Biography | Charles Darwin — The Brig That Finally Cleared Devonport on 27 December

HMS Beagle was a 10-gun Cherokee-class brig, 27 metres long, refitted at Devonport in 1831 under Commander Robert FitzRoy.

The Admiralty's object was a survey of South American coasts and a chain of chronometer measurements around the world.

John Stevens Henslow was offered a place as gentleman companion and naturalist.

He declined and put forward his pupil Darwin, then twenty-two.

Beagle first left Devonport on 10 December 1831 and was driven into Barn Pool by weather.

She finally sailed on 27 December 1831.

That is the date Darwin put on the first page of the Journal of Researches.

He was seasick almost at once and missed Madeira.

The voyage lasted 1,740 days and ended at Falmouth on 2 October 1836.

About a third of those days were spent at sea, a third at anchor, and a third on land.

The notebooks from the coast of South America and the five weeks in the Galapagos later supplied the raw material of natural selection.

The theory itself was not written on deck.

It was assembled years later, in Kent.

The pin is the Devonport yard where the ship was rebuilt and from which the sailing is dated, not a Galapagos landing.

Photo: HMS Beagle by Conrad Martens, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons