LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Charles Darwin: Hms Beagle
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Charles Darwin was the first to make a scientific study of the islands in 1835. He was a young student just out of university and was the naturalist on a round-the-world scientific and geographical voyage on board HMS Beagle (1831 - 1836).
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Charles Darwin was a very mild, kind, pleasant man, unassuming and modest. He suffered from an unexplained illness much of his adult life (perhaps picked up during the Beagle voyage). He ... remained driven and ambitious to explore nature and examine it candidly.
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In 1831, Charles Darwin sailed aboard the HMS Beagle, a British Royal Naval ship that sailed on an expedition for 5 years around South America and to the Galapagos Islands and back. Because of this adventure, Darwin wrote his famed book, "The Voyage of the Beagle" that outlined the discovery of many fossils in South America and distinct species of creatures on the Galapagos Islands that were unique to the islands.
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Charles Darwin sailed from Plymouth on the 27 December 1831 on a journey that was to take him many thousands of miles. He sailed in a ship called the Beagle. The Beagle was not a big ship, it was only about 28 metres long and had to be home to 74 people for the whole voyage.
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After nearly five years of journeying aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin found himself in March of 1835 becalmed in the seas off Valparaiso, Chile. He took the opportunity to write letters to friends and relatives, including this letter to his sister Caroline.
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Before they set out, FitzRoy gave Darwin volume one of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which explained landforms as the outcome of gradual processes over huge periods of time. On their first stop ashore at St Jago Darwin found rock formations which, seen this way, gave him a revolutionary insight into the geological history of the island, inspiring him to think of writing a book on the subject. Subsequently he saw stepped plains of shingle and seashells in Patagonia as raised beaches, experienced an earthquake in Chile, noted mussel-beds stranded above high tide showing that the land had been raised, and ,even high in the Andes, found himself able to collect seashells. He theorised that coral atolls form on sinking volcanic mountains, and confirmed this when the Beagle surveyed the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
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Hms Beagle