We mapped HMS Beagle's route on ExploreMap, stop by stop. Charles Darwin was 22 when he boarded as the ship's naturalist in December 1831, on a survey voyage that was meant to last two years and stretched to five — carrying him around the world and giving him the raw material for a theory that would reshape biology.
The Beagle sails from Devonport, calls at Tenerife and Porto Praya in Cape Verde, then crosses the Atlantic to Brazil — Fernando de Noronha, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro — before working down the coast to Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Argentina is where the fieldwork starts in earnest: at Punta Alta, Darwin digs up the fossil bones of giant extinct mammals just a short walk from where their living relatives still graze. The survey then creeps south through Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, rounding Cape Horn and threading the Falklands and the Strait of Magellan, before the ship finally turns north up the Chilean coast — Valparaiso, Santiago, and Concepcion, where Darwin experiences a major earthquake firsthand and watches the coastline lift out of the sea.
The most consequential stop comes late: five weeks in the Galapagos in September and October 1835, island-hopping between San Cristobal, Floreana, Isabela, and Santiago, collecting the mockingbirds and finches whose subtle differences from island to island would later nag at him. From there the Beagle strikes out across the open Pacific — Tahiti, New Zealand, Sydney, and Hobart — then swings west via the Cocos Keeling Islands, Mauritius, and Cape Town, and doubles back through St Helena and Ascension before a final loop through Brazil and the Azores brings the ship home to Falmouth in October 1836, five years after it left. Every stop carries its own date, the same way a real trip does in ExploreMap — a five-year circumnavigation, plotted like any modern itinerary: a line of places, in order, each with something that happened there.
You can explore the full route, in order, here: The Voyage of the Beagle .
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