I hate every wave of the ocean," complained a young naturalist sailing into Hobart harbour after nearly five years afloat; "I will take good care no one shall ever persuade me again to volunteer as Philosopher (my accustomed title) even to a line of Battle Ship." l Desperate words for desperate feelings -and by all accounts of the famous Beagle voyage, Charles Darwin was not exaggerating. He felt entitled to grumble in private to his family about the cramped conditions, ceaseless traveling, and continued delays in turning the Beagle northwards toward Britain. He was emphatically tired of the sea, having seen the expedition enlarge from a two-year survey in South American waters to an eventual five-year circumnavigation of the globe. And in a more literal sense, as is well known, he was physically tired, depressed, and seasick, never having found any "sea legs" -as his captain, Robert FitzRoy, had feared from the start -and was always eager to take the opportunity to stay securely on land whenever the chance arose.
So the obvious question emerges, why did Darwin do it? Why did he remain with the Beagle even when he could ask -and afford -to leave whenever he chose? Why did any young man, for that matter, voluntarily undergo the rigors of contemporary travel without scuttling'back home after the first port of call? Looking beyond the personal factors that undoubtedly come into play here, not least the tremendous intellectual resilience shown by Darwin at this time and in his later career, the persistence displayed by Darwin and others has something to tell us about the role that "travel" may have had in the burgeoning professional world of the nineteenth century and the functions it may have 1. Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, eds., The Correspondence of