Anyway, I heard that they wanted a clockmaker and this seemed like a good chance for me. My old man encouraged me, especially as we had recently set up to work on sextants, telescopes and theodolites. I had to go for an interview with the captain and his questions were very sharp. He asked me about artificial horizons and it so happened that we had had one in for new glass and some more mercury the previous week, so I knew what he was talking about. He decided to take me on for a journey of about two years. He was wrong about that!

In my quarters there was just enough room for a hammock, a little cupboard for my tools and my little watchmaker's lathe. While I was looking around and keeping out of the way of the crew and the dockyard mateys, a young gentleman came on board asking for the captain. This was Mr Darwin who was to be the naturalist on the voyage. He was a great collector of any living thing and wrote about them in his big books. I got to know him very well because it was only a small ship but I especially got to know Sims Covington who was Mr Darwin's shooter. His job was to shoot the birds for the collection, stuff or mostly dry them and preserve them in salt. Mr Darwin was really the only man on board who could talk to the captain and we used to hear them arguing at all hours.

When we set sail I had twenty-two clocks bedded down in their boxes in sawdust on the centreline of the ship. No-one was allowed near them except him and me. My job was to wind them every day at nine, rain or shine, rough or smooth, though two or three were 7-day clocks which were wound on Sundays. I spent a lot of time down there in the dark with 'my friends', as I called them, ticking away in tune with each other.

Every day I had to check each clock against all the others to see which was gaining and which was losing and to set the Deck Watch against the average. The Deck Watch was used to time their sextant observations so that we knew where we were and to time meridian passage to give us our valuable longitude. Only a few days out and Mr Wickham, the First Lieutenant, dropped his sextant and smashed one of its sunshades but I had one in my spares so that I got a good mark by fixing it.

As the weeks and months went by we got warmer and, as we crossed the line, colder again. My clocks drifted in time but really ran very well. One broke a spring as I was winding it but again my spares came in handy. The work was tedious but important and I did sometimes get ashore with the crew and Mr Darwin and Sims. Some nights I had to work with my bits of brass and my soldering iron or turning some little screw to keep the theodolite in action. One very difficult job was to fix one of the magnetic needles, which had broken on its pivot. This was like a compass except it measured the magnetic field up and down instead of round and round. I ground up a new pivot and replaced on of the jewel bearings.

After two years we were still down near Cape Horn. We had a cheek on my work because we visited some ports that Beagle had been to some years before. A few members of our party became sick or tired and went home on other ships but most of us stuck it out. We started up the west coast, thinking that we were on our way home, but we had to go off and rescue another ship. We also got some help with our work from another ship called the Adventure. We got to the Galapagos Islands where there were big tortoises, big enough to ride on.

After about four years we got to Australia and called in to Hobart Town which, although at the end of the world, seemed like a good place to live, with good weather at least in February. We went on to Western Australia, still doing our everlasting measurements. By now there were only 15 clocks going but the average looked pretty good. Mr Darwin asked me one day to make a kind of trap for come special little fish that could be put over the side as we went along. I got some wood from the carpenter and some fabric from the sailmaker and I made up some brass cornerpieces and other bits of tackle to attach to the towing line but the flow of water pulled it apart and we never did catch any of the fish. I don't know how Mr Darwin knew they were there.

We all knew we were finally going home and when the captain said that we were going back to Bahia in South America he very nearly had a mutiny on his hands. But the delay was only for a week or so and by the end of 1836 we were back in Devonport in time for a cold Christmas.

Well, we had a check on the clocks. There were only eleven working by then and the average was about 36 seconds slow. I thought that was miraculous but the captain, who didn't blame me at all, thought that it must be something to do with the magnetic field. I said that I didn't think that any clocks anywhere could have done better and he gave me a certificate to say how valuable my services had been. It hangs in my shop in Bath to this day. I heard as how Mr Darwin got a lot of ideas about animals and such and that the captain was now an Admiral. I have my shop and a bit of a reputation so we all got on in the world, didn't we?