alified to judge, "an
active, intelligent, and most energetic officer:" and well has it been
remarked by the same high authority, "that those who have been exposed to
one of such trials as his, upon an unknown lee shore, during the worst
description of weather, will understand and appreciate some of those
feelings which wrought too powerfully upon his excitable mind." The
constant and pressing cares connected with his responsible commanded--the
hardships and the dangers to which his crew were of necessity exposed
during the survey of Tierra del Fuego--and in some degree the awful gloom
which rests forever on that storm-swept coast--finally destroyed the
equilibrium of a mind distracted with anxiety and shattered by disease.

Perhaps no circumstance could prove more strongly the peculiar
difficulties connected with a service of this nature, nor could any more
clearly testify that in this melancholy instance every thought of
self-preservation was absorbed by a zeal to promote the objects of the
expedition, which neither danger, disappointment, anxiety, nor disease
could render less earnest, or less vigilant, even to the last!

The two vessels returned to England in October, 1830, when the Adventure
was paid off at Woolwich, and the Beagle at Plymouth; she was
recommissioned by Captain Fitzroy--to whose delightful narrative allusion
has been already made--on the 4th July, 1831,* and continued under his
command till her return to Woolwich in November, 1836; where, after
undergoing some slight repairs, she was a third time put in commission
for the purposes of discovery, under Commander Wickham, her former first
lieutenant; and shortly afterwards commenced that third voyage, of the
toils and successes of which, as an humble contribution to the stores of
geographical knowledge, I have attempted in the following pages to convey
as faithful and complete an account as the circumstances under which the
materials have been prepared will allow. Nor will the subject less
interest myself, when I call to mind, that for eighteen years the Beagle
has been to me a home upon the wave--that my first cruise as a Middy was
made in her; that serving in her alone I have passed through every grade
in my profession to the rank I have now the honour to hold--that in her I
have known the excitements of imminent danger, and the delights of long
anticipated success; and that with her perils and her name are connected
those recollections of early and