Walk the Voyage of the Beagle, round the world with Darwin
Five years, forty thousand miles and one young naturalist, seasick for most of it. Your everyday steps carry you round the world with Darwin, and his journal unlocks at the places he wrote it.
- 40,000 miles
- 9 stops
- Charles Darwin, 1839
Five years round the world
Darwin was twenty-two, seasick for most of five years, and aboard chiefly so the captain would have someone of his own class to dine with. Forty thousand miles later he came home with a notebook full of finches and a question that took him another twenty years to answer.
HMS Beagle left Devonport in December 1831 to survey the coasts of South America, and came home to Falmouth in October 1836. Darwin was twenty-two when it sailed. Most of his voyage was actually spent on land, on horseback and on foot: across Brazil and Patagonia, over the Andes, and for five weeks in 1835 on the Galápagos.
The book he wrote about it is a travel journal, not a theory. It has rainforests, earthquakes, fossils dug out of cliffs and finches he nearly forgot to label. On the Origin of Species came twenty years later. It is also the longest journey in the library by a wide margin, forty thousand miles, which makes it one to walk at a brisk pace.
- Distance
- 40,000 miles (64,374 km)
- Stops
- 9, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Charles Darwin; Project Gutenberg ebook #944
Where it starts
After having been twice driven back by heavy southwestern gales, Her Majesty’s ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain Fitz Roy, R. N., sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831. The object of the expedition was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the World.
The Voyage of the Beagle, Chapter I · Charles Darwin
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 8 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would the Beagle take you?
The voyage took Darwin five years. At true scale it would take you a lifetime, so choose a month or a season instead and Bematist sets the pace from how much you already walk.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
9 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out round the world.
40,000 miles of The Voyage of the Beagle, on the walks you already take.
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