In Darwin’s slipstream

In 1831, when he was just 22, the naturalist Charles Darwin set sail from Plymouth on the HMS Beagle. Over the next five years, he explored distant lands, collected rare specimens and documented his observations in dozens of notebooks.

That intrepid journey is now the stuff of legend. Darwin survived a major earthquake in Chile, travelled in the company of South American cowboys and ate armadillos and iguanas.

But it was also a milestone in scientific understanding. What Darwin discovered on his trip became the basis for his theory of evolution by natural selection, a breakthrough that changed how we look at life’s origins.

Nearly two centuries later, the Darwin200 team has retraced this journey on a restored Dutch tall ship called Oosterschelde. They studied and documented species around the world from Patagonia to French Polynesia – and, of course, the Galápagos Islands.

The voyage, led by the British geographer Stewart McPherson, was designed to inspire a new generation of environmental leaders. At every major port where Darwin had made landfall, young conservationists came aboard to receive intensive training.

Oosterschelde visited four continents and sailed 43,000 nautical miles over the course of two years. On Saturday, it returned home, docking at Falmouth harbour, where Darwin disembarked the HMS Beagle in 1836.

Photographs by Clare Riley, Rhodri Hall, Tom Dixon, Oosterschelde, Josh Clarke, Luca Vincent, Arthur Smeets, Luiz Thiago de Jesus, Naia Andrade/Darwin200; Hugh Hastings/Getty Images