Project Beagle

I want to give a shout-out to Peter McGrath and the Beagle Project.
Peter is an author and commercial yacht skipper, living in the UK. In
addition to being a sailing Renaissance man he is also behind an
important project for anyone interested in Charles Darwin.

Note: the Beagle was the ship that Darwin sailed to the Galapagos in (but you all knew that, right).

2009 will be Darwin’s bi-centennial and to commemorate this, Peter McGrath and David Lort-Phillips, a descendant of one of the Beagle’s crew have started a project to build a replica of the Beagle.

They will then retrace the voyage of the Beagle with crews of young students who will do environmental monitoring and all that other good stuff.

I am not sure how far along they are with the project and 2009 is not far away so I am sure they could use all the support they can get. Peter has a blog to keep folks informed and generally bait creationists.

For anyone interested in the voyage of the Beagle, I strongly recommend Evolution’s Captain by Peter Nichols. There was a lot more to the voyage of the Beagle than is generally known. Firstly it was actually a mission to explore Terra Del Fuego with a view to colonizing it. Why anyone would want to colonize this God-forsaken territory is beyond me. Along the way, the crew kidnapped three Fuegans (no I had never heard the term either) to take home to London, as you do.

The exploration of the Galapagos and Darwin’s detailed observations were an ancillary part of the voyage. It wasn’t till a lot later that Darwin actually figured out what he had discovered much to the irritation of Creationists the world over.