Side project
Darwin's Voyage
From 1831 to 1836, Charles Darwin sailed around the world on the HMS Beagle. He was 22 when he left and a geologist by training. The voyage lasted 1,740 days. This map tracks his location for every one of them.
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Sources & methodology
Daily positions come from several sources:
- The meteorological appendix of FitzRoy's Narrative (1839), which records noon latitude and longitude fixes for most of the voyage
- The collated itinerary of Darwin's voyage by Kees Rookmaaker and John van Wyhe
- Historical markers placed along Darwin's route
- Our own estimates based on Darwin's Beagle Diary
There are many issues translating historical coordinates into modern reference frames, but we cross-checked known locations FitzRoy described in his Table of the Variation of the Compass and found positions typically within ~1 km of modern coordinates.
Links to the online Beagle Diary and the Darwin Correspondence Project are provided where relevant. If any of this interests you, pick up The Voyage of the Beagle—it reads like an adventure novel that happens to be full of brilliant science.
Note: The ship crossed the international date line traveling east to west. FitzRoy accounted for the lost day on November 16, 1835, in Tahiti, designating it "Tuesday 17th Nov."