The surveying of southern Chile continued into 1835. Here he saw the effects of a devastating earthquake on the city of Concepción; he noticed that rocks has been forced upwards by the earthquake, evidence of the force of rock movement that was slowly pushing up the Andes. In the months that followed he undertook various inland expeditions until 7 September, when the Beagle sailed from Peru for the Galapagos Islands.
The green sea turtle (left) and the marine iguana (right) were two of the animals on the Galapagos Islands that fascinated Darwin.
The insatiable collector
The Beagle stayed for five weeks and Darwin was an exhaustive collector: ‘The natural history of this archipelago is 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,’ and the evidence amassed provided the spur for Darwin to develop his theory of evolution.
The Beagle then set sail across the Pacific, reaching Tahiti in November, northern New Zealand in December, and Sydney on 12 January 1836. The Beagle next sailed to Tasmania, then onto the Keeling Islands (now Cocos Islands) in the middle of the Indian Ocean. By June they had reached Cape Town in South Africa, where they stayed for a month, and then it was on to St Helena and Ascension Island.
Finally, after a brief return to Brazil, the Beagle docked at Falmouth on 2 October 1836. Fitzroy had completed much valuable surveying work and Darwin had gained the knowledge and enthusiasm to devote his life to natural history, and his greatest achievement, the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species, which outlined his landmark theory of evolution.
A caricature of Darwin as an ape, on the cover of the French satirical magazine La Petite Lune, published in 1878.
Yuri Gagarin: The man who fell to Earth
“Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the Earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colours of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colours!
Yuri Gagarin
WHEN
1961
ENDEAVOUR
Becoming the first man to orbit the Earth.
HARDSHIPS & DANGERS
Gagarin’s rocket could have exploded on launch; he could have been stuck in orbit if the engines set to re-insert him had malfunctioned; he could have burned up in re-entry; his ejection from the capsule and parachute descent could have failed.
LEGACY
Gagain’s expedition was unique in its achievements; it also ignited the Space Race, spurring the United States into a rivalry with the USSR of ever-increasing scientific and technological ambition.
Yuri Gagarin, alone with his thoughts, shortly before the launch of Vostok 1.
12 April 1961
A farmer and her daughter are tending to a calf on the vast expanse of the Russian steppe when an otherworldly figure approaches them. The visitor is dressed in a bright orange boiler suit. His face is obscured by a white helmet and he is dragging several metres of rope and cloth in his wake.
The figure speaks: ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he tells them. ‘I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space. I must find a telephone to call Moscow!’
The stranger is the first person to leave our planet. Yuri Gagarin, the 27-year-old son of a carpenter and a milkmaid, had spent the previous 89 minutes circling the Earth in Vostok 1, reaching speeds of more than 27,400 km/h (17,000 mph) and a highest point of orbit of 328 km (204 miles). No human had ever travelled further from Earth, or faster.
Just a few minutes before his encounter with the farm workers, Gagarin had been withstanding extreme heat and severe gravitational force as the Vostok 1 capsule, barely bigger than a saloon car, battered its way through Earth’s atmosphere. Now he was calm as he waited with an excited crowd of surprised farm workers for the helicopter which would take him back to the control team. News of the mission was about to become broadcast on Soviet state radio and Gagarin would become the most famous man in the world.
A report of Gagarin’s exploits from the Soviet state newspaper Pravda.
The space race takes off
Yuri Gagarin’s world-changing mission was first prize in a race between two global super powers; the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and the United States of America. The ‘space race’ was a battle between the America’s Project Mercury and Russia’s Vostok programme for the conquest of space. For the two cold war foes the prestige of being the first nation to send a human being into space compelled them to sink vast resources into their space programmes and by the spring of 1961 both sides were on the brink of manned spaceflight.
The course of history could have been very different. The Americans had planned to launch Freedom 7, a sub-orbital flight piloted by Alan Shepard, on 24 March 1961 but opted to undertake one last, unmanned, test flight instead. By the time Shepard made it to space on 5 May 1961, his place in history had been taken.
In truth, Gagarin’s orbit of the Earth was worthy of humankind’s first foray into space. Whereas Shepard was thrust briefly into sub-orbit for just a few minutes; Gagarin’s journey took him on a lap of the whole planet, encompassing both sunset and sunrise on his 89-minute orbit.
Vostok 1 was the embodiment of mechanical force. Its engines generated 4,800 kN (900,000 lbf ) of thrust and Gagarin would be subjected the equivalent of six times the force of gravity on Earth at key points on the mission. This ferocious burst of energy would be needed to propel Vostok 1 through Earth’s atmospheric boundaries and out into the nothingness of space. Once into Earth orbit, Vostok 1 would continue on a journey eastwards above the Russian steppe and Siberian wilderness before plotting a course over the Pacific Ocean towards the southernmost tip of South America. At this point the craft would head north over the Atlantic and the rainforests and deserts of Africa before descending back to Earth in the Russian motherland.
Vostok rocket on display at the Exhibition Centre in Moscow, Russia.
First human being in space
On the morning of the Vostok 1 mission, Gagarin was calm as he waited to board the craft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Samara region. He was accompanied by Gherman Titov, the standby pilot. The two would-be cosmonauts had been working together and vying with each other for the berth in Vostok 1 for more than a year. They had been informed of Gagarin’s selection at a meeting on 8 April, just four days before the mission. The two men then took part in a staged re-enactment of the meeting for the benefit of a film crew, with Gagarin delivering a somewhat stilted acceptance speech while Titov watched on.
One factor in Gagarin’s