THE CONTINUING VOYAGE OF THE HMS BEAGLE

THE LIBRARY OF THE BEAGLE IS NOW ON LINE

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 When Darwin put to sea on the HMS BEAGLE he didn't just bring blank notebooks, but relied heavily on a compact but fairly complete set of references on known biology, geology, and botany. Darwin's make shift personal quarters and laboratory  also served as the ship's library. Unfortunately the library was dispersed after the voyage and until recently the contents of Darwin's references were unknown. Today 178 years later John van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore has reconstructed, a virtual version of Darwin’s library, by cataloging all of the printed sources Darwin made reference to in his travel notes. Dr van Wyhe has found the texts of these now rather obscure volumes that Darwin would become so familiar with and has scanned them into on line versions that scholars, journalists, historians, and others may access at no charge. The entire project has been generously supported by the National University of Singapore..You may read the full story of this daunting feat of research and publishing at Take a Virtual Voyage into Darwin's Library. You can literally read scanned versions of the library publications at CHARLES DARWIN's BEAGLE LIBRARY.

 We think this is an invaluable resource and service, a light that should never be hidden under a basket.. Since we don't have room yet for a VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY section in its own right we're going to post this as an illustrated post in several likely sections where someone looking for such information might think to look within our present system. As long as this valuable resource is up on the internet we will endeavor to track it and link you to it. We can't possibly replicate all of the fantastic research in the maritime context that is going on out there. But we view it as our job to try and learn everything that is going on and to make it easier to find .