Both title and subtitle in this book are misleading, since its contents focus on only two major Spanish expeditions of the eighteenth century: the Royal Scientific Expedition (1787-1806) and Malaspina’s around-the-world expedition (1789-94). The first one, directed by Martín de Sessé, surveyed areas of Guatemala, Mexico, and the present-day American Northwest. Malaspina’s, after rounding Cape Horn, spent a year mapping the South American West Coast, sailed to Alaska to search for a Northwest passage, and explored the southwest Pacific and eastern Indian Oceans, before being recalled to Spain because of a war with France.
To produce her very well researched work, the author traveled to Spain and Mexico to investigate the original sources. There are twelve chapters, five appendixes (of far greater interest to botanists than to historians), a bibliography with extensive documentary evidence (almost 200 titles), and an index. The chapters themselves cover an introductory history of the Spanish scientific Enlightenment, the formative years of both expeditions, the development of such undertakings and a brief—much too brief—analysis of the results and implications of the expeditions, after they had returned to Spain.
The main body of the book is thus contained between chapters 3 and 11, covering the expeditionary and scientific activity proper. These are meticulous chapters, following the many expedition members in their different errands almost step by step. The key figure is Alejandro Malaspina (1754-1810), Italian by birth, Spanish by adoption. Among eighteenth-century explorers, Malaspina has been ranked on an equal level with Jean La Pérouse and James Cook, but he never saw his reports published and has remained little known. Malaspina is presented in the book as an able leader, explorer, and seaman, as well as an observer who understood well the harm that Spain’s conservative policies were causing in its American empire. His devotion to republican principles caused his imprisonment in Spain and his later deportation to Italy, where he died.
This book then does justice to him and to his fellow scientists and explorers. Now that a number of Anglophile scholars, like Ronald Clark, berate or ignore the accomplishments of non-British explorers, books like this one come to us none too soon.
