Voyage of HMS Beagle, Darwin

The voyage of HMS Beagle was the Royal Navy survey expedition of 1831 to 1836 under Captain Robert FitzRoy, on which the naturalist Charles Darwin sailed as gentleman companion and unpaid naturalist. The roughly five-year circumnavigation surveyed South American coasts and visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835, where Darwin’s observations of finches and tortoises fed his theory of natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin’s account appeared as the Journal of Researches (1839), later titled The Voyage of the Beagle. The Beagle was a 10-gun Cherokee-class brig-sloop.