Second voyage of HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle sails from Plymouth with Charles Darwin aboard
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Darwin left England after a farewell lunch of mutton chops and champagne, and recorded feeling a "total absence of sentiment."
27 December 1831, out of Plymouth Sound
After weeks of weather delays, HMS Beagle weighed anchor at 11 a.m. on 27 December 1831 and tacked laboriously out of Plymouth Sound under the command of Robert FitzRoy.
Darwin recorded the farewell luncheon before he and his companions rejoined the ship outside the breakwater at about 2 p.m.; the commissioner, Captain Ross, escorted Beagle out in his yacht.
With its sails filled by a light easterly breeze, the ship made about seven or eight knots away from England.
"Embarks" is the wrong word
Darwin's diary shows he first boarded Beagle on 25 October and was already sleeping aboard by early December. The 27th was the ship's final departure from England, not his embarkation.
An earlier attempt to leave on 21 December had ended with a grounding of about half an hour near Drake's Island and a gale-driven return to Plymouth Sound.
The previous day's excellent sailing weather had been wasted because much of the crew was absent or incapacitated after Christmas drinking.
Into the Bay of Biscay
Darwin escaped seasickness on the evening of departure, went to bed early, and was sick for the whole of the next day. By noon on 29 December the ship was 380 miles from Plymouth.
He sailed as the expedition's naturalist and FitzRoy's intellectual companion — a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate whose appointment had Admiralty sanction, though he was unpaid and financed his participation privately.
Nothing about natural selection began that day: Darwin's first dedicated transmutation notebook dates from July 1837, after the voyage ended.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited Date corrected
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Date corrected. The research places this at 1831-12-27.