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Beagle for just eighteen months. His acquaintanceship with Tierra del Fuego was barely a year old. It had been a challenging, frustrating and at times exasperating experience. When he accepted command of the ship, his first captaincy, he was twenty-three years old, and he took on the job in tragic circumstances.
    The two ships HMS Adventure and HMS Beagle had set out from England in 1826 charged with establishing accurate longitudes for the city of Monte Video and the cape of Santa Maria. When that was done they were to survey and map the southern coastline of South America, from Cape St Antonio on the Atlantic coast to the island of Chiloe on the Pacific. Even by the shortest route possible, through the Straits of Magellan, this would have been a survey covering more than 2,500 miles; going the long way around the Horn would have added another 500 miles. The task before the ships, however, included all of this plus plotting the complex coves, bays and channels of Tierra del Fuego and the labyrinthine western coast of Patagonia, many hundreds, if not thousands of miles extra.
    The justification for the work was simple: in the days before the Panama Canal, the passage around Cape Horn and Tierra del Fuego constituted one of the world’s most important shipping channels, and the major route around the Americas, but countless ships came to grief on these terrible shores – at the end of the nineteenth century up to nine ships a year foundered on Staten Island alone, at the eastern tip of the archipelago. This survey would make the route a far safer proposition. There was more to it, though. This was conquest and influence by mapping. The Royal Navy was the most deadly sea force on the globe, the world’s self-appointed policeman: information was not only crucial to maintaining its position of power, but plotting the courses and coastlines of unexplored passages and territories gave it and its officers immense status and intensified prestige.
    At the head of the expedition, on board the Adventure, was Captain Philip Parker King. The son of the first governor of New South Wales, he had already built a reputation surveying the coast of Australia, yet he was still only in his mid-thirties. His number two, in command of the Beagle, was Pringle Stokes, an industrious yet frail sailor whom King was keen to praise for his ‘daring, skill and seamanship’. Between them they divided up the workload of the survey: while the Adventure concentrated on the area around Port Famine to the east of the Straits of Magellan, the Beagle headed off to the straits’ western mouth to fix the positions of Cape Pillar and Cape Victory, then to survey the Evangelist Islands. Over the next months each of the ships was to have a number of escapades – including, on the Beagle ’s part, the rescuing of a ship’s crew stranded in Fury Bay – before reuniting and turning back to Rio de Janeiro to refit.
    In March 1828 Stokes was instructed to survey Patagonia’s Pacific coastline from the western mouth of the straits to the most northerly point of the Gulf of Penas. It proved a difficult and exhausting voyage, covering more than 400 miles and five degrees of latitude. Progress was slow: the weather played cruel tricks – intermingling vicious storms, hurricane squalls, known as williwaws, and prolonged periods of paralysing calm – one man died from ‘inflammation of the bowels’, sickness debilitated the crew, the ship’s deck was constantly awash, rain quashed the men’s spirit, days passed with no surveying possible, fatigue set in, and Stokes was overwhelmed by the monotony of the country he found himself consigned to.
    Four months after she had left the Adventure, the Beagle rendezvoused with her sister ship at Port Famine. It was 27 July 1828, the ship was three days late, and there was already concern for her whereabouts. As she passed under the stern of the Adventure, Pringle