Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral (Tavistock, Devonshire, England,1540 â€“ at sea, off Portobelo, PanamĂĄ 27 January 1596), was an English sea captain, privateer (a pirate working for a government), navigator, slaver, a renowned pirate, and politician of the Elizabethan Age: Queen Elizabeth I awarded Drake a knighthood in 1581. It was in 1572 that he embarked on his first major independent enterprise. He planned an attack on the Panama isthmus, known to the Spanish as Tierra Firme and the English as the Spanish Main. This was the point at which the silver and gold treasure of Peru had to be landed and sent overland to the Caribbean Sea, where galleons from Spain would pick it up at the town of Nombre de Dios. He left Plymouth on May 24, 1572, with a crew of 73 men in two small vessels, the Pascha (70 tons) and the Swan (25 tons), to capture Nombre de Dios. His first raid there came in July, 1572. Drake and his men captured the town and its treasure. However, his men noticed that Drake was bleeding profusely from a wound and they insisted on withdrawing to save his life, leaving the treasure. He remained in the vicinity of the isthmus for almost a year, raiding Spanish shipping and attempting to capture a treasure shipment. In 1573, he joined up with a French buccaneer, Guillaume Le Testu, in an attack on a richly-laden mule train. This raid succeeded beyond any of their wildest dreams and Drake and his companions found that they had captured around 20 tons of silver and gold. It was far too much for the few men to carry off and so much of the treasure was buried (which may have given rise to all subsequent stories of pirates and buried treasures). Le Testu was wounded, captured and later beheaded. The small band of adventurers dragged as much gold and silver as they could carry back across some 18 miles of jungle-covered mountains to where they had left their small raiding boats. However, when they got there, their boats had vanished. Drake and his men, downhearted, exhausted and hungry, now had nowhere to go and the Spanish were not far behind.
At this point Drake showed exceptional leadership. He rallied his men, buried the treasure on the beach and built a raft to sail himself and two volunteers ten miles along the fearsome surf-lashed coast to where he had left his flagship. The raft was continually awash up to their chests and the salt water and the burning sun caused them much suffering. However, they pushed onwards until they reached their ship. When Drake finally stood on her deck, his men were alarmed at his bedraggled appearance. Fearing the worst they asked him how the raid had gone. Drake, in spite of everything, could not resist a joke and teased them by looking downhearted. Then he laughed, pulled a necklace of Spanish gold from around his neck and said "Our voyage is made, lads!" By August 9, 1573, he was back in Plymouth.
He is also famous for leading the first English circumnavigation of the world, from 1577 to 1580. It was the second expedition, Magellan led the first voyage around the world. They left Plymouth, England, on December 13, 1577, with six ships (including the Golden Hind). They sailed to Brazil, and through the perilous Strait of Magellan (between August 20 and September 6, 1578). At Tierra del Fuego (located at the southern tip of South America), natives gave Drake and his crew food and water. They sailed by Panama (1579), where he pirated Spanish ships and settlements for food and treasures. He landed on the island of Cano, off the coast of southern Mexico. In North America, he claimed the land he called "Nova Albion" for the Queen (his exact location was kept secret, but he may have sailed as far north as northern California or even Vancouver Island, Canada). They then crossed the Pacific Ocean and sailed by Indonesia, through the Indian Ocean, past the Cape of Good Hope, and back to Plymouth, England, in 1580. Upon his return, the Queen rewarded Drake with a large sum of money (ÂŁ10,000) .
Drake was also involved in the slave trade and was a fierce warrior and privateer. Drake and John Hawkins were on a slave-trading trip to the West Indies (backed by Queen Elizabeth) that ended with an attack by the Spanish fleet at San Juan de Ulua, near Veracruz, Mexico. The six English slave-trading ships were in the harbor for repairs, and only two ships survived the attack; the Spanish did not want the English competing in their highly profitable slave-trading business. This battle led to a series of battles that later resulted in a war between Spain and England. In this war, England crushed the Spanish Armada in 1588 and became the dominant world power. Drake helped the British defeat the Spanish Armada: he was second-incommand of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588, subordinate only to Charles Howard and the Queen herself. His exploits were legendary, making him a hero to the English but a pirate to the Spaniards to whom he was known as El Draque. His name in Latin was Franciscus Draco ('Francis the Dragon'). King Philip II was claimed to have offered a reward of 20,000 ducats, about ÂŁ4,000,000 (US$6.5M) by modern standards, for his life.
Spanish town St. Augustine in Florida,besieged by Drake in1586
Final years Drake's seafaring career continued into his mid-fifties. In 1595, following a disastrous campaign against Spanish America, where he suffered a number of defeats, he unsuccessfully attacked San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Spanish gunners from El Morro Castle shot a cannonball through the cabin of Drake's flagship, but he survived. In 1596, he died of dysentery, at age 55, while anchored off the coast of Portobelo, Panama. He was buried at sea in a lead coffin, near Portobelo. Divers continue to search for the coffin .
Voyages and discoveries: Endeavour, Cook, Banks. In 1768 the Royal Society, in conjunction with the Admiralty, was organizing the first scientific expedition to the Pacific, and the rather obscure 40-year-old James Cook was appointed commander of the expedition. As lieutenant, he was given a homely looking but extremely sturdy Whitby coal-hauling bark renamed HMS "Endeavour," then four years old, of just 368 tons, and less than 98 feet long. Cook's orders were to convey gentlemen of the Royal Society and their assistants to Tahiti to observe the Transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. That done, on June 3, 1769, he was to find the southern continent, the so-called Terra Australis, which philosophers argued must exist to balance the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. The leader of the scientists was the rich and able Joseph Banks, aged 26, who was assisted by Daniel Solander, a Swedish botanist, as well as astronomers (Cook rating as one) and artists. Cook carried an early nautical almanac and brass sextants, but no chronometer on the first voyage. Striking south and southwest from Tahiti, where his predecessors had sailed west and westnorthwest with the favouring trade winds, Cook found and charted all of New Zealand, a difficult job that took six months. After that, instead of turning before the west winds for the homeward run around Cape Horn, he crossed the Tasman Sea westward and, on April 19, 1770, came on the southeast coast of Australia. Running north along its 2,000-mile eastern coast, surveying as he went, Cook successfully navigated Queensland's Great Barrier Reef--since reckoned as one of the greatest navigational hazards in the world--taking the Coral Sea and the Torres Strait in his stride. Once the bark touched on a coral spur by night, but it withstood the impact and was refloated. After the "Endeavour" was grounded on the nearby Queensland coast and repaired, Cook sailed it back to England. He stopped briefly at Batavia (modern Jakarta) for supplies, and, although the crew had been remarkably healthy until then, 30 died of fever and dysentery contracted while on land. None of the crew, however, died of scurvy (a dietary disease caused by a lack of ascorbic acid and that habitually decimated the crews of ships on lengthy voyages in the 18th century). This was because, in addition to ensuring cleanliness and ventilation in the crew's quarters, Cook insisted on an appropriate diet that included cress, sauerkraut, and a kind of orange extract. The health in which he maintained his sailors in consequence made his name a naval byword. Back in England, he was promoted to commander and presented to King George III, and soon he began to organize another and even more ambitious voyage. The success of the expedition of Joseph Banks and his scientists (which established the useful principle of sending scientists on naval voyages--e.g., Charles Darwin in the "Beagle," T.H. Huxley in the "Rattlesnake," and J.D. Hooker with Sir James Ross to the Ross Sea in the Antarctic) stimulated interest not only in the discovery of new lands but in the new knowledge in many other scientific subjects. The wealth of scientifically collected material from the "Endeavour" voyage was unique. Cook was now sent out with two ships to make the first circumnavigation of and penetration into the Antarctic. Between July 1772 and July 1775 Cook made what ranks as one of the greatest sailing ship voyages, again with a small former Whitby ship, the "Resolution," and a consort ship, the "Adventure." He found no trace of Terra Australis, though he sailed beyond latitude 70 S in the Antarctic, but he successfully completed the first west-east circumnavigation in high latitudes, charted Tonga and Easter Island during the winters, and discovered New Caledonia in the Pacific and the South Sandwich Islands and South Georgia Island in the Atlantic. He showed that a real Terra Australis existed only in the landmasses of Australia, New Zealand, and
whatever land might remain frozen beyond the ice rim of Antarctica. And, once again, not one of his crew died of scurvy. Back in England, he was promoted to captain at last, elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and awarded one of its highest honours, the gold Copley Medal, for a paper that he prepared on his work against scurvy.
There was yet one secret of the Pacific to be discovered: whether there existed a northwest passage around Canada and Alaska or a northeast one around Siberia, between the Atlantic and Pacific. Although the passages had long been sought in vain from Europe, it was thought that the search from the North Pacific might be successful. The man to undertake the search obviously was Cook, and in July 1776 he went off again on the “Resolution”, with another Whitby ship, the “Discovery”. This search was unsuccessful, for neither a northwest nor a northeast passage usable by sailing ships existed, and the voyage led to Cook's death. In a brief fracas with Hawaiians over the stealing of a cutter, Cook was slain on the beach at Kealakekua by the Polynesian natives.
LOOKING FOR VENUS TRANSIT ENDEAVOUR QUEST
The voyage of HMS Endeavour (1768-1771) was the first devoted exclusively to scientific discovery. This site presents most of the botanical drawings and engravings prepared by artist Sydney Parkinson before his untimely death at sea, and by other artists back in England working from Parkinson's initial sketches. Natural History Museum, London
PLACES CHECK SPELLING WITH A GOOD MAP with the names in English!.......................... Write the places in the boxes under best headword: CONTINENTS
OCEANS AND SEAS
COUNTRIES - CITIES
ISLANDS - T ROPICS
PACIFIC AUSTRALIA INDIC PANAMA NEW ZEALAND CAPE TOWN BOTANY BAY INDIA AFRIKA ATLANTIC EASTER ISLAND JAKARTA JAPAN MARQUESAS CAPE HOPE CANCER MADAGASCAR Add two or more words to each category. Write all the names on the map, in the correct places!
Route of Cook's first voyage (HMS Endeavour, 1768-1771)
Biological expeditions Although a number of 16th- and 17th-century travellers provided much valuable information about the plants and animals in the Orient, America, and Africa, most of this information was collected by curious individuals rather than trained observers. A development that occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries was the organization of scientific expeditions, usually under the auspices of a particular government. The most notable of these efforts were the voyages of the "Endeavour," the "Investigator," the "Beagle," and the "Challenger," all sponsored by the English government. Captain James Cook sailed the "Endeavour" to the South Sea Islands, New Zealand, New Guinea, and Australia in 1768; the voyage provided Joseph Banks, a young naturalist, with the opportunity to make a very extensive collection of plants and notes, which helped establish him as a leading biologist. Another expedition to the same area in the "Investigator" in 1801 included a botanist, Robert Brown, whose work on the plants of Australia and New Zealand became a classic; especially important were his descriptions of how certain plants adapt to different environmental conditions. Brown is also credited with discovering the cell nucleus and analyzing sexual processes in higher plants. One of the most famous biological expeditions of all time was that of the "Beagle" in 1831, the members including Charles Darwin. Although Darwin's primary interest at the time was geology, his visit to the Galรกpagos Islands aroused his interest in biology and caused him to speculate about their curious insular animal life and the significance of isolation in space and time for the formation of species. During the "Beagle" voyage, Darwin collected specimens of and accumulated copious notes on the plants and animals of South America and Australia, for which he received great acclaim on his return to England. The voyage of the "Challenger" from 1872 to 1876 was organized by the British Admiralty to study oceanography, meteorology, and natural history. Under the leadership of Charles Wyville Thomson, the chief naturalist, vast collections of plants and animals were made, the importance of plankton (minute free-floating aquatic plants and animals) as a source of food for larger marine organisms was recognized, and many new planktonic species were discovered. A particularly significant aspect of the "Challenger" voyage was the interest it stimulated in the new science of marine biology. In spite of these expeditions, the contributions made by individuals were still very important. Such an individual was the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who undertook explorations of the Malay Peninsula from 1854 to 1862. In 1876 he published his book The Geographical Distribution of Animals, in which he divided the landmasses into six zoogeographical regions and described their characteristic fauna. Wallace also contributed to the theory of evolution, publishing in 1870 a book expressing his views, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection._
Between 1839 and 1843 Royal Naval Captain James Clark Ross, commanding his two ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, completed three voyages to the Antarctic continent. During this time he discovered and explored a new sector of the Antarctic that would provide the field of work for many later British expeditions. Ross established the general geography of this region, and named many of its features; the Ross Sea, the Great Ice Barrier (later renamed the Ross Ice Shelf), Ross Island, Cape Adare, Victoria Land, McMurdo Sound, Cape Crozier and the twin volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. He returned to the Barrier several times, hoping to penetrate it, but was unable to do so, achieving his Farthest South in a small Barrier inlet at 78Â°10', in February 1842. Ross suspected that land lay to the east of the Barrier, but was unable to confirm this.
The Discovery Expedition was planned during a surge of international interest in the Antarctic regions at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A German expedition under Erich von Drygalski was leaving at about the same time as Discovery, to explore the sector of the continent south of the Indian Ocean. The Swedish explorer Otto NordenskiĂśld was leading an expedition to Graham Land, and a French expedition under Jean-Baptiste Charcot was going to the Antarctic Peninsula. Finally, the Scottish scientist William Speirs Bruce was leading a scientific expedition to the Weddell Sea.
The Discovery Expedition, like those of Ross and Borchgrevink before it, was to work in the Ross Sea sector of Antarctica. Other areas of the continent had been considered, but the principle followed was that "in going for the unknown they should start from the known". The two main objectives of the expedition were summarised in the joint committee's "Instructions to the Commander" as: "to determine, as far as possible, the nature, condition and extent of that portion of the south polar lands which is included in the scope of your expedition", and "to make a magnetic survey in the southern regions to the south of the fortieth parallel and to carry out meteorological, oceanographic, geological, biological and physical investigations and researches". The instructions stipulated that "neither of these objectives was to be sacrificed to the other"
Map showing the Discovery Expedition's general field of work, 1902–04. Main journeys: RED line; Southern journey to Farthest South, November 1902 to February 1903. BLACK line; Western journey through Western Mountains to Polar Plateau, Oct–Dec 1903. BLUE line; Journeys to message point and Emperor Penguin colony at Cape Crozier, October 1902, September and October 1903. On his 1907–09 Nimrod expedition, Shackleton was highly successful. His first experience of the polar regions was as third officer on Captain Scott’s Discovery Expedition, 1901–04, from which he was sent home early on health grounds. Determined to make amends for this perceived personal failure, he returned to Antarctica in 1907 as leader of the Nimrod Expedition. In January 1909 he and three companions made a southern march which established a record Farthest South latitude at 88°23'S, 97 geographical miles (114 statute miles, 190 km) from the South Pole, while its northern party reached the location of the South Magnetic Pole.
During the 1910â€“13 Terra Nova expedition, a large-scale scientific and geographical expedition with the conquest of the South Pole as its principal objective. Scott was anxious to avoid the amateurism that had been associated with the Discovery Expedition's scientific work. He appointed Edward Wilson as his chief scientist, and Wilson selected an experienced team.
Its programme was complicated by the simultaneous arrival in the Antarctic of Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition. Using the ship Fram ("Forward"), earlier used by Fridtjof Nansen, he left Norway for the south, leaving Oslo on June 3, 1910. At Madeira, Amundsen alerted his men that they would be heading to Antarctica in addition to sending a telegram to Scott notifying him simply: "BEG TO INFORM YOU FRAM PROCEEDING ANTARCTICâ€”AMUNDSEN."
The expedition arrived at the eastern edge of Ross Ice Shelf at a large inlet called the Bay of Whales on January 14, 1911 where Amundsen located his base camp and named it Framheim. Further, Amundsen eschewed the heavy wool clothing worn on earlier Antarctic attempts in favour of Eskimo-style skins.
Amundsen's party reached the South Pole on 15 December 1911 and returned safely. Scott and four companions, including Wilson, arrived at the Pole on 17 January 1912. All five perished on the return journey. After the race to the South Pole ended in 1912 with Roald Amundsen's conquest, Shackleton turned his attention to what he said was the one remaining great object of Antarctic journeyingâ€”the crossing of the continent from sea to sea, via the pole. To this end he made preparations for what became the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914â€“17.
Disaster struck this expedition when its ship, Endurance, was trapped in pack ice and slowly crushed, before the shore parties could be landed. There followed a sequence of exploits, and an ultimate escape with no lives lost, that would eventually assure Shackleton's heroic status, although this was not immediately evident.
Map of the sea routes of Endurance, the James Caird, and Aurora, the overland supply depot route of the Ross Sea Party, and the planned overland route of the Weddell Sea Party led by Ernest Shackleton on his trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914â€“15: Voyage of Endurance Drift of Endurance in pack ice Sea ice drift after Endurance sinks
Voyage of the James Caird Launching the James Caird from the shore of Elephant Island, 24 April 1916 Planned trans-Antarctic route Voyage of Aurora to Antarctica Retreat of Aurora
Supply depot route
In 1921 he went back to the Antarctic with the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition, intending to carry out a programme of scientific and survey activities. Before the expedition could begin this work Shackleton died of a heart attack while his ship, Quest, was moored in South Georgia.
December 1911: Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition becomes the first to reach the South Pole.
Edward Wilson took part in two British expeditions to Antarctica, the British National Antarctic Expedition (Discovery Expedition) and the Terra Nova Expedition, both under the leadership of Scott. On the first, from 1901 to 1904, Wilson acted as Junior Surgeon, Zoologist and expedition artist, setting off with the expedition on 6 August 1901. They reached Antarctica in January 1902. On 2 November 1902, Wilson, Scott and Ernest Shackleton set off on a journey that, at the time, was the southern-most trek achieved by any explorer. The party had dogs but they were not experienced in using them and the food brought for the dogs had gone bad. With many of the dogs dead, they turned back on 31 December 1902 having reached latitude 82°17'S. They had travelled 300 miles farther south than anyone before them and were only 480 miles from the Pole. Shackleton was deteriorating rapidly, coughing blood and suffering fainting spells and unable to help pull the sledge. Scott and Wilson, themselves suffering, struggled to get the party home. It was a close call but 93 days after setting off, having covered 960 miles, they reached the Discovery and safety in February 1903. The following month, Shackleton, having suffered particularly badly from scurvy and exhaustion, was sent home early by Scott on the relief ship, Morning. On his return, Shackleton asked Wilson to join his Nimrod expedition to Antarctica in 1907, but partly out of loyalty to Scott, he declined. On 15 June 1910, Wilson set sail from Cardiff on the Terra Nova, as Chief of the Scientific Staff of Scott's final expedition. After making stops in Madeira, South Trinidad, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the Terra Nova was trapped for 3 weeks by pack ice, and finally arrived at Cape Evans in McMurdo Sound in early January 1911. A base camp hut was built and 3 weeks later work began to establish the supply depots in preparation for the journey to the South Pole the following austral Spring. In the austral winter of 1911, Wilson led "The Winter Journey", a journey with Henry Robertson Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, to the Emperor penguin breeding grounds at Cape Crozier to collect eggs for scientific study. The 60 mile journey was made in almost total darkness, with temperatures reaching as low as −70 °F (−56.7 °C). Frozen and exhausted, they reached their goal only to be stopped by a blizzard during which their tent was ripped away and carried off by the wind, leaving the men trapped in their sleeping bags for a day and a half under a thickening drift of snow. When the winds subsided, by great fortune they found their tent lodged about half a mile away in rocks. Having successfully collected three eggs and desperately exhausted they returned to Cape Evans on 1 August 1911, five weeks after setting off. On 1 November 1911, 14 men set off from Cape Evans on the long trip to the South Pole. 79 days later, Wilson was one of the five-man Polar party that reached the Pole on 18 January 1912, only to find the pole had been claimed by Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his team just 5 weeks earlier.
Their return journey soon became a desperate affair mainly due to the exceptionally adverse weather. On 17 February, near the base of the Beardmore glacier, Petty Officer Edgar Evans died, suspected to be from a brain injury sustained after a fall into a crevasse two weeks earlier. Then, in a vain attempt to save his companions, Captain Lawrence Oates deliberately stumbled out of their tent to his death on 16 March after his frostbitten feet developed gangrene. Wilson, Scott and Bowers continued on for 3 more days, progressing 20 more miles, but were stopped 11 miles short of the 'One Ton' food depot that could have saved them by a blizzard on 20 March. The blizzard continued for days, longer than they had fuel and food for. Too weak, cold and hungry to continue, they died in their tent on or soon after 29 March (Scott's last diary entry), still 148 miles from their base camp. Their bodies were found by a search party the following spring on 12 November 1912. Their tent was collapsed over them by the search party who then buried them where they lay, under a snow cairn, topped by a cross made from a pair of skis.
Pack Ice Extracts from Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World What is pack? Speaking very generally indeed, in this region it is the sea-ice which forms over the Ross Sea area during the winter, and is blown northwards by the southerly blizzards. Thus it is that floes from a few inches to twenty feet thick go voyaging out to join the belt of ice which is known as the pack. It is clear that winds and currents are, broadly speaking, the governing factors of the density of pack-ice. The tendency of the pack is northwards, where the ice melts into the warmer waters. But the bergs remain when all traces of the pack have disappeared, and, drifting northwards. And the last stages of these, when the bergs have degenerated into 'growlers,' are even worse, for then the sharpest eye can hardly distinguish them as they float nearly submerged though they have lost but little of their powers. A berg shows only about one-eighth of its total mass above water, and a berg two hundred feet high will therefore reach approximately fourteen hundred feet below the surface of the sea. There are two main types of Antarctic berg. The first and most common is the tabular form. Bergs of this shape cruise about in thousands and thousands. A less common form is known as the pinnacled berg, and in almost every case this is a tabular berg which has been weathered or has capsized. The number of
bergs which calve direct from a mountain glacier into the sea is probably not very great. Whence then do they come? To the biologist the pack is of absorbing interest. If you want to see life, naked and unashamed, study the struggles of this ice-world, from the diatom in the ice-floe to the big killer whale; each stage essential to the life of the stage above, and living on the stage below: THE PROTOPLASMIC CYCLE Big floes have little floes all around about 'em, And all the yellow diatom couldn't do without 'em. Forty million shrimplets feed upon the latter, And they make the penguin and the seals and whales Much fatter. Along comes the Orca and kills these down below, While up above the Afterguardattack them on the floe: And if a sailor tumbles in and stoves the mushy pack in, He's crumpled up between the floes, and so they get Their whack in. Then there's no doubt he soon becomes a Patent Fertilizer, Invigorating diatoms, although they're none the wiser, So the protoplasm passes on its never-ceasing round, Like a huge recurring decimal ... to which no End is found.
Shackleton's whisky recovered That's the spirit! Cases of Mackinlay's 'Rare Old' scotch whisky have been recovered from the ice outside Shackleton's Antarctic hut. What will it taste like? After some hype and anticipation news has emerged that the crates of whisky long suspected to have been entombed by ice outside Sir Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic hut have finally been recovered. A team from the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust have managed to extract five cases, three of Chas Mackinlay & Co's whisky and two containing brandy made by the Hunter Valley Distillery Limited, Allandale (Australia), which were abandoned by the expedition in 1909 as encroaching sea ice forced a hasty departure. Anything related to Shackleton's 1907 attempt to reach the south pole is emotive. His most famous exploit, an 800 mile voyage in an open lifeboat across the southern ocean in 1916, was an appalling feat which made him the hero of generations of Britishs. Even the string vest he wore on that occasion is a carefully preserved relic. Extracting the whisky may not be as simple as it sounds as inevitably ice has got into the cases and broken at least some of the bottles, and if the corks have come into contact with the alcohol they will have degenerated.
Other foodstuffs are preserved inside and outside Shackleton's hut, including "dried spinach, mint, stewed kidneys, oxtail soup, India relish, mutton cutlets in tomato
sauce, Irish brawn, marrow fat, stewed rump steaks, tripe, concentrated egg powder, kippered mackerel, minced collops, and red currants ... there's also the Antarctic classic, pemmican: dried meat mixed with fat, available in varieties for men and dogs."
"Beagle": British naval vessel aboard which Charles Darwin served as naturalist on a voyage to South America and around the world (1831-36). The specimens and observations accumulated on this voyage gave Darwin the essential materials for his theory of evolution by natural selection. Charles Darwin Books
On the Origin of Species 1859 The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection Coral Reefs The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms Insectivorous Plants More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume I More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II Observations Geologiques sur les Iles Volcaniques South American Geology The Autobiography of Charles Darwin The Descent of Man 1871 The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals 1872 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants The Power of Movement in Plants The Voyage of the Beagle The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication V1 1868 The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication V2 1868 Volcanic Islands