Collecting and the Pursuit of Scientific Accuracy: The Malaspina Expedition in the Philippines, 1792

Chapter two Collecting and the Pursuit of Scientific Accuracy: The Malaspina Expedition in the Philippines, seventeen ninety-two

Introduction

This chapter focuses on botanical collecting, an important aspect of Spanish scientific voyaging in the Enlightenment and one of the most significant achievements of the Malaspina expedition. I will discuss the expedition's collecting in the Philippine Islands, Spain's Pacific possession. The information collected by the expedition, I will show, was distinguished by scientific accuracy, the pursuit of which profoundly influenced all the expedition's data-gathering tasks, from surveying and mapping to botanizing and drawing.

Toward the end of July seventeen eighty-nine, Alejandro Malaspina, a brilliant thirty-four-year-old Italian-born naval officer in the employ of the Spanish Crown, set sail from Cádiz in command of an ambitious expedition organized by the Spanish Crown and what would be one of the best examples of expeditionary science in the Spanish Enlightenment. The chief officer of the expedition was his friend and fellow officer José Bustamante y Guerra, a capable and courageous Spaniard, several years Malaspina's junior. Their ships were the Atrevida and the Descubierta, three-masted corvettes, each one hundred twenty feet long, each carrying one hundred two men, supplied with books, manuscripts, maps, and the latest scientific instruments; the accompanying personnel comprised naturalists, artists, draughtsmen, and a cartographer-men of exceptional learning, experience, and possessed of eclectic interests. The voyage, it was estimated, would take three-and-a-half years, and would attempt a comprehensive scientific exploration of Spanish territories in the Americas and the Pacific. Ultimately the journey took five years, following routes that explored the west coast of the Americas from Cape Horn to the Gulf of Alaska, several Pacific islands, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, and Atlantic Patagonia. Though celebrated on his return to Spain in seventeen ninety-four, Malaspina soon after became embroiled in political intrigues and he incurred the displeasure of Manuel de Godoy, a high-ranking minister at the court of Carlos the Fourth. The entanglement cost him dearly. He was arrested for treason, imprisoned for six years (from seventeen ninety-six to eighteen oh two) and, upon his release, was exiled for life in Italy, where he died in obscurity in eighteen ten. As a consequence of Malaspina's fall from grace, the vast amount of valuable information collected by the expedition was impounded and suppressed, remaining unpublished until the late nineteenth century.

The scale of this tragedy moved Alexander von Humboldt to remark that Malaspina was more famous for his misfortunes than for his discoveries. The significant scholarly attention the expedition has lately received, however, has brought some vindication. The interests of Malaspina's select team of natural historians, artists, and hydrographers were so many and diverse that scholars have described the scope of the expedition as encyclopedic. Dolores Higueras, curator of the data amassed by the expedition currently housed in the Museo Naval in Madrid, has shown that the expedition produced over three hundred journals and logbooks; four hundred fifty albums of astronomical observations, one thousand five hundred hydrographic reports, one hundred eighty-three charts, three hundred sixty-one views of coastal elevations, and almost one thousand botanical and ethnographic drawings. The expedition made a contribution to science that, to paraphrase Felipe Fernández-Armesto, "enhanced the world-picture."

The expedition's sojourn in the Philippines in seventeen ninety-two is an aspect of the voyage largely ignored by scholars. The Islands were important to Spain at the time mainly because Manila functioned as an entrepôt for trade. From the city, the famed "Manila galleons" plied between Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico and Manila bringing shipments of silver bullion and minted coin to be exchanged for cargoes of Chinese goods, mainly silk. Malaspina had been to the Philippines twice previously. In seventeen seventy-seven, captaining the ship Astrea, he had sailed to and from the archipelago via the Cape of Good Hope, and in seventeen eighty-four, in the service of the Royal Philippine Company, he embarked on a circumnavigation of the globe traveling through ports on the east coast of South America, around Cape Horn before sailing north to Lima, and crossing the Pacific to the Philippines before returning to Spain via the Cape of Good Hope. It was these voyages that opened his eyes to the possibilities of new discoveries, and, inspired by the journeys

COLLECTING AND THE PURSUIT OF SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY

of James Cook and Jean-François de La Pérouse, he put forward, in seventeen eighty-eight, his ambitious "Plan of a Scientific and Political Voyage Around the World."

Malaspina allotted a period of six months for the visit, or at least while favorable northeast winds blew, during which time he would collect hydrographic measurements and data on the depth of near-shore waters, survey and map coastlines, and collect botanical and animal specimens. The expedition stayed for nine months and for almost each day of those months, Malaspina kept a maritime diary describing in detail, and often in technical language, his activities-how tasks were undertaken, the logistical challenges faced, and the encounters with local peoples.