DARWIN
part II

by Miles Mathis

First written February 14, 2024

In part I, we saw me go from “Darwin wasn't a fraud” in the first paragraph, to the discovery after a few pages that yes, indeed he was. A complete and utter fraud, one that almost certainly faked most or all of his journey around the world. Here I will compile a lot more evidence of that, most of it from his own journals.

We get the first hint of it before page 1, because University College, London, genetics professor Steve Jones gives us a big clue in his introduction [The Voyage of the Beagle, Random House Modern Library edition]:

It is also a monument of English literature. Darwin took Paradise Lost as well as The Principles of Geology as a literary companion, and it shows.

Yes, it does, which is very suspicious. The writing style is way too good for a 22-year-old slacker student who didn't even qualify for the Tripos and whose writing up to then—from his letters, for instance—showed no special facility with the English language. We have to ask, when and where did he learn to write like this?

Clearly, those who actually wrote this considered it more important to make the journals readable and “literary” than to make them believable or consistent. As we have seen many times when studying these people, they have no concern for continuity, much less for plausibility, since they know their readers don't notice contradictions and will believe anything fed to them from a mainstream institution.

Before we move on, something in that introduction pushed me into Captain Fitzroy's bio again, which is just as fishy as Darwin's. Jones reminds us that Fitzroy slit his own throat at age 59, dying by suicide like his predecessor as captain of the Beagle, Pringle Stokes.   That led me to Fitzroy's Wiki page,

where we find this:

Artist unknown, which makes no sense. A portrait like that would certainly be signed. But as a portrait painter myself, I can tell you that portrait is almost certainly a fraud as well. It looks like something pieced together by a semi-amateur 20th century painter from photos. It doesn't have the style of that period and the brushwork is very clumsy. The background is atrocious. My guess is we could find the photo he used for the head without much work.

The first paragraph at Wiki claims Fitzroy, as governor of New Zealand, “tried to protect the Maori from illegal land sales claimed by British settlers”. And you believe that? This is the same Fitzroy who argued FOR slavery against Darwin when they were on the Beagle, and had zero regard for the natives of South America. He is famous for kidnapping natives in Tierra del Fuego and using them as hostages. One of these natives died of a smallpox vaccination—which interests us in regards to current events, doesn't it?

Also suspicious is that we are told Fitzroy died broke. The usual sob story. A famous vice-admiral of the Stuart family, grandson in direct line of the King, but he “exhausted” almost a million dollars on his way out. On what? Booze, hookers, and lottery tickets? We are told only it was “on public expenditure”, making us believe, I suppose, that he gave too much to the Meteorological Society or the Save the Maori Fund. Somehow his friends soon raised about half a million dollars (current numbers) for his family and they were allowed to live for free at Hampton Court:

The Stuarts were too big to fail, I guess. Sounds like the usual Phoenician fraud we have seen a hundred times: fake insolvency so that you can be bailed out by the treasury.

Fitzroy's uncle the 2nd  Marquess of Londonderry, Robert Stewart, also allegedly slit his own throat, at age 53. He had been Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons, showing you just how high up Fitzroy was—in case you still haven't gotten it. This uncle of his, known as Lord Castlereagh, was such a fascist even his colleagues were repulsed by him, and that is saying a lot among the Phoenicians. For example, the poet Percy Shelley was a major opponent of Castlereagh, mentioning him as a murderer in The Masque of Anarchy. Castlereagh had been involved in the Peterloo Massacre, for instance. . . though that may have been faked or provocateured—like our own January 6. 18 people allegedly died, the usual aces and eights, Chai. We now know the point of the fake event was to pass the repressive Six Acts of 1819, which banned any meetings by critics of Parliament. Sound familiar? They didn't have Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, or Google back then, so this is how it was done in the old days.

But it wasn't being called out as a fascist that brought Castlereagh down. Can you guess what it was?  Think Rudolph Valentino. Castlereagh was being blackmailed by his homosexual lover, and that is admitted at Wiki.

That's Castlereagh. If you didn't follow my critique of Fitzroy's portrait above, compare it to that one. Notice how much better the skintones are. Look at the lovely quality of light, giving us those soft shadows which accentuate the roundness of the face and the three-dimensionality of the head. Look at the dark background which still has a depth, with the warm brown to the right and some blue in the distance to the left. Look at the way the white linen is painted. Look how soft the fur seems. And we know who painted this: Thomas Lawrence, the greatest portraitist of his time. This is actually not one of Lawrence's best, but it still serves to show what is wrong with the portrait of Fitzroy.

Anyway, like Valentino, Castlereagh may have faked his death to get out of the limelight and avoid any more steep payments. You can't blackmail a dead guy, even if he isn't dead. Which means Fitzroy may also have faked his death. Remember, cutting your own throat isn't a very good way to commit suicide. If you prefer blades to poisons, it is much less gruesome, messy, and difficult to open a vein in your wrist in the bathtub, under water, and go out that way. Plus, we know these people love to fake their deaths. They like nothing better, other than stealing from Gentiles.

More indication of a fake is that Castlereagh was allegedly buried at Westminster Abbey. Suicides aren't allowed burial there, since suicide is a mortal crime. We are told that felo de se was no longer followed in the early 1800s, but that was a matter of state, where property would no longer be forfeit to the crown, with a finding of insanity instead. But burial at Westminster Abbey wasn't a matter of state, since the Abbey is a church. In 1820 the Anglican Church had the same rules as the Catholic Church regarding suicides.  In fact, they only just changed them in 2015.   Of course the same analysis applies to Fitzroy, who is said to be buried at All Saints Church, Upper Norwood. That shouldn't have been possible, indicating a fake death. According to church law, sodomy should also have kept them out of such burials, but of course no official finding of sodomy was found for either man, while an official finding of suicide was found.

Yes, reading Fitzroy's Wiki page and Jones' introduction now suggests to me a further reading of the Darwin story: they admit Darwin actually wasn't the ship's naturalist, that being the ship's surgeon McCormick. Darwin was taken along as Fitzroy's gentleman companion. Hmmm. I guess you are seeing where I am going already. This would explain why in his decision whether or not to marry, Darwin thought of a woman as little better than a dog.

And like Darwin, Fitzroy also married his first cousin, Isabella Smyth. This is the way the gay Phoenicians do it, as I said in part I. No one else of the opposite sex wants to marry them, for obvious reasons. So they pair up the gay men with their lesbian cousins. Same thing they still do in Hollywood.

Does that mean I think Darwin actually went on this trip? No, as I said in part I, I think he may have gone to Bahia or Rio, but there is no way this ship went around the Horn in winter or around the world. They admit it was a coastal ship, meaning a ship only seaworthy enough to hug the coasts or perhaps sail across the central Atlantic in summer. It would not have been taken round the Horn or across the Pacific. Which means he didn't go to Galapagos.

But back to the journals. Fitzroy's Beagle journals took three years to compile and publish after his return, and Darwin's even longer. Why the three-year delay with Darwin and Fitzroy? These are journals: already written. All they have to do is be typeset. The work of a few months, and the work of a publisher, not of the author. Darwin had already written them, so what was there for him to do further, other than to OK some minor edits for readability? The three-year delay again indicates some kind of fraud. It tells me the journals had to be faked by some committee somewhere, though I don't see why they couldn't have been working on it during the five years it was allegedly happening. Apparently the project didn't really hit full steam until several years after we thought it did.

Except that, looking more closely, we find The Voyage of the Beagle isn't the publication of Darwin's journals or notebooks, kept on the voyage, as most would assume. As I assumed on my previous reading long ago.  No, as Darwin admits in his preface, it was written after the voyage, “in the form of a journal”. Meaning? Meaning it is actually a memoir, not a journal. You will say that accounts for its slick form: Darwin had learned to write beautifully some time between 1831 and 1837, when he began writing this memoir. Possibly, but I hope you see that is unlikely, since—according to the timeline published—he was at sea for the first five of those six years, and busy with a thousand projects when he returned. He was not taking a series of creative writing courses onboard the Beagle, nor from 1836 to 1837.

You will say there are other ways for a man to learn to write other than creative writing courses. That's true. I myself never took any courses. I learned to write by reading and writing A LOT. But Darwin wasn't writing a lot on the Beagle. And what he was writing wasn't polished prose, it was jottings in his notebooks. So we still don't have any way to explain the form of these memoirs. You will say, “Maybe he had a ghostwriter or a committee of them, taking dictation.  That isn't a crime.”  No, it isn't a crime, but we should be told that if he did. It is a highly suspicious omission, at best. But I don't think that is what happened here. I don't think this memoir is ghostwritten because I don't think the story came from Darwin. It was compiled by some committee at Cambridge from various other sources, with Darwin—our Stuart for the nonce—planted as a front. I am already sure of it from just the introduction, preface, and first few pages, so prepare yourself for the usual Mathis blasting down to bare ground.

Amazingly, Darwin himself tells us who was on this committee behind him in his preface:

but I trust that naturalists will remember, that they must refer for details to the larger publications which comprise the scientifc results of the Expedition. The Zoology  of  the Voyage of the Beagle includes an account of the Fossil Mammalia, by Professor Owen; of the Living Mammalia, by Mr. Waterhouse; of the Birds, by Mr. Gould; of the Fish, by Reverend Jenyns; and of the Reptiles, by Mr. Bell.

So Darwin had a big hometeam back in Cambridge, as I said. None of those guys took any trip around the world. They weren't on the Beagle, so why are they here? You will say they studied and made reports on Darwin's specimens sent back, which again is no crime.   No, it isn't a crime, but it again

arouses huge suspicion given what we have already discovered. That is because it would be very easy for Darwin's writing team to have back-manufactured this memoir from the work of these guys, collating it with the published notes of Fitzroy. You will say I have argued Fitzroy also did not go round the Horn. True, but others had, and those reports were known. If Darwin was such a felicitous writer, he should have been able to crank these memoirs out, using his own notes as reference, in a matter of months. He should quote extensively from his notes, simply expanding them with further commentary. That is what you or I or anyone else would have done. But that isn't what we find. Instead we find him waiting until after Fitzroy and all these real scientists had done their work, letting his memory fade for two years, then providing this polished story that magically brings them altogether.

Plus, we can return to the introduction by Steve Jones, which I already quoted above, where Jones says Darwin took Paradise Lost on his trip, explaining why the <journal> is “a monument of English literature”. But surely that implies Darwin wrote it on his trip, which we now find he didn't. Making Jones part of this conjob.

You would expect Darwin's <journal> to be illustrated by his own cute and naive drawings, allegedly worth millions. But they aren't. Opposite page one we find a professional etching of a Galapagos lizard. No artist or source is given, which is again strange. It seems they want you think it came from the journal, as if Darwin himself drew it.

OK, just read the first chapter very closely, which is 15 pages. It takes us from England to Rio and covers about 14 weeks. Which comes out to about one page per week. Upon graduation, Darwin was all excited planning a trip to Tenerife, but now he has gone to the Canaries as well as Cape Verde and Bahia, but only has 15 pages over 14 weeks? You or I at age 22 on such a voyage would have written 15 pages every day we were on or near land, in our excitement. We would double that by added commentary in a memoir six years later. But clearly Darwin's writing committee isn't as excited by those first weeks as you or I or Darwin would have been. Why? Because that part of the journey is old hat for them. These guys are seasoned writers and scientists for whom these little islands are a big yawn.

Even when they get to Bahia they can't get up the energy to fake this in a believable fashion. There Darwin admits he took his first trip into a rainforest, but he tells us nothing but that he did. Here is what he says about that, in toto:

The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the fowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, flled me with admiration. A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. To a person fond of natural history, such as day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again. After wandering about for some hours, I returned to the landing place . . . . [p. 12]

Wow, is that what you would write about your first day in a rainforest? Bland generalities and empty platitudes? There is nothing specific there. Anyone could have written that. Siri could have written that after reading the page on “Brazilian rainforest” at Britannica. The glossy green of the foliage? You have to be kidding me! Is this what Steve Jones considers a monument of English literature? Yes, whoever wrote that has a limpid pen, but he wasn't in that rainforest on that day, or likely ever. I have never been in a rainforest, but I could make up something better than that, just by naming some of the

actual plants and animals known to be there. Darwin, supposedly the great beetle lover, didn't see any of the thousands of species of beetles in that rainforest? Ones he had never seen before? All he saw was the elegance of the grasses. Darwin hadn't been reading Milton: apparently he had been reading  Walt Whitman twenty years in the future.

The whole first chapter reads like this, and we don't get any impression Darwin wrote it, or the notes it is based on. None of it mirrors any of Darwin's known interests; instead it mirrors the interests of those actually writing this—the discoloration of sea and rocks by organic and mineral causes, Atlantic dust from the Sahara and other sources, rock strata, and so on. It doesn't read like the journal of a 22-year- old, or the memoirs of a 27-year-old, either. As you see from the last quote, it reads like a project. Once you look for it, it becomes very obvious.

Let's skip ahead to chapter XI, to see what they have to say about rounding the Horn in winter. Remember, we saw that Wikipedia completely skips over this part of the trip. They have an entire very long page on the 2nd voyage of the Beagle, but this is all they say about passing the straits of Magellan:

Beagle and Adventure now surveyed the Straits of Magellan before sailing north up the west coast . . .

Wow did they rush by that! I wonder why?

Sure enough, the <journal> confirms the Beagle allegedly entered the eastern end of the straits of Magellan at the end of May, 1834. So they didn't technically “round the Horn”.* They rounded South America. But the straits are almost as dangerous as the open ocean in June, which is like December in the northern hemisphere. That's where they get the term “dire straits”, you know. There is a similar term going back to Homer and others, referring to the straits of Gibraltar, but the straits of Magellan are far more dangerous, and the current phrase was popularized in the 1700s when ships began taking that route more often. Regardless, there was no reason to round anything in June, since Darwin admits they were already there the first time six months earlier in January, when they could have rounded South America in summer. Instead they waited six months so they could do it in winter. Brilliant. Except that we know it didn't happen.

That's from a site on tourism in the straits. Yes, it looks like a paste-up, but it serves to remind you there is ice in the water there in winter. During global warming. Just so you know, the Straits of Magellan are extremely far south, being at about 54 degrees south latitude, which is similar to Juneau,

Alaska, at 58 degrees north. Or, if you are in Europe, think Moscow in winter. And it is actually colder in the south than in the north. The Antarctic is colder than the Arctic. As I have shown in my science papers, this is because there is more charge/EM activity in the south, EM having a reverse effect at the poles to the effect it has at the equator. So when reading this chapter of the Beagle rounding the continent in June, you should be thinking Alaska in December. Except that the straits are far stormier in June than Alaska is in December, with winds so high they would rip that little sardine- can Beagle to shreds. The Captain wouldn't have to kill himself since the gods of the sea would soon put the whole crew in a watery grave.

Again, the narrative makes no sense, since the 28-year-old Fitzroy is in no hurry to get around the continent before it gets even colder. Darwin says they instead landed and hobnobbed amiably with the tall Patagonians as if it were high summer. These hidden authors do realize it isn't summer in June down there, right? I find the stupidity here as shocking as anything I have come across: they either don't know it or figure their readers won't know it, so they can say whatever they wish.

Actually, on the next page Darwin admits it was the beginning of winter, with snow on the ground. He says they met a couple of sailors who had run off a sealing ship, and that these “vagabonds” had somehow survived outside the “incessant gales, with rain, sleet, and snow”. Hmmm. So how did the little “unseaworthy” Beagle survive the incessant gales at sea? Darwin skips right over it. You would think they never saw a squall.

They don't just stop a few hours to gather food, water, and bearskins before moving on in haste; Darwin the gentleman's companion says they leisurely surveyed the place as usual, and he lists the flora and fauna of the area, including his beloved beetles. In fact, they spent eight days in Port Famine, allegedly firing the cannon over the heads of Natives and other fine deeds. But again, Darwin's reports have an academic second-hand feel to them, and what he tells us of the flora and fauna of Tierra del Fuego is textbook stuff, not firsthand accounts.

According to Darwin they passed the straits in just four days of sailing. Two days to Port Famine and two days from there. They weighed anchor the morning of June 8th from Port Famine, and in the morning of June 10th “entered the open Pacific” [p. 215]. One little problem: the straits of Magellan are 350 miles long, and Port Famine is actually less than halfway coming from the east. So they allegedly sailed almost 200 miles in two days. Second little problem, the currents and winds would have been  against them:

for the currents and the prevailing winds run west to east. And they do run. If the tides are wrong, the currents can run eight to ten knots, and Magellan’s vessels could, at the very best, make about twelve. In a word, Magellan would have to tack the length of the strait against the wind and currents, and at this narrowest point he had to set his tack such that he would not have to switch back, for there’s not enough room. Negotiating the strait in a sailing vessel with no auxiliary power is a superb feat of seamanship.

Like Magellan, Darwin was in a big wooden sailboat, so that also applies to the Beagle. Tacking means the ship had to zigzag into the wind, making the total distance travelled much longer. Something like 40% longer, taking the distance up to 140 miles per day. So at around five mph above the speed of the current in its face, that would mean the Beagle sailed how many hours per day? Answer: 28 hours per  day. The Beagle had to sail 28 hours per day for two days to travel 280 miles at 5mph.

Which brings us to problem number three. Darwin admits it was dark 14 hours a day in winter there, but it is even worse than that, since that includes twilight hours with the day. It is actually light in mid-

winter at that latitude only about 7.5 hours. The rest of the time they would be sailing in the dark or dusk. Which you can't do tacking into the wind and current in the straits of Magellan in a 90ft ship. The route is so curvy, foggy, and dangerous it now has 41 lighthouses to guide ships, but of course in the time of Darwin there were none. No lights onshore at all, which means they couldn't sail at night.

Which brings us to problem number four. From the photo above, we see there may have been ice in the straits, which would have slowed them even more.  The Beagle was not an icebreaker, which is just another reason they should never have been there in the winter in an “unseaworthy” wooden boat. They should have only been able to sail about 40 miles per day, which means it should have taken them about a week to enter the Pacific from Port Famine. For comparison, it took Magellan 38 days to make the trip through the straits—but he did it in late spring (November).

You will tell me the Beagle was faster than Magellan's ships, since it was smaller and more maneuverable. No.  Actually Magellan's ships were smaller, the Victoria being a carrack of about 70 ft.

Which reminds us of something else: Magellan went through with four ships, while the Beagle was alone, except for possibly a schooner Fitzroy had bought which he named the Adventure.  A schooner is even smaller than a brig, but we aren't told much about this Adventure, for what we are now seeing are obvious reasons: it didn't exist.  It seems to have been added to the story just to add another layer of misdirection. On the 1st voyage of the Beagle in 1826-30, she was allegedly accompanied by the HMS Adventure under captain Phillip King. But even there we find mystery, since the HMS Adventure was originally the HMS Aid. We aren't told why the name was changed, but a little study tells us why. She was built as a storeship, one of six built during the Napoleonic wars, in their own class, and as such she was larger than the Beagle by about 15 feet. As a storeship she had a very large depth of hold, at over 17 feet, making her a terrible choice for a round-the-world journey, or even a journey through the straits of Magellan. They obviously renamed her in hopes of hiding this information.

As for this schooner Adventure on the 2nd voyage, she looks like a ghost dreamed up by the writers to at least make it appear the Beagle had some back-up in her passage of the straits. The story was already stupid enough as it was, but the Beagle going through alone made it twice as stupid. So they made up this part about Fitzroy buying some schooner in the Falklands, fitting it with a new copper bottom, sailing it through the straits with the Beagle, then being forced by the Navy to sell it when they found out. That story makes absolutely no sense, since the Admiralty would have had to give permission for the purchase to start with. They would have had to assign a captain and so on, since this was a naval expedition, not some Stuart boating party. And guess what, Darwin doesn't mention this Adventure once in his <journal>. Whenever he says “we sailed” after January 1833, he mentions the Beagle alone. There is one occurrence of the Adventure in these chapters, but it is the HMS Adventure of the 1st voyage, not the schooner of the 2nd voyage.

All this about the Straits of Magellan leads me to return to the story of the Bounty, which of course I  have also destroyed. If you will remember, the Bounty—another small unseaworthy vessel of the same class and size as the Beagle—also tried to round the Horn east-to-west about 40 years earlier, allegedly being turned back by gale-force winds in its face. What we forgot to ask there is this: why was the Bounty trying to round the Horn at all? Why didn't it try to go through the Straits of Magellan? In 1789, as in 1834, the Straits would have been the preferred choice for any vessel of this class. There was absolutely no reason for the Bounty to risk the Horn, especially in April, which was autumn there.

Here's another big problem: The Beagle allegedly left Galapagos on October 20, 1835.   It had left

England on December 27, 1831. It would be home on October 2, 1836. So that is almost four years out and one year back.

But I remind you the return trip was much much farther than the trip out to Galapagos.  It was roughly
2.5 times farther, but they did it four times as fast, which means they returned ten times as fast as they went out. As you see, they went farther than around the entire Earth in less than one year in that little ship, moving against most currents and against the trade routes. The trade routes ran west to east for a reason: the trade winds also moved that way. So as in the Straits of Magellan, the Beagle would have been tacking into the wind for most of that year. And there was no reason to go west from Galapagos to Australia, since in its third voyage in 1836 the Beagle would be going directly to Australia to check the chronometer readings.

These chronometers appear to be yet another red herring, since Wikipedia admits in its section on the 3rd voyage of the Beagle that Captain John Lort Stokes forgets to mention them in his <journal>:

Other than mentioning that he carried a pocket chronometer by French which gave good results, Stokes' account of the voyage does not list or even enumerate the chronometers.[note 3][47] It may be that chronometers were now so commonplace that their use was no longer something of note.

Whoops! This after being told by the fake historians that all three voyages of the Beagle were mainly to confirm longitude readings by these chronometers. Also, they seem to be recycling names. I remind you the captain of the 1st voyage was also a Stokes. Pringle Stokes. As usual, they just say, “no relation”. This second Stokes allegedly shared Darwin's cabin aboard the Beagle on the 2nd voyage, being an assistant surveyor at age 20. He had previously been on the 1st voyage as well, as a 13 year old. So more malarky. In 1836, at age 25, he was promoted from assistant surveyor to lieutenant and made first officer for the Beagle's 3rd voyage.  Five years he later took over the captaincy of the Beagle in Australia when Commander John Wickham fell ill. As any Navy man will tell you, none of that makes any sense either. If we go to Wickham's page, we find this great “portrait”:

Here's an even better one of him as captain:

He joined the Navy at  age 13 and was a  midshipman by age 16. He passed his Lieutenant's examination at age 20. He was second lieutenant on the HMS Adventure during the 1st voyage of the Beagle, and was Fitzroy's First Lieutenant on the 2nd voyage. He was either Commander or Captain of the Beagle on its 3rd voyage, but retired from the Navy at age 42 for ill health and became the police magistrate of New South Wales. Strange that NSW would hire a sick person for the police force at age 42.

As for Captain Stokes, he retired at age 52 but according to Wiki was nonetheless promoted to rear admiral that year, vice admiral at age 60, and full admiral at age 66. That also makes no sense, since

you can't be promoted after you have retired. I have not noticed that Darwin mentions any of these people in his <journal>, although allegedly bunking with Stokes. I finally thought to go to gutenberg.org, where this journal is printed in full, allowing me to word-search it. A Mr. Stokes is mentioned four times, but never as a surveyor or cabin mate. A Mr. Wickham is mentioned once, but not as First Lieutenant of the vessel. He answers something to a commanding officer, but the only commanding officer of the First Lieutenant would be the Captain, unless there was some kind of First Mate outranking him, but in either case Darwin would just have said the Captain Fitzroy or the First Mate X. So again this is more proof of the hoax.

So I would say the 2nd voyage of the Beagle has now been proved to be a myth. I could continue beating this horse, but it is already so dead it is fossilized. We could carbon-date it. It has joined the  Titanic fake story in Davy Jones' locker.

It looks like there will be a part III, since I haven't even got Darwin up to age 30. But I may take a break and come back to it, since I am feeling especially slimed by this entire project. I didn't see it coming in so it took me somewhat by surprise. I knew there was dirt on Darwin, but nothing like this.

*The Beagle did allegedly round the Horn, but according to this <journal> it was in December of 1832, not the summer of 1834. They hit the Horn on December 21st but were forced back by gale winds. They hid in a cove for several days then tried again on December 30, when they made it around to York Minster. They were tossed around for almost two weeks and almost capsized on January 13th, causing them to retreat. And that was in mid- summer!

We also find this at Wikipedia, on the page for chronometers:

A chronometer was damaged as Beagle was approaching Cape Horn on 13 January 1833. The ship was hit by three enormous rolling waves in quick succession. The first wave slowed the ship sufficiently that she could no longer make way and the second turned her broadside to the third. This last wave rolled the ship so far that the bulwark on the opposite side went 2 to 3 feet (0.6 to 0.9 m) under water. This was a critical moment for Beagle; many of her class had been lost through capsizing.[44]

If so, we have to ask why the Beagle had been sent to round the Horn in the first place, with a 26-year-old nincompoop Stuart as captain. Shouldn't these 22 important chronometers have been on a real “seaworthy” ship instead of this little tub? And why round the Horn with the chronometers in any case? It wasn't necessary to the mission in any way.