Charles Darwin's Beagle library

"books; those most valuable of all valuable things"

Darwin to Catherine Darwin 1833

The voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836) was one of the most important scientific expeditions in history. On board was the young naturalist Charles Darwin. His investigations would change science and the world forever. There was no sudden discovery on the Galapagos sparked by the finches as popular legend has it. Instead he intensively studied the geology, animals, plants and peoples of the lands visited. Along the way he made a number of striking discoveries, particularly in South America, which eventually led him to realize that living things must evolve over time. After his return home he formulated what he called "natural selection" to explain how living things adapt to a changing world. When he published his revolutionary On the Origin of Species in 1859, he began with the famous opening line "When on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts." (p. 1)

As a research vessel HMS Beagle may not have had the internet, but she did have an impressive state-of-the-art library of about 400 volumes. The library was housed in book cases in the poop cabin at the stern of the ship, which was also Darwin's cabin. Thus, Darwin lived and worked in the Beagle library for five years.

HMS Beagle, by P.G. King for Murray's 1890 illustrated edition. One of the bookcases is here in red. The original sketches are reproduced in Keynes's Beagle diary. A scale diagram of the poop cabin, probably drawn by one of the officers, with Darwin's annotations, including on the right and bottom, "Book Cases". (Cambridge University Library, DAR 44.16)

The library consisted of works that belonged to Captain FitzRoy and other officers on the ship. There was originally a catalogue which is not known to survive. So the contents of the library were long a mystery.

Reconstructing the lost library

In the 1980s, the editors of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin reconstructed a list of 132 works that were probably in the library based on evidence from Darwin's notes and other sources. (That list and a very important introduction, including a copy of the library regulations, is online here.) Further works in the library were later identified from Darwin's surviving books and during the editing of his field notebooks and for this project several further titles have been identified, such as Phillip 1789 mentioned in FitzRoy's Narrative 2:621.

Some of the references in Darwin's notes are very brief and obscure. For example, while on the Pacific island of Tahiti, Darwin noted cryptically in his Galapagos notebook (p. 55b), "Ellis horse story." What could this mean? The Beagle Library provides the answer. This was a shorthand reference to a book by the missionary William Ellis who described the first horse being landed at Tahiti in 1817. The horse fell overboard and the natives on the ship "plunged into the water, and followed like a shoal of sharks or porpoises." (Ellis 1829, vol. 1, p. 148.) Darwin too thought the Tahitians seemed at home in the water. When Darwin came to write his Journal of researches, he mentioned "The Tahitians have the dexterity of amphibious animals in the water." (Journal of researches, p. 486) Some works referred to in Darwin's Beagle notes etc. cannot be said with certainty to have been in the library. While noting these tentative items as such in our catalogue, we have included them in the online Beagle library.

Combining previous lists with new research creates our catalogue of 180 works, totaling 404 volumes. This is remarkably close to FitzRoy's estimate in a 16 March 1826 letter to his sister "I flatter myself I have a complete library in miniature, upwards of 400 volumes!"

The Beagle library was dispersed when the voyage ended in October 1836. It has now, 178 years later, been electronically re-constructed as part of Darwin Online. The (2012-14) Beagle library project has been funded by an Academic Research Fund granted by the Ministry of Education of the Singapore Government and supported by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Science and Charles Darwin University and the Charles Darwin University Foundation, Northern Territory, Australia. The project is directed by John van Wyhe who first proposed reconstructing the Beagle library in 2006 while editing the Beagle field notebooks.

To achieve this reconstruction, scans of the books have, in most cases, been sourced online and then specially transcribed to make them searchable under the powerful Darwin Online search engine. We have been careful to use the same editions that Darwin had, or when not obtainable, the closest available. We have added missing pages, maps and illustrations when those on Google Books or the Internet Archive, for example, were missing. And we have added better illustrations when we could find them. Other works in the library have been digitized here for the first time, for example the plates for Humboldt's Personal narrative are available nowhere else online in colour.

Now, for the first time, it is possible to search through the Beagle library in an instant for quotations, places, people, species and so forth. To search: CLICK HERE

To view the complete catalogue of the library alphabetically CLICK HERE

To view the complete catalogue according to category CLICK HERE

Darwin Online provides by far the world's largest collection of Beagle voyage materials, CLICK HERE

Some totals

The online Beagle library consists of over 195,000 pages containing more than 5,000 illustrations. The library, as far as it can be reconstructed, can be roughly broken into the following categories:

Travel/voyages 36%

Natural History 33%

Geology 15%

Atlases/Nautical 7%

Literature 4%

Reference 3%

History 2%

At least 31% of the library was in foreign languages. There were 125 English titles, 38 French, 9 Spanish, 7 German, 1 Latin and 1 Greek.

Illustrations

Another surprise revealed by the online Beagle library is the rich visual gallery it contained. Many of the works were beautifully illustrated with woodcuts or engravings of animals or scenes of exotic lands. The online Beagle library now allows anyone to see the amazing range of visual imagery that Darwin poured over during the voyage.







Humboldt's illustration of his famous ascent of Mount Chimborazo in the Andes in 1802.

Reading on the Beagle

As the Beagle was preparing to depart from England on her voyage around the world, Darwin outlined what he saw as his work list: