September 7, 1835

Galápagos Islands

HMS Beagle reaches and begins surveying the Galápagos Islands

The listed date is the day Beagle left Peru. It reached the Galápagos eight days later, and Darwin did not set foot on an island until the afternoon after that.

A departure date standing in for an arrival

7 September 1835 was the day Beagle sailed from Callao, Peru, for the Galápagos. The ship reached the archipelago on 15 September, after an eight-day passage.

At 10 a.m. that day the log recorded land to the west-northwest; at noon Chatham Island — now San Cristóbal — lay about ten miles to the northwest.

Darwin's diary says Beagle spent 15 September surveying the outer coast of Chatham, the southeastern island of the group.

Darwin stayed aboard

He did not go ashore on arrival day. His first Galápagos landing came at about 4 p.m. on 16 September, at Cerro Tijeretas on Chatham Island, and lasted roughly an hour.

During the night of 15–16 September the ship worked toward Hood Island while preparing to detach boats for separate surveying work.

The expedition's official business was an Admiralty hydrographic survey; Darwin's natural history accompanied it.

The finch story belongs to later years

Darwin paid limited attention to the finches, did not recognise them all as one related group, and labelled some specimens inadequately by island.

Cambridge University Library's specimen history notes that those missing locality labels prevented him from making reliable island-to-island comparisons at all.

He remained in the archipelago until Beagle departed on 20 October 1835, and did not open a dedicated transmutation notebook until July 1837.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 8 sources not yet audited Date corrected

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Date corrected. The research places this at 1835-09-15.

What the sources leave uncertain

The date as listed, 7 September, is not the arrival date. It is the date Beagle sailed from Callao for the Galápagos.
The ship entered Galápagos waters and sighted and surveyed Chatham on 15 September; Darwin's personal first landing was on 16 September. Accounts using “landfall” can blur those two milestones.