The voyage of HMS Beagle, captained by Robert Fitzroy and containing the young Charles Darwin is justly famous. At the end of a five year circumnavigation, they returned to the UK, making their first landfall in Falmouth late on 2 October 1836.
But what happened next? An entry in a journal tells us how Captain Fitzroy’s spent the next 24 hours as a guest of a leading Falmouth family. Oh to have been a fly on the wall for the conversation between the inventor and the leading naval surveyor of his day, newly returned from his great voyage.