HMS Beagle

The Cherokee class of 10-gun brig-sloops was designed by Sir Henry Peake in 1807, and more than a hundred were eventually built. Working drawings for Beagle and her sister Barracouta went to Woolwich Dockyard on the Thames on 16 February 1817, amended in coloured ink that July to raise the bulwarks — six inches at the stem, four at the stern. Her keel was laid in June 1818, construction cost £7,803, and she was launched on 11 May 1820.

There was no immediate work for her. She lay in ordinary — moored afloat, without masts or rigging — after taking part, by John Lort Stokes's later account, in the celebrations for the coronation of George IV, when she went up the Thames through the old London Bridge and became the first rigged man-of-war afloat above it. Her class carried an unhappy reputation: the Cherokees were known as "coffin" brigs, handling badly and prone to sinking.

Pringle Stokes took command on 7 September 1825 and the ship passed to the surveying section of the Hydrographic Office. At Woolwich she was cut from ten cannon to six and given a mizzen mast, turning brig into barque. She sailed from Plymouth on 22 May 1826 to accompany the larger HMS Adventure on a hydrographic survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego under Captain Phillip Parker King. In March 1827 she took off survivors of the wrecked sealer Prince of Saxe Coburg in the Barbara Channel.

The desolate southern waters broke Stokes. At Port Famine on the Strait of Magellan he shut himself in his cabin for fourteen days, shot himself on 2 August 1828 and died on the 12th. Rear Admiral Sir Robert Otway later superseded Stokes's replacement with his own flag lieutenant, the 23-year-old Robert FitzRoy, who proved an able commander and meticulous surveyor. FitzRoy took four Fuegians back to England when Beagle returned on 14 October 1830. The Beagle Channel, charted on this voyage, carries the ship's name.

Re-commissioned under FitzRoy on 4 July 1831, Beagle went into dock at Devonport for extensive rebuilding. The upper deck was raised — eight inches aft, twelve forward — which gave headroom below and made her less liable to top-heaviness by reducing the water that could collect and be trapped by the gunwales. Additional sheathing added about seven tons to her burthen. She was one of the first ships fitted with the lightning conductor invented by William Snow Harris.

FitzRoy spared no expense: twenty-two chronometers and five sympiesometers, Alexander Adie's mercury-free barometer, which he preferred for the accuracy the Admiralty demanded. He asked to swap her iron guns for brass to spare the navigational instruments; the Admiralty refused, so at Rio de Janeiro in April 1832 he paid for the replacements himself. Wanting expert advice on geology, and company against the loneliness that had killed Stokes, he sought a self-financing gentleman naturalist, and Charles Darwin joined the ship.

She left Devonport on 10 December 1831, sheltered at Barn Pool in Plymouth Sound, and got away on 27 December. After extensive survey work in South America she came home by way of New Zealand, Sydney and Hobart Town, reaching Falmouth on 2 October 1836. Darwin's diary, worked up with his scientific notes, was published in 1839 as the third volume of the expedition's official account and reprinted many times under various titles as The Voyage of the Beagle.

Six months after her return, Beagle was commissioned to survey large parts of the Australian coast under Commander John Clements Wickham, with Lieutenant John Lort Stokes as assistant surveyor — both veterans of her earlier voyages. She left Woolwich on 9 June 1837 towed by HM Steamer Boxer, sailed from Plymouth Sound on 5 July, and reached the Swan River on 15 November. The survey ran from the western coast to both shores of Bass Strait and then north to the Arafura Sea.

Wickham fell ill and resigned; Stokes took over in March 1841 and finished the work in 1843. Exploration of the Gulf of Carpentaria revealed the Albert and Flinders rivers. On 9 October 1839 Wickham named Port Darwin for their former shipmate, prompted by a fine-grained sandstone found there — the settlement became Palmerston in 1869 and was renamed Darwin in 1911. Beagle Gulf carries the ship's name in the north, as the Beagle Channel does in the south.

In 1845 Beagle was refitted as a static coastguard watch vessel and transferred to HM Customs and Excise to control smuggling on the Essex coast, moored mid-river in the River Roach near Burnham-on-Crouch. Each watch ship housed seven coastguard officers and their families, drawn from other areas to minimise collusion with locals. In 1851 the Walfleet oyster traders petitioned for her removal as an obstruction to their beds; the Navy List that May recorded her as "Southend W.V. No. 7 at Paglesham".

She was sold in 1870 to Messrs Murray and Trainer to be broken up. Investigations from 2000 led by Robert Prescott of the University of St Andrews confirmed W.V. 7 as Beagle and found substantial material in a Paglesham dock, including an anchor of 1841 pattern and a boathouse incorporating knee timbers matching hers. Research in 2025 traced the buyers' purchases and the towage advertisements to East Greenwich, where the evidence now indicates she was broken up by experienced shipbreakers.