Home » What happened to HMS Beagle, the ship that allowed Darwin to travel around the world?

What happened to HMS Beagle, the ship that allowed Darwin to travel around the world?

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What happened to HMS Beagle, the ship that allowed Darwin to travel around the world?

Charles Darwin was one of the most important scientists in history, being the main proponent of the renewal of biological science in the second half of the nineteenth century, yet it was thanks to a ship that his “revolution” began.

Many do not know that Darwin was in fact destined to spend his entire life in England, having trained as an Anglican priest and being subjected to considerable pressure by his family to get grades. This obviously would not have condemned him to a life of seclusion as in the past, given that in England the pretthey started a family and they could study in depth any discipline they wanted.

However, if he had chosen that path, Darwin would have had greater difficulty in developing the ideas that had been circulating inside his head for some time and which would only have matured thanks to his journey around the world, on board the brigantino HMS Beagle.

This ship has been considered by some historians among the most important in history, not so much because it allowed an explorer to discover new lands – in short, we are not talking about one of Columbus’ three caravels – but because it allowed a man to explore the world and to completely revolutionize our knowledge of man’s relationship with nature. nature.

Darwin in 1831 he climbed onto the Beagle almost by chance, to fulfill a personal whim, thanks to the intervention of his uncle. In fact, he did not yet wish to be ordained a priest and despised complying the requests of the paternal family, who already wanted him to be the father of children. So it was that following the advice of a professor and his uncle, he embarked as a ship’s naturalist to carry out mainly two tasks: accumulating scientific data and carrying out the role of “cultured companion” for the captain of the ship, Robert Fitzroy.

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After Darwin’s voyage, HMS Beagle became a legend for natural science enthusiasts and new enthusiastic supporters of evolutionism, but years had to pass before the ship became the true symbol of renewal for scientific research.

Darwin in fact published his evolutionary theories just 28 years later the end of his journey in the company of the Beagle, time that the scientist dedicated to publishing several other texts, with which he described the flora and fauna of the countries (including the Galapagos) that he had visited, but which was quite harsh with the ship that allowed him to achieve success.

In fact, the Beagle, after accompanying Darwin for a few years on his trip around the world, made a second less successful voyage, leaving in 1837 for the coasts of Australia, while in 1845 – having now become a rather obsolete ship – it was readjusted and became a coastguard vessel for the Essex coast.

During her final years, the Beagle practically hunted smugglers as long as she remained anchored on the River Roach until 1851. Starting from that year, while Darwin was about to conclude the final chapters of his masterpiece – “The Origin of Species” – which would have contributed to making the Beagle legendary, some oyster producers signed a petition to remove it, unaware that they had among hands an heirloom that a few decades later could have been resold to some museum.

In 1870 the Beagle was again moved to the warehouse of a well-known scrap dealer of the time, who had created the local company Murray and Trainer. He had in fact bought the ship in order to demolish it and obtain material to resell.

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At the time, Darwin’s journey had become public knowledge and the theory of evolution was circulating easily among the main English newspapers and scientific communities. Although it had suddenly become famous, the Beagle’s exact position had been forgotten by many, until some of Darwin’s friends, including Thomas Huxleyknown for being the “hound of evolutionism”, they did not realize in 1875 that it had been lost.

However, one of his old anchors was fished out of the sea in 1841, while in 2011 the museum Nao Victoria in Chile announced that he was making a copy, to celebrate his trip to the Chilean coast.

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