Fitzroy He was born into an aristocratic family descended from King Charles II of England; He entered the Royal Navy in 1819 and, after serving in the Mediterranean and South American waters, received command of the Beagle, a 240-ton brig, in 1828. With it he explored the South American coasts around Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, returning to England in 1830.
On December 27, 1831, he set sail with the Beagle from Portsmouth, with Darwin on board. The expedition visited the Cape Verde Islands, the coast of South America, the Strait of Magellan, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, the Maldives, and Mauritius, before returning to England on October 2, 1836.
In 1839 Fitzroy published two volumes of narrative of the His Majesty’s Topography Voyages Adventure and Beagle ships between the years 1826 and 1836, which describe his inspection of the coasts of South America, and the circumnavigation of the globe, aboard the Beagle. A third volume, popularly known as The Voyage of the Beagle, was published by Darwin in 1839.
Member of Parliament for Durham (1841), Fitzroy he became governor of New Zealand in 1843, but was retired in 1845 largely because he held that the Maori land claims were as valid as those of the settlers. He retired from active service in 1850 and from 1854 devoted himself to meteorology. He devised a storm warning system that was the prototype for the daily weather forecast; invented a barometer and published The Book of Time (1863).
Fitzroy he was a very religious man. During the 1831-1836 voyage, he continually resisted Darwin’s growing doubts about the special creation and evolution of species. Interactions with FitzroyHowever, they did help Darwin clarify his views on evolution and anticipate many objections to his theory, before publication. Fitzroy was present at the famous meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860 in which TH Huxley successfully defended Darwin’s origin of species from the attack of Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. At that meeting, the attempt to Fitzroy of supporting Wilberforce against Huxley, led to ridicule. His death was by suicide, during a period of mental turmoil, induced in part by the growing success of the idea of evolution.