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By Root 634 0

the 4 P.M.-1 A.M. shift as a newspaper copy editor—the most soul-leeching job in an industry that operated on the principle that the more leeches dangling from employees the better. On nights when I couldn’t indulge my primary form of relaxation (hurling dirt clods at the “SLOW” sign in the parking lot), I turned to a secondary method of stress relief: thumbing through the atlas. Retreating into the corner of my cubicle, I would dream of faraway lands, of reaching that glorious level of understanding where the Brazilian forest was more than little orange lines and squiggly blue rivers on a map, but a vast, green, three-dimensional place full of real people living real lives and chasing real lizards. So one miserable night—probably as I was bumping the headline size on a car crash story—I bought plane tickets. Which was how I found myself a few months later, idling through my savings account in Tierra del Fuego, and stumbling into a bookstore that stocked English-language books on the same afternoon a pair of friends and I had bounded through snowy mountains overlooking the Beagle Channel. I decided on impulse to learn more about the ship that gave its name to the channel, and that provided Darwin with lodging for nearly five years. That evening I curled up in the hostel common room, watched snow swirling over the channel, and started to read—and kept reading for the next two weeks as I stumbled back to Santiago, Chile, and returned home. But I could not leave that image of Darwin, and the snow falling over the Beagle Channel, behind. Back in California, with no burning ambition to return to graveyard-shift proofreading, I started to map out a new voyage.

The Beagle, a surveying ship under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy, left England in December of 1831 and arrived on the east coast of South America, in Brazil, in February of 1832. The ship spent five months in Brazil, including a three-month stop in Rio de Janeiro (Darwin rented a cottage and lived onshore), then headed south down the coast of Brazil to the world’s largest estuary, the Rio de la Plata, between present-day Argentina and Uruguay. From there, FitzRoy launched multiple surveying trips, heading south to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego before returning to Montevideo or Buenos Aires. Darwin, who suffered from terrible seasickness (“the misery is excessive and far exceeds what a person would suppose, ” he complained early on), would leave the boat whenever possible to make land expeditions. These weren’t always daytrips—Darwin would sometimes quit the Beagle for weeks at a time and cover a huge distance over harsh terrain. Twice he exceeded four hundred miles, including a two-week ride with a band of gauchos from Northern Patagonia to Buenos Aires that left him hugely enamored of the nomadic lifestyle and idly speculating about the health benefits of his new all-red-meat diet. (“I found this new regimen agreed very well with me,” Darwin wrote, “but I at the same time felt hard exercise was necessary to make it do so.”)

In June 1834, after two years spent exploring back and forth between the Plata and Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle rounded the southern tip of the continent and started surveying the west coast of South America. Over the next year the ship moved gradually northward, while Darwin made land expeditions into the interior to inspect Chilean mines or examine the geology of the Andes. On his final—and longest—land journey, he rode north 420 miles from Valparaíso into the world’s driest desert and met up with the Beagle again two months later near the tiny mining town of Copiapó, in northern Chile. From that point the ship continued north without backtracking and reached Lima, Peru, in July 1835. (Darwin didn’t explore around Lima because of political trouble.) From Lima the Beagle headed west to the Galapagos Islands, where it stayed for a month, and then on through the Pacific—with stops in Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. (“Australia is rising, or indeed may be said to have risen, into a grand centre of civilization, which, at some not very