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Galápagos Islands, Pacific Ocean
191 years ago

On September 15, 1835, HMS Beagle reached the Galápagos Islands, a volcanic archipelago on the equator roughly a thousand kilometres west of South America. The ship was nearly four years into a surveying voyage, and its naturalist was a twenty-six-year-old named Charles Darwin, who had joined largely because the captain, Robert FitzRoy, wanted educated company. The Beagle spent about five weeks in the islands, and Darwin went ashore on four of them.

His first impression was not favourable. He described the landscape as black, broken lava, baked by the sun, with stunted, leafless brushwood and a general air of desolation. What caught his attention was the wildlife: giant tortoises, marine iguanas that fed in the sea, and birds so unafraid of people that they could be knocked off branches. He collected specimens, took notes, and left with a set of observations whose significance he did not yet grasp.

The key detail came from an offhand remark. The vice governor of the islands, Nicholas Lawson, told Darwin that he could tell which island a tortoise came from by the shape of its shell. Darwin noted it but did not act on it immediately, and he was careless about labelling which island his bird specimens came from, a mistake he had to work around later using the more carefully labelled collections of other men aboard the ship.

It was in London, after the Beagle returned in October 1836, that the picture assembled itself. The ornithologist John Gould examined Darwin's birds and reported that the assortment of what Darwin had taken for blackbirds, finches, and wrens were in fact a group of closely related finch species found nowhere else. Different islands had different species, distinguished largely by the size and shape of their beaks, each suited to a different food source. Something had produced varieties from a common ancestor, in place, over time.

Darwin spent more than twenty years working out the mechanism and assembling evidence, driven partly by caution and partly by an awareness of how the argument would be received. He published On the Origin of Species in 1859, after learning that Alfred Russel Wallace had independently arrived at the same idea. The theory of evolution by natural selection became the organizing principle of the biological sciences, underpinning modern genetics, medicine, agriculture, and ecology. The Galápagos themselves became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978 and a natural laboratory where evolutionary change has since been documented in living finch populations, generation by generation.

Charles Darwin reached the Galápagos on September 15, 1835, thought the place looked like a wasteland, and collected birds without carefully noting which island each came from. Back in London, an ornithologist told him they were all closely related finches. It took Darwin twenty-four more years to publish what that meant.

How much do you know about Darwin's visit to the Galápagos, the tortoises and finches he found there, the role of John Gould, and the two decades before Origin of Species appeared?