HMS Beagle 1831–36 and Charles Darwin. The role of Phillip Parker King and his colleague the hydrographer Francis Beaufort

The significance has been compounded with the steadily increasing interest in Charles Darwin, his work and the famous voyage in the Beagle, which in Darwin’s words was ‘by far the most important event of my life and has determined the whole of my career’.2 This article proposes that, whilst Captain FitzRoy was involved in the process, other persons played the pivotal role in Charles Darwin embarki. [...] There are numerous examples of FitzRoy’s inherent view of his superiority including the fact that FitzRoy informed Captain King about the Fuegian hostages detained on the Beagle in the first expedition 1826–30 after the expedition10 had left Rio de Janiero on its return to England in 1830, that FitzRoy claimed that the ordering of the return voyage of the Beagle to South America by the Admiralty w. [...] The expedition (initially involving the Adventure and the Beagle, but subsequently with the Adelaide and the Hope, and various supernumerary craft) was engaged for more than four years in exploring and surveying the hitherto relatively unknown labyrinthine coastlines, waterways, sounds, bays and passages of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego including the Magellan Straits and around the treacherous Ca. [...] 7 When it was decided that a small vessel should be sent to Tierra del Fuego, the Hydrographer of the Admiralty was referred to for his opinion, as to what addition she might make to the yet incomplete surveys of that country, and other places which she might visit.19 Consequently, the Hydrographer Francis Beaufort was intimately involved from the beginning with the decision to expand the Beagle’s. [...] In his Memoirs written in about 1894, Philip Gidley King recorded that in ‘about October 1831’ (it was obviously slightly earlier) the Admiralty had again appointed Captain Robert FitzRoy to the Beagle … for the purpose of continuing the surveys of the former commissions and for conveying the Fuegians back to Terra del Fuego – My father was in lodging in — Street [blank in the MSS] and sent for me.