ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the discourses of freedom and commerce in relation to the Beagle's hydrographic and 'discovery' missions to analyze Britain's positioning of geopolitical, economic, and cultural relations across the pan-Atlantic in the early Victorian period. It explores the ideology of free trade and its fusion with the discourses of political and legal freedoms in the new republics. Such a confluence fulfilled the fantasies of humanitarian capitalism that the abolitionist movement had espoused with regard to the British West Indies, and which Harriet Martineau elaborated a new in Demerara. The Beagle voyage positioned South America through multiple triangulations of the pan-Atlantic discourses of discovery, enslavement, and liberation as it served the interests of 'war and commerce' that to this day continue to define surveying missions. The personas of Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin, the navigator and the discoverer, articulated narratives of British power as disinterested in the Southern hemispher.
