Notas del episodio
HMS Beagle was a Cherokee-class brig sloop, a type so prone to capsizing that sailors called them coffin brigs. Built at Woolwich Dockyard for just under 8,000 pounds and launched in May 1820, she joined the celebrations for George IV's coronation as the first fully rigged man-of-war to sail upriver of old London Bridge, then sat stripped in ordinary until an 1825 refit added a third mast for a survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego alongside HMS Adventure. Flush decks and high bulwarks trapped seawater and made her top-heavy, and at bleak Port Famine commander Pringle Stokes shut himself in his cabin for two weeks and took his own life in August 1828. Command passed to 23-year-old Robert FitzRoy, who returned to England in 1830 with four Fuegian people taken after a dispute over a stolen whaleboat.
For the second voyage FitzRoy raised the upper deck by eight inches aft and 12 forward, adjusted the ballast, and paid for brass cannons, lightning conductors, sympiesometers, and 22 chronometers. Shadowed by his uncle Viscount Castlereagh's suicide, he wanted a gentleman companion and nearly rejected 22-year-old Charles Darwin because physiognomy told him Darwin's nose showed a lack of energy. That voyage ran from December 1831 to October 1836. On the third, surveying Australia, Captain John Clements Wickham named Port Darwin in 1839, and surgeon Benjamin Bynoe collected the wild tobacco Nicotiana benthamiana.
- FitzRoy's charts of South America, including the Beagle Channel, stayed in use into the 20th century.
- Nicotiana benthamiana, lacking strong viral defenses, now serves as a bioreactor for antibody treatments such as those tested against Ebola.
- In 1845 the ship became Watch Vessel 7, a Coast Guard station against smugglers on the River Roach in Essex.
- Local oyster farmers petitioned in 1851 that she was grounding on and damaging their beds.
- Research in Thames Conservancy records in 2025 showed buyers Murray and Traynor towed her to East Greenwich to be broken up after the 1870 sale.