HMS Beagle Begins Darwin's Survey Voyage
Poet involved
What happened
HMS Beagle left Plymouth in December 1831 on a surveying voyage around South America and across the Pacific. Charles Darwin travelled as a naturalist and made observations in places including Patagonia and the Galapagos Islands. His findings contributed to the eventual development of evolutionary theory by natural selection.
Literary impact
Darwin's Beagle voyage transformed the intellectual setting in which Victorian poets wrote about nature, faith and human origins. Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith and later poets responded to evolutionary ideas that unsettled inherited images of providential order.
Source: Wikipedia
