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Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. In the mids, Charles Darwin famously described variation in the anatomy of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Alfred Russel Wallace noted the similarities and differences between nearby species and those separated by natural boundaries in the Amazon and Indonesia.
Independently they came to the same conclusion: over generations, natural selection of inherited traits could give rise to new species. Use the resources below to teach the theory of evolution in your classroom.
Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Image Voyage of the H. Beagle Darwin traveled the world for five years collecting samples then returned to England to analyze his samples.
In , a new class, the gun brig-sloop, designed by Sir Henry Peake Surveyor to the Navy, — , came into being and was given the class name Cherokee. The Achates was the first to be launched, on February 1 of that year, and orders for the Parthian, Cherokee, Cadmus, and Rolla were sent out in the same period. One hundred and seven gun brigs were built between and ; the Beagle, laid down in June and completed on May 11, , was the 41st.
The maximum breadth was 24 feet, 6 inches, and the depth of the hold was 11 feet. Little workhorse ships built to an inferior design, they were scorned by those who sailed in greater ships and detested— or at best viewed with an affectionate alarm—by those who sailed in them.
In the Pax Brittanica that followed , policy centered around an open world trade which was principally seaborne. To permit safe commerce, the Royal Navy set about putting down piracy and slaving and tackled the mammoth task of accurately charting the oceans and coasts of the world. The resulting maps were made freely available through the Admiralty. During this period, the gun brigs were pressed into a variety of services, principally routine naval patrolling in the eastern North Atlantic and as packets.
Several were used in extensive overseas surveying. Such work offered the most interesting challenges to young naval officers, and some of the best men available took part, including Robert FitzRoy. The Beagle was one of the brigs used for this purpose, and, like her sister ships, she was not at all well designed for the task.
Beagle was launched on May 11, , at Woolwich naval dockyard on the Thames. Even so, she did gain one mark of fame. The spanking new Beagle was included in this great parade and, in passing up the river, became the first man-of-war to pass fully rigged under the old London Bridge.
It is a minor distinction, and certainly no one would then have guessed that the name of this little brig would be known the world over years later. But unfortunately, the plans for her conversion to a bark are also missing. When I became interested in the Beagle, my first task seemed to be to examine the plans of her sister ships in order to try to reconstruct what the Beagle might have looked like when she was first built.
I decided to look at plans of the first of the brigs and, quite mistakenly as I later discovered , thought that this must have been the Cadmus launched February 26, These annotations seem mostly to have been made in , when the plans were brought up to date by Sir Robert Seppings.
There is another draft, dated July , that shows a modification of the construction of the frames and floors and a raising of the height of the bulwarks. This also bears the annotation that a copy was sent to Woolwich for the construction of the Beagle.
Therefore, the master plans from which the Beagle was constructed do exist, and we can get a clear idea of the ship as she was first designed. Figure 1. Sail plan of a typical gun brig. Like all brigs, the Beagle originally had two masts: the mainmast carrying a large fore-and-aft driver, or spanker, in addition to a full set of square sails comparable to those on the foremast above.
The squaresail complement was typically a mainsail, topsail, and topgallant, but possibly royals were added, and there was one large jib. She was, of course, built of oak; the main wale measured 4 inches thick, and the bottom planking, 3 inches. The Beagle was no doubt painted in the standard navy fashion of the time—black sides with a broad yellow stripe around the upper parts and touches of gold and scarlet outlining the beak and possibly the stern.
There was a minimum of external decoration; none of the elaborate scrollwork seen on ships of the line graced the appearance of a lowly gun brig. There was no figurehead. The Beagle was originally flush-decked, with only two tiny cupboardlike enclosures at the stern containing a flag and signal locker and a water closet. Also, there were two hatches—a main and fore hatch—companionways just in front and behind the mainmast, bits, the chimney from the galley, a scuttle to the bread room in the stern, and a couple of winches.
Of course, the guns were also carried on the main deck, so the tiny space would not have been uncrowded! The Beagle was designed to carry eight pounder carronades and two 6-pounder long guns. Her bulwarks were pierced with six gunports on each side and two at the stern. The landlubber would notice the total lack of skylights to the lower deck. Apart from any light and air that may have reached the lower deck via the companionways and hatches, it must have been pretty dark and dismal down there.
In fine weather a system of canvas screens was doubtless erected in order to direct fresh air below, but in stormy weather, everything was battened down.
It is hard to imagine which would be worse: being battened down in the penetrating cold of a North Atlantic winter gale or in the stifling heat of a tropical storm. The general picture of crowding and discomfort is not alleviated by close examination of the arrangement of the lower deck. The height between decks at midship was only 63 inches! Immediately forward was a small passageway with a scuttle to the magazine and armory below; a marine sentry would have stood guard there. Along the port side of the passage leading forward, sleeping spaces were marked off for the master and surgeon.
The messroom was in the center of the vessel, and it led, on the starboard side, to sleeping spaces for the first and second lieutenants. The hold was reached via the main and fore hatches, and individual scuttles provided access to several separate areas. Given the fact that some 65 officers, men, and boys lived in these close quarters, it is evident that some highly structured social organization was necessary. The social code, applied relatively easily on ships of the line, was rigorously enforced on these smaller, cramped vessels; indeed, it was vital for iron discipline.
The captain dined separately from the rest of the officers, except when he invited them to share his table. The other officers ate in the messroom, as did the purser, surgeon, and chaplain.
Each person on board came to know his fellows extremely well, and during the second voyage—the one we know most about—although there were the customary desertions and transfers during the first weeks of the cruise, there was an impressive loyalty to the Beagle.
We have some idea of the stores carried on a fully equipped gun brig, and they are not impressive. The ship could carry 19 tons of water in iron casks, which had been generally introduced into the navy in and were a vast improvement over wooden casks, whose contents were usually completely fetid in a few days. Also on board were about 2, yards of spare canvas for sails, and some two tons of spare masts, yards, and gear were lashed to the main deck.
Typically, a brig would carry three bower anchors two with iron cables , one stream anchor, and one kedge anchor. The gun brigs were not capable of cruises of more than three months away from well-established bases of supply. When these little vessels came to be used for survey work in the s to s, the lack of range was a great problem.
On her first survey cruise, to South America, the Beagle was accompanied by a mother ship, the Adventure, which carried more ample stores. On her second and third voyages, the Beagle worked alone, and the supply problem added a major burden to the responsibilities of her captains.
The main disadvantage of the gun brigs was not their accommodations, size, or range. After all, no one entered the Royal Navy in those days expecting a comfortable life at sea, especially in a small ship.
The problem was the handling characteristics; they were fundamentally dangerous in stormy weather. A great weight of water could become trapped in the very high bulwarks on the main deck, and the brig would wallow and lose steerage way, with the resulting danger that it would turn broadside to the weather.
With the bulwarks only 6 feet from the water line, a second wave shipped before the first had cleared the deck could bring it to a standstill; a third would have it completely at its mercy, and it would probably founder. Therefore, very careful sailing was necessary in bad weather. FitzRoy, after some initial close shaves, mastered the art of maintaining a minimal press of sail in order to keep under way and thereby managed to establish a record of great safety over his two voyages.
It is easy to imagine that a less vigilant captain and less dedicated officers and crew would have had a different fate. Ample confirmation of the difficulty of handling the gun brigs is given in the reports of those who served in them and in the silent testimony of the wrecks.
Of the ships of the Cherokee class, none were directly lost to enemy action, one—the Redpole, of —was sunk by the pirate ship Congress in , but 26 were lost at sea by wrecking on rocks, by foundering, or through unknown cause.
The following observations by Charles Darwin in his Diary, dated July 10, , probably may be taken as typical of the performance of a gun brig. At last the ports were knocked open and she again rose buoyant to the sea. A further problem with the sailing of the Beagle was that, like any square-rigged vessel, even when converted to a bark rig, she could not sail close-hauled into the wind. Thus, on both South American voyages, the eastern entrance to the Strait of Magellan posed a serious problem: a narrow dangerous channel to be tackled with very strong, directly contrary winds.
Also, the Beagle could not be handled easily close to shore under many conditions. The official Narrative of the first two voyages is full of accounts of how the ship, unable to find a safe anchorage at night, was forced to keep out to sea under way.
For these reasons FitzRoy liked to work with auxiliary schooners—borrowed, hired, or bought outright. The Admiralty, having sent out what they considered a fully adequate ship, looked upon these adventures with disfavor and refused to reimburse him. Adventure, a large transport brig. This voyage ended with the well-known kidnapping of three Fuegians, who were transported to London for education.
FitzRoy was also the captain of the Beagle on her second surveying voyage, which took her around the world — This is, of course, the expedition that Darwin accompanied. The third voyage, to Australia and the East Indies — , was under the command first of Lieutenant John Clements Wickham and then, from , under John Lort Stokes no relative of the first captain of the Beagle.
Stokes is the author of the only published account of this final expedition. Figure 2. Sail plan for the Beagle rigged as a bark. Compare with Figure 1. Many people have assumed that the Beagle was modified from a brig-sloop to a bark especially for her second surveying voyage.
However, the records make it perfectly clear that she was converted to bark rig for the first voyage. Barque Beagle : 0. In fact, such modification was common at the time.
Figure 3. The Beagle as she probably looked after The lower rigging reproduced here follows that of a sister ship, the Barracouta. Illustration by Fenna Bouhuys. The modification to a bark rig required removing the boom and running rigging for the main driver from the mainmast and adding a small mizzenmast, which then bore a smaller driver.
Although we do not have any plan to show the exact placement of the mizzenmast in the Beagle, it must have been in the same place as in the Barracouta —a sister brig converted for survey work—for which plans have survived and have been used here to make drawings for the Beagle as a bark Figure 3, above. A settlement there became the town of Palmerston in , and was renamed Darwin in During this survey, the Beagle Gulf was named after the ship.
What scientific equipment did she carry? The voyages under Captain Robert FitzRoy saw the use of scientific technology such as theodolites, chronometers and barometers used to provide accurate survey information for new charts and, equally important, meteorological data and weather forecasting. The Darwin voyage was the first time the Beaufort wind scale was used for wind observations.
The crew also undertook various experiments and, despite some disappointments, they produced useful results. They were especially successful in the measurement of earthquakes during experiments in One of the bodies of water found was named the Beagle Channel after the ship.
During the voyage, Captain Pringle Stokes became depressed and shot himself. He died ten days later. Robert FitzRoy became the new captain. Beagle returned to England on 14 October The rich variety of animal and plant species that Darwin saw on the voyage on the Beagle led him to develop his theory of 'evolution by natural selection'.
What happened to Beagle?
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