Charles Darwin

His first landing; walking inland he reached the celebrated baobab tree and noted in his diary that its bark was covered with visitors' initials and dates.

On 16 February he landed with Captain FitzRoy and found the seabirds so tame that they could easily be killed.

The ship stayed only one day, which Darwin spent wandering through the forest that covered the whole island; they sailed that night.

On 3 March he walked the lower town by the wharves, comparing its narrow streets and tall houses to the old town of Edinburgh, and visited one of the principal churches.

On 29 March he landed on the uninhabited rocky islets and collected insects and plants while others killed large numbers of birds.

He lodged in a cottage at Botafogo, and on 27 April walked to the Botanic Garden, where several acres were planted with tea.

On 5 August, when FitzRoy was asked to help put down a mutiny, Darwin marched through the streets to the fort with 50 armed men from the ship.

On 22 September he found fossil teeth and bones of giant extinct mammals in the conglomerate of low cliffs.

He wrote that the city was one of the most regular in the world, every street crossing at right angles and the houses grouped in blocks called quadras.

Going ashore he met native Fuegians for the first time and called it the most curious and interesting spectacle he had ever beheld.

Arriving just after British rule was re-established, he found ancient fossils like those he had seen in Wales.

He described the town as really a small village with a church on its central plaza, and said he had never seen so quiet and deserted a place.

Delayed here by illness, he was puzzled to find a horse tooth in the same rock layer as the fossil casing of a huge armadillo.

The ship put in on 23 December, and the next day Darwin shot a guanaco that provided the crew's Christmas meal.

In cliffs near the harbour he found fossil pieces of the spine and a hind leg of a large animal he guessed was a mastodon.

From 19 April he and FitzRoy's party hauled boats up the river until they neared the Andes and had to turn back.

He collected lignite and petrified wood, at least two pieces of which were found in the British Geological Survey's collection in 2011.

Arriving on 23 July, he walked the surrounding country, then obtained horses and set off for the Andes on 14 August.

On 17 August he climbed the shattered greenstone that crowns the summit and spent the day at the top.

He reached Santiago after visiting a copper mine and spending five days scrambling in the mountains.

On 20 February he was ashore when a severe earthquake struck, and returned to find the port town badly damaged.

He found the city wrecked by the same earthquake and tsunami, even the cathedral in ruins, while FitzRoy found mussel beds lifted above high tide.

He crossed the divide by the Portillo Pass to Mendoza, and on the return by a different pass found a forest of fossil trees in a sandstone escarpment.

He travelled north overland from Valparaíso by way of Coquimbo and rejoined the Beagle here on 5 July.

On 13 July he rode 14 leagues to the saltpetre works and spent the night at a mine owner's house.

He wrote that Lima was in a wretched state of decay with its streets nearly unpaved, though its extraordinary number of churches gave it a striking character.

On 16 September he spent his first hour ashore at what is now Cerro Tijeretas, and his first field note recorded a mockingbird like those on the mainland.

The acting governor Nicholas Lawson told him he could tell from a tortoise's shell which island it came from.

On 1 October he landed near Tagus Cove, explored Beagle Crater and saw his first Galápagos land iguanas.

He was put ashore for nine days with the surgeon Benjamin Bynoe and their servants, collecting specimens of every kind.

He made an excursion into the mountainous interior, through deep ravines with a succession of waterfalls.

On 23 December he visited the missionaries' farm at Waimate, about 15 miles inland from the bay.

He hired a man and two horses and rode to Bathurst, about 120 miles inland, and back.

Near the Weatherboard inn he looked down into a valley about 1,500 feet deep, and the next morning walked about three miles to see Govett's Leap.

He spent five and a half hours climbing Mount Wellington, whose 3,100-foot summit gave a wide view.

He provided boiled rice for a corroboree danced by the men of two Aboriginal tribes.

He examined the atoll's structure in light of the theory he had formed in Lima, that reefs become atolls as an island sinks.

The Surveyor-general Captain Lloyd took him on the island's only elephant to see an elevated coral plain.

Around 15 June he and FitzRoy visited the astronomer Sir John Herschel, which he called in his diary the most memorable event for a long period.

He lodged within a stone's throw of Napoleon's tomb and spent four days walking over the island to study its geology.

He climbed Green Hill, 2,840 feet high, and from there walked across the island to the windward point.

He recorded as the most curious sight the reef that forms the harbour, running for several miles in a perfectly straight line.

He went up a channel by canoe to the old town, finding it cleaner than Pernambuco, but two houses refused to let him cross their gardens to reach a viewpoint.

Going ashore on the evening of 20 September, he found the town of about 10,000 people clean and tidy; the next day he rode to steaming fissures in the centre of the island.

Landing on the stormy night of 2 October, he took the mail coach straight away for his family home in Shrewsbury, arriving late on 4 October.