and bored, he wrote to WD Fox: "I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor...I thank my good stars I was not born a Sailor."

Psychological studies claim homesickness is a temporary grief response to changed circumstances. Darwin shows it can also come on due to time.

#maritimehistory

I am very much looking forward to reading this. Enjoy the writing...there is so much pleasure when you can finally share your passions with the world.

My gloves and woolly hat live in the door pocket so I can grab them if I get cold. The glove box is a strange and mysterious void where things go to disappear...

20 June 1769 in Tahiti, Cook and Banks were served dog: "it was the opinion of everyone who taisted of it that they Never eat sweeter meat, we therefore resolved for the future not to despise Dogs flesh."

Just read a couple his letters to Ross and Henderson from Whale Fish. Poor chap. His loneliness drips from the page!

It would be if I wasn't starring in the play "Jekyll & Hyde" this week! I'm standing in the wings of the theatre waiting to go on & I'm thinking, "How do I define Darwin's relationship with his diary? Essentially the physical artefact is transformed into a friend & confidante, so Transfigurative?" 🤔

You're still an absolute star. I really struggled to get my head around this MA as the switch from doing history to doing "History" is quite disorientating. But there are many types of history & I don't think a degree is necessary to be a historian, just passion, which you have in spades ❤️

Thank you, I'm seeing a specialist but it's another month away. I don't want to discard hundreds of hours of research & a topic that fascinates me, but I do wonder if it will affect my objectivity. He looms large over many of the surveying voyages so can't be avoided, unfortunately.

It also changes how we should view Stokes and the effect of isolation on mental health. He was not a capable officer affected by the strain. He was more like Donald Crowhurst, out of his depth, lying and afraid of exposure. This is a far darker and more complex story than the one we've been told 9/9

Taking command, Fitzroy would have known this about his predecessor. He would have known it was Stokes' inadequacy and fear of discovery that drove him mad, not just the stress of the task. But Fitzroy was an exceptional commander, so this changes how we should view his invitation to Darwin. 8/9

Flinn, the Master, sick of his treatment, requested a transfer to Adventure. King agreed, and dispatched a master's mate to the Beagle instead. According to King, this was why it happened. Knowing he could no longer hide his deficiencies, and terrified of being found out, Stokes shot himself. 7/9

They record a man loitering for two weeks just outside the rendezvous, in the process running out of most food and all the antiscorbutics, in the hope that King in the Adventure would have already left and thus would not find out the truth. But as he sailed into Port Famine, the ship was there. 6/9

They show a man that copied the charts, measurements and calculations of his assistant surveyor, Lt Skyring, and passed them off as his own. Who on the storm-tossed deck of the Beagle demanded an oath of loyalty from his officers that they would not tell anyone what had transpired. 5/9

They depict a man who repeatedly ignored the advice of his officers, sailed his ship into hazards that endangered them all, relied upon the Master and luck to extricate them, and then punished the crew for his own mistakes. A man whose surveying ability was substandard and woefully inadequate. 4/9

I have since discovered King's letter to the Admiralty reporting Stokes' death, and a diary by the Beagle's purser, which cast this simplistic interpretation into doubt. They paint Stokes not as a lonely soul burdened with responsibility but as a tyrant who abused his officers and men. 3/9

I claimed, in line with the epitaph on his gravestone, the official voyage narrative by PP King, and the opinion of various historians, that Stokes was driven by the stress and isolation of command to take his own life, and as a result, Fitzroy (potentially) invited Darwin as a friend/companion. 2/9