Course Correction

Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative partner Mission Blue is hard at work in the Galápagos, creating a blueprint for getting it right across the planet

- JONATHAN HO

ON 27 DECEMBER 1831, Charles Darwin set sail on the HMS Beagle. Departing England, the 22-year-old Darwin was hired to be the ship’s naturalist. Bound for South America, the voyage commanded by Captain Robert FitzRoy required the expertise of a trained scientist-geologist because the mission was to chart the coasts of South America from the Rio Plata round to Chiloe in southern Chile.

Nearly four years after setting off from Plymouth, Darwin arrived in the Galápagos Islands in September 1835. Like many visitors before him, Darwin considered the islands bleak and ugly. Although employed as a geologist, Darwin had also been an avid collector of fossils, animals and plants during his voyage. Taking extensive notes on all he observed, Darwin spent considerable time ashore collecting plants and animals, filling notebooks with his observations of plants, animals and geology.

In his words, he described the Galápagos as “very remarkable: it seems to be a little world within itself; the greater number of its inhabitants, both vegetable and animal, being found nowhere else”. However, one of the key observations that Darwin made while he was studying finches on the island were that while similar to other finches from the mainland, each species showed certain characteristics that helped them to gather food more easily in their specific habitat. With that in mind, he found a remarkable proportion of the native plants, birds and reptiles that had developed in isolation from the mainland, often differed in ways which he could only explain by as gradual transformation of the various species. This formed the foundation of his theories On the Origin of Species.