HMS Beagle--Stokes, Commander Pringle.

with detailed daily notes as well as regular records of weather, wind, and location, also including lengthy descriptions of Port Henry (Isla Madre de Dios), the Gulf of Penas, and Borja Bay, with underlinings and additions by Stokes in pencil, three autograph letters tipped in by Benjamin Bynoe, the ship's assistant surgeon, to Stokes, relating to the health of the crew (8 pages, 16 June to 24 July 1828), also with the results of experiments on environmental magnetism using "Professor Haansteen's instrument" at different locations in Brazil tipped in (11 pages, 1827), altogether 118 pages, plus blanks, folio (315 x 200mm.), originally loose sheets in parchment wrappers but now bound in modern brown calf, morocco-backed cloth slipcase with chemise, damp-staining

Family of Phillip Parker King; G. and N. Ingleton (bookplate and note)

the final journal kept by the commanding officer of one of the most famous ships in maritime history, charles darwin's HMS Beagle, detailing the dramatic end of her first hydrographic surveying voyage to patagonia. In the four months covered by this journal, the Beagle was charting the Strait of Magellan and the maze of islands that lie to the north on the Pacific coast. This careful hydrographic work had to be carried out in terrible conditions - incessant heavy rain, strong winds, cold, lengthening nights as winter approached, all against a backdrop of bleak and inhospitable mountains - and the voyage culminated in the suicide of Captain Pringle Stokes. The ship's lieutenant, W.G. Skyring, was put in temporary command as the Beagle and the Adventure returned to Montevideo, where King appointed a new commander, Robert Fitzroy, who also commanded the ship during her second voyage to South America. Following the tragedy of Stokes death, it was thought advisable for the captain to have a companion on the second voyage to ease the pressure of a long and arduous expedition. A personable young man from a good family, who had revealed a gift for natural science in Cambridge and was "amply qualified for collecting, observing, & noting any thing worthy to be noted in Natural History" (J.S. Henslow on Darwin, quoted in the ODNB), was duly chosen. The consequences of this appointment were, of course, huge: it was from the observations that he made while accompanying Fitzroy on this voyage that Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

The Beagle had a humble start in life. At her launch in 1820 she was a ten-gun brig, with two masts. Such craft, not wholly affectionately known as "coffin-brigs" because of their propensity to sink in heavy weather, were originally designed to undertake blockade duties. The end of the Napoleonic wars meant there was little work for such a ship, and the Beagle lay dormant, afloat, but without masts or rigging.

In 1825 the Beagle was refitted as a surveying barque, losing four cannon and gaining a mast. Her maiden voyage under Pringle Stokes was to survey the west coast of Tierra del Fuego. The Beagle was accompanied by the larger HMS Adventure, whose captain, Phillip Parker King, was in overall command of the expedition. King was the son of the third governor of New South Wales, and had made his name in the navy through his work surveying the coast of Australia. 

The voyage was beset by bad weather, ill health and food shortages, causing Stokes's mental state to deteriorate. His log, which records these problems, grows increasingly bleak and becomes preoccupied with the oppressive landscape and weather at the far end of the world. He notes that "this portion of the coast is similar to that of the most dreary parts of the Magalhaenic regions: bare, rugged, rocky and mountainous", and, towards the end, that "the weather is precisely that in which (as Thomspon [sic] emphatically and no less justly described it ) 'the soul of Man dies in him'".

The poor health of the crew eventually forced Stokes to halt the survey and anchor at Port Otway. In justification of this, he includes in his journal a letter of 16 June from the ship's surgeon Benjamin Bynoe (who became Darwin's close friend on the second voyage): "In consequence of great exposure to a long-continued succession of incessant and heavy rain, accompanied by strong gales, the health of the ship's company had been seriously affected, particularly with pulmonic complaints... a recurrence... would probably prove fatal in many instances".

This journal provides important details of Stokes's last weeks of command. On 29 June, following several days of unusually fine weather, the Beagle recommenced surveying operations and sailed south back towards the Strait of Magellan, but Stokes's behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic. Regular entries in the journal end on 4 July and some days later the ship dropped anchor at Port Famine. On 1 August 1828, having locked himself in his cabin for the fortnight before, Stokes shot himself. He survived, tended by Bynoe, for a further twelve days, and died on 12 August.

These papers were probably written on loose sheets as they are written on a number of different paper stocks of slightly different dimensions, and with various watermarks. Although the entries are written neatly, this was apparently not Stokes's final text. There are many gaps in the text and in a few cases the omitted text was later supplied by Stokes in pencil. Other pencil markings are evidently editorial, for example some text is marked for deletion while other sections are underlined and numbered, presumably for copying. Stokes's papers were dispersed after his death. One journal, covering the period 15 January to 10 March 1827, is at the UK Hydrographic Office and has recently been edited for the Hakluyt Society. Other papers came into the possession of Captain King: the King archive in the Mitchell Library, New South Wales, includes some of Stokes's papers, and in King's Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle he quotes extensively from "Captain Stokes's unfinished journal, and from detached memoranda". The present manuscript is not, however, the journal from which King quoted. It covers largely the same period of time but the text varies very significantly from that printed by King (although it is evidently related), and the journal used by King ended on 15 June, whereas the present manuscript has 24 pages of later entries. 

this journal is a unique record of the history of one of the world's most celebrated vessels, provides hitherto unknown detail about her first great voyage, and is an unusual adjunct to the development of evolutionary theory.