Second voyage of HMS Beagle

2 October 1836: Falmouth, after heavy weather

HMS Beagle reached England on 2 October 1836 and anchored at Falmouth, Cornwall, after heavy weather. Charles Darwin went ashore and set off for Shrewsbury by mail coach the same night.

His first sight of England moved him remarkably little. In his diary he compared it unfavourably with an ordinary Portuguese settlement.

The collection was not in his luggage

Darwin did not carry the voyage's collection ashore with him. Much of it had gone to England during the voyage, dispatched through his Cambridge mentor John Stevens Henslow — 1,529 species preserved in spirit and 3,907 labelled skins, bones and other dried specimens.

He had sailed as an independent gentleman-naturalist rather than a salaried Admiralty naturalist, so the collections were his own property.

The ship's work was not finished either: Beagle went on to Plymouth on 4 October and later to Greenwich, where Darwin returned to unload what was still aboard.

What had not happened yet

Robert FitzRoy stayed with the ship. At the voyage's end her time in commission was recorded as five years and 136 days.

Darwin had not yet begun his systematic work on species transmutation. He opened his species notebooks in 1837 and reached the natural-selection mechanism in 1838 after reading Thomas Malthus.

His own account of the voyage did not appear in print until 1839.