excursion among the Chonos, the wild potato, peat formation, otters and mice, and an ornithology so odd that Darwin wonders whether the birds are petrels or auks. Then Osorno erupts on the same night as Aconcagua and Coseguina, and on 20 February the earthquake destroys Concepcion. Darwin describes fissured rocks, a sea that boiled black, a great wave, and land lifted several feet — the observation that lets him argue, in the last pages, that mountain chains rise slowly and that elevation and eruption are one system.
- Chapter XV: Passage of the Cordillera: March 1835 and the crossing by the Portillo pass: mules that choose their own road, torrents of snow-water, mines found by accident, and proofs that the Andes have been raised in stages, with marine shells high on the ridges. Darwin crosses to Mendoza, notes red snow, the dry clear air, electricity in the wind, and the different zoology on the eastern side; returns by the Uspallata pass past silicified trees still standing where they grew, and reaches Valparaiso having enjoyed twenty-four days more than almost any others in his life.
- Chapter XVI: Northern Chile and Peru: A long ride up the coast to Coquimbo and Copiapo through desert: step-formed terraces, an absence of recent deposits, the nitrate and salt beds of Iquique, and Indian ruins in the Despoblado that suggest the climate has changed since they were built. At Lima he sees the ruins of Callao thrown down by an earthquake and raised shells on the island of San Lorenzo, and ends with the antiquity of the Indian race and a plain full of buried shells and broken pottery.
- Chapter XVII: Galapagos Archipelago: Five weeks in September and October 1835 among islands made entirely of volcano: two thousand craters, leafless bushes, and a colony of convicts at Charles Island. Darwin meets giant tortoises that hiss and withdraw, a marine iguana that swims out to feed on seaweed and a land iguana that burrows, and birds so tame that he can push them off a branch with a stick. He sees that the mockingbirds and the finches differ from island to island, and writes the sentence that later readers would underline: “one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”
- Chapters XVIII–XIX: Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia: The long passage west: the low lagoon islands of the Dangerous Archipelago, then Tahiti, its ravines and waterfalls, Queen Pomarre, and a parliament held to settle a question of English law. New Zealand follows — the Bay of Islands, the fortified villages called pahs, the mission farm at Waimate that looks like an English scene transplanted, and the tattooing and chiefly power of the Maoris — and then Australia: Sydney, the road over the Blue Mountains, the gulf-like valleys, and Darwin’s bleak reckoning with the extinction of the Aboriginal peoples, before the farewell to a country too ambitious for affection.
- Chapters XX–XXI: Keeling Island, the coral theory and home: Keeling Island’s atoll gives Darwin his finest piece of reasoning: reef-building corals cannot live deep, so fringing reefs must become barrier reefs and barrier reefs atolls only if the land beneath them slowly subsides — an argument he follows through the Maldivas and the dead reefs of the Indian Ocean. Then Mauritius, the changed vegetation of St. Helena, Ascension’s volcanic bombs and beds of infusoria, Bahia and Pernambuco, a last word on slavery, and on 2 October 1836 the English shore. The book closes with a retrospect on five years and on what a voyage is worth.
The Voyage of the Beagle: Frequently Asked Questions
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