The Voyage of the Beagle (originally published as Journal and Remarks in 1839, and revised as Journal of Researches in 1845) is Darwin’s account of HMS Beagle’s circumnavigation of the globe from December 1831 to October 1836. Darwin shipped as the gentleman naturalist and companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy, and the five years he spent collecting specimens, observing geological formations, and experiencing the natural world of South America, the Galapagos, Australia, and the Indian Ocean transformed him from a conventional young naturalist into the man who would revolutionize biology.
The book is magnificent travel writing — vivid, precise, and endlessly curious. Darwin describes the pampas of Argentina, the forests of Brazil (which moved him to ecstasy), the earthquakes of Chile (he experienced a major earthquake at Concepcion in 1835), the Galapagos Islands (where the famously variable finches would later provide key evidence for evolution), the coral reefs of the Pacific (which he explained through a theory of subsidence that is still accepted), and the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego (whose apparent primitiveness troubled his assumptions about human nature).
The Galapagos chapters are the most famous, but Darwin’s observations in South America were equally important to his later theorizing. The fossils of giant extinct mammals (Megatherium, Glyptodon) that he found in Argentina raised questions about extinction and replacement that the theory of evolution would eventually answer. The geological observations — particularly the evidence of land rising and falling over geological time — gave him the sense of vast, slow change that is essential to natural selection.
Collecting The Voyage of the Beagle
First edition (Henry Colburn, London, 1839, as Vol. III of FitzRoy’s Narrative): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition (1839, as part of FitzRoy’s Narrative): $10,000–$30,000
- Second edition (1845, revised, as Journal of Researches): $3,000–$10,000
- Later Victorian editions: $200–$1,000