| A descendant of Lieutenant John Lort Stokes, who accompanied Charles Darwin on his voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle, is planning to rebuild the famous ship. David Lort-Philips, a scientist from Lawrenny, Pembrokeshire, and his partner, commercial yacht master Peter McGrath, have started the Beagle Project Pembrokeshire. They are working on the ¢G3,300,000 plan to recreate a full-size version of HMS Beagle. Mr. Lort-Phillips plans on having the ship ready by 2009 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. Construction is expected to take about 14 months to complete. If the funds are raised, the new Beagle will be built by shipwrights in Milford Haven. |
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| The new Beagle will be a fully functioning ship but with a modern interior and will sail with a crew of university professors, science professionals, and students to undertake scientific research around the world. |
The 2009 HMS Beagle will be a sailing replica of the ship Charles Darwin boarded in 1831. She will be built of larch and oak planking on oak frames. Unlike the 1831 Beagle, her 2009 descendent will have diesel auxiliary engines, radar, GPS navigation, satellite communications and modern safety equipment. Her design will be approved by Germanischer Lloyds and she will be certified for Category A - unrestricted ocean sailing.
The replica Beagle is not intended to be a museum ship; she will be equipped with laboratories and equipment to allow contemporary, original research. This is not only in keeping with Charles Darwin¡¦s legacy but also creates an opportunity to engage students and teachers in the excitement of real scientific discovery.
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The Beagle will spend 2009 - 2011 circling the world in Darwin's wake, making similar landfalls and undertaking shore expeditions. She will host two perpetual DNA-based projects that together will explore both macroscopic and microscopic biodiversity and offer opportunities for sustained formal curriculum links during the voyage and beyond. The Beagle will also host shorter, one-off researcher-led projects targeting specific localities along the voyage.
Two projects will run throughout the voyage and offer opportunities for parallel studies in green spaces, freshwater and coastal environments close to schools. Based on scientific precedent, both projects will yield new and important discoveries about the diversity of life on earth:
I. Metagenomics¡@Metagenomics is the study of a mixture of genetic material from different organisms contained in an environmental sample. Modeled after the J. Craig Venter Institute's Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition, the Beagle will be equipped with equipment to capture ocean microbes onto filters for sequencing at partner genomics institutes (TBD). Data will be uploaded and analysed using Global Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Research and Analysis (CAMERA), a user-driven site dedicated to providing the scientific community with metagenomics data and analysis tools. Results will be made available to researchers, teachers and students alike to analyse using CAMERA cyberinfrastructure tools.
This project will deliver results similar to those recently published in PLoS Biology including dramatic new insights into the composition and structure of marine microbial communities and their genes. Beagle metagenomic samples will be time-stamped for correlation with images taken from space by NASA astronauts in the International Space Station. These images will enable the visible characteristics of plankton blooms and other biotic phenomena as seen from space to be verified by real measurements on the composition of marine microbial communities.
II. DNA barcoding¡@Aboard the Beagle and on inshore expeditions, scientists, students and teachers will collect traditional animal and plant specimens (or photographic vouchers where appropriate) relating both to specific research projects (below) and general Beagle-based surveys, and for each specimen collected or observed, researchers will be expected to collect tissue samples for DNA analysis. Just as the name suggests, DNA barcoding is proposed as a way of accessing information about an organism by ¡§scanning¡¨, or reading off, a short, informative length of its DNA. Reference databases must first be assembled, and the Beagle voyage will play a key role in populating international barcoding databases with specimen-linked DNA sequence data.
The Beagle will also host a portfolio of shorter, specific, one-off researcher-led projects, involving teachers and students aboard to make targeted collections of data and specimens during pre-defined stretches of the voyage ranging from 2-8 weeks in duration. These projects will be aimed at specific localities, either marine or terrestrial (the latter taking place on parallel inland expeditions such as those carried out by Darwin in Argentina, Chile and the Galapagos). As on the 1831-6 circumnavigation, Beagle-based research will span a variety of disciplines including biology, oceanography and geophysical studies.
Projects range from marine biology, botany, climate science to island biogeography and have been proposed for a wide range of localities including the South Pacific, Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos Islands and the high Andes.
The replica HMS Beagle will make her first voyage around the south coast of England, to the sites significant in the history of the original. From Milford Haven she will sail to Devonport from where she departed for the 1831-36 voyage. From there she will sail to the River Thames, to Woolwich where the original was launched in 1820. From where Beagle was launched we will sail to where her remains are though to lie, near Paglesham on the River Roach at Paglesham in Essex. |
The original HMS Beagle didn't make it to North America, but Darwin did send two of The Origin of Species to Harvard University. We feel it would be right to celebrate the 150th anniversary of these famous items of post by sailing across the Atlantic to Boston and delivering a facsimile of the first edition of the Origin of Species.
The original HMS Beagle didn't make it to North America, but Darwin did send two of The Origin of Species to Harvard University. We feel it would be right to celebrate the 150th anniversary of these famous items of post by sailing across the Atlantic to Boston and delivering a facsimile of the first edition of the Origin of Species. After these shakedown voyages, the replica Beagle will set sail to re-stage the 1831-36 Voyage of the Beagle, a circumnavigation of the globe. The Beagle will be crewed by young scientists following Charles Darwin's intellectual journey and making new discovering using modern scientific equipment and techniques.
More readings on the replica Beagle:
- posted by Wei-chin Chang 3-5-2008 |
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