In 1831, a fifteen-year-old boy named Syms Covington set sail on the famous five-year voyage of the HMS Beagle. The sea voyage was made famous for sailing around the globe with its passenger, Charles Darwin, a curious naturalist and geologist who explored the South American coast and its islands. Darwin’s discoveries in the Galápagos Islands led him to publish his theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species, which changed the way modern people thought about where humans and other living things come from.
Syms Covington originally joined the crew as a fiddler and cabin boy. Halfway through the journey, he was hired as Charles Darwin’s assistant to help collect specimens. Both Darwin and Covington kept journals of the voyage; however, Covington stopped writing in his journal for a period of seven months. His notebook is notably blank during their trip through the Galápagos Archipelago, and nobody knows why.
What follows is my explanation for why Syms was silent during this time. It is an invented journal entry, pages which I imagined were ripped out from his notebook and lost to the world until now. It is entirely a work of fiction.
NOVEMBER 5, 1835
I have been afraid for weeks to tell about the events which happened during our recent voyage through the Galápagos Islands. They will call me insane and declare me unfit
