In 1831, at age 22, Charles Darwin set out on a 5-year voyage that would revolutionize natural science. The Voyage of the Beagle is the vivid account of this journey. Darwin's purpose on the voyage was to study the geology at each landfall, but everything he encountered, from the people of the Tierra del Fuego to fossil seashells in the Andes, challenged the biblical assumptions of the time. The journey led to his theories of evolution as well as the publication of The Origin of Species, the groundbreaking distillation of his ideas.