Darwin Sails on the Beagle

December 27, 1831

A twenty-two-year-old Cambridge graduate with a theology degree and a passion for beetles boarded HMS Beagle at Plymouth as the captain's unpaid companion. The voyage would take nearly five years, circle the globe, and give him the finches, the fossils, and the patience to write Origin of Species. He returned seasick, shaken, and quietly certain that the world's creation story needed rewriting from the ground up.