Brigadier Alejandro Malaspina (5 November 1754 – 9 April 1810) was a Spanish Navy officer and explorer. Under a Spanish royal commission, he undertook a voyage around the world from 1786 to 1788, then, from 1789 to 1794, a scientific expedition (the Malaspina Expedition) throughout the Pacific Ocean, exploring and mapping much of the west coast of the Americas from Cape Horn to the Gulf of Alaska, crossing to Guam and the Philippines, and stopping in New Zealand, Australia, and Tonga.
Malaspina, who was born in Italy, was christened Alessandro, the Italian form of Alexander. He signed his letters in Spanish Alexandro, which is usually modernized to Alejandro by scholars.
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Early life
Malaspina was born in 1754 in the town of Mulazzo, in the small principality of Lunigiana on the northwest coast of Italy. Lunigiana, formally dependent on the Habsburgs, was ruled by the extended Malaspina family. Alessandro's parents were the Marquis Carlo Morello and Caterina Meli Lupi di Soragna. From 1762 to 1765, his family lived in Palermo with Alessandro's great-uncle, Giovanni Fogliani Sforza d'Aragona, the viceroy of Sicily. From 1765 to 1773 he studied at the Clementine College in Rome. In 1773 he was accepted into the Order of Malta and spent about a year living on the island of Malta where he learned the basics of sailing.
Naval service
Malaspina joined the Spanish Navy in 1774 as a guardiamarina. Between 1774 and 1786 he took part in a number of naval battles and received many promotions. In January 1775, aboard the frigate Santa Teresa, Malaspina was part of the expedition to relieve Melilla, which was under siege by Moroccan forces. Shortly after he was promoted to frigate ensign. In July 1775 he participated the failed invasion of Algiers and in 1776 was promoted to ship-of-the-line ensign.
From 1777 to 1779, aboard the frigate Astrea, Malaspina made a round-trip voyage to the Philippines, rounding the Cape of Good Hope in both directions. During the voyage he was promoted to frigate lieutenant. In January 1780 he fought in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent and was promoted to ship-of-the-line lieutenant shortly afterwards. During the Great Siege of Gibraltar, in September 1782, Malaspina served on a floating battery. In December of the same year, aboard San Justo, Malaspina participated in the Battle of Cape Spartel. He was soon promoted once again, to frigate captain.
In 1782 he was suspected of heresy and denounced to the Spanish Inquisition, but was not apprehended. From March 1783, to July 1784, Malaspina was second-in-command of the frigate Asunción during a trip to the Philippines. As with his first trip to the Philippines the route went by the Cape of Good Hope in both directions. In 1785, back in Spain, Malaspina, on board the brigantine Vivo, took part in hydrographic surveys and mapping of parts of the coast of Spain. During the same year he was named Lieutenant of the Company of the Guardiamarinas of Cádiz.
Circumnavigation
From 15 September 1786 to 18 May 1788 Malaspina made a commercial circumnavigation of the world on behalf of the Royal Company of the Philippines. During this voyage he was in command of the frigate Astrea. His route went via Cape Horn and, returning, the Cape of Good Hope. In February 1787, the Astrea called at Concepción in Chile, whose military governor, the Irish-born Ambrosio O'Higgins, had six months before recommended that Spain organize an expedition to the Pacific similar to those led by Lapérouse and Cook. O'Higgins had made this recommendation following the visit of the Lapérouse expedition to Concepción in March 1786, and presumably discussed it with Malaspina while the Astrea was at Concepción. Following the Astrea's return to Spain, Malaspina, in partnership with José de Bustamante and advised by Francisco Muñoz y San Clemente, produced a proposal for an expedition along the lines set out in OHiggins's memorandum. A short time later, on 14 October 1788, Malaspina was informed of the government's acceptance of his plan. José de Espinoza y Tello, one of the officers of the Malaspina expedition, subsequently confirmed the importance of the information sent by O'Higgins in stimulating the Government to initiate an extensive program of exploration in the Pacific. The prompt acceptance of Malaspina's proposal was stimulated by news that the Russian government was preparing the Mulovsky expedition to the North Pacific, which had as one objective the claiming of territory around Nootka Sound that was also claimed by Spain (see Nootka Crisis and Spanish expeditions to the Pacific Northwest).
Expedition of 1789–1794
In September 1788, Malaspina and José de Bustamante y Guerra approached the Spanish government. The explorers proposed a scientific-political expedition that would visit nearly all the Spanish possessions in America and Asia. The Spanish king, Charles III, a promoter of science in the Spanish Empire, approved.
Two corvettes were built under Malaspina's direction specifically for the expedition: Descubierta and Atrevida (meaning "Discovery" and "Daring" or "Bold"). Malaspina commanded Descubierta and Bustamante Atrevida. The names were chosen by Malaspina to honor James Cook's Discovery and Resolution. The two corvettes were constructed by the shipbuilder Tómas Muñoz at the La Carraca shipyard. They were both 306 tons burden and 36 metres long, with a normal load displacement of 4.2 metres. They were launched together on 8 April 1789.
The expedition was under the "dual command" of Malaspina and Bustamante. Although in time the expedition became known as the Malaspina's, Bustamante was never considered subordinate. Malaspina insisted on their equality, yet Bustamante early acknowledged Malaspina as the "chief of the expedition."
The expedition sailed from Cádiz on 30 July 1789. The bohemian naturalist Thaddäus Haenke missed the boat, but joined in 1790 in Santiago de Chile after crossing South America by land from Montevideo.
The expedition had explicitly scientific goals, as had the recent voyages of James Cook and Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse. Some of the leading scientists of the day accompanied Malaspina. The scientific data collected during the expedition surpassed that of Cook, but due to changed political circumstances in Spain Malaspina was jailed upon return and the reports and collections locked up and banned from publication. The expedition and its findings remained obscure and nearly unstudied by historians until the late 20th century.
Malaspina stopped at Montevideo and Buenos Aires, investigating the political situation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. After rounding Cape Horn, the expedition stopped at Talcahuano, the port of Concepción in present-day Chile, and again at Valparaíso, the port of Santiago. Continuing north, Bustamante mapped the coast while Malaspina sailed to the Juan Fernández Islands in order to resolve conflicting data on their location. The two captains reunited at Callao, the port of Lima. There investigations were made into the political situation of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The expedition then continued north, mapping the coast, to Acapulco, Mexico. A team of officers was sent to Mexico City to investigate the archives and political situation of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
Political controversy and exile
In December 1794 Malaspina met with King Charles IV and Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy. At first all was well and Malaspina was promoted to fleet-brigadier in March 1795.
In September 1795, he sent his writings to the Spanish government, but the latter judged their publication to be inopportune in the then existing political situation. Disenchanted, Malaspina led a philosophical-literary polemic in the Madrid press on the meaning of beauty in nature, and at the same time took part in a secret conspiracy to overthrow Manuel Godoy. In his examination of the political situation in the Spanish colonies Malaspina had decided that Spain should free its colonies and form a confederation of states bound by international trade. In September 1795 he began trying to influence the Spanish government with such proposals. Unfortunately Malaspina had lost the support he used to have at the royal court before his voyage and the political situation had changed radically, due in part to the French Revolution. He was accused by Prime Minister Godoy of being part of a conspiracy to overthrow him, and arrested on November 23 on charges of plotting against the state. After an inconclusive trial on April 20, 1796, Charles IV decreed that Malaspina be stripped of rank and imprisoned in the isolated fortress of San Antón in La Coruña, Galicia. Malaspina remained in the prison from 1796 to 1802. During his incarceration he wrote a variety of essays on topics such as aesthetics, economics, and literary criticism. Francesco Melzi d'Eril and later, through him, Napoleon campaigned for Malaspina's release. He was finally freed at the end of 1802 but was exiled from Spain. He left for his hometown of Mulazzo via the port of Genoa, and settled in nearby Pontremoli.
Because of Spain's conflict with revolutionary France, there were no funds in the naval budget for publishing his seven-volume account of the 1789–94 expeditions: it remained unpublished until the late 19th century (apart from a Russian translation by Adam von Krusenstern in successive issues of the official journal of the Russian Admiralty between 1824 and 1827). A large portion of the documents meant to be used as source material for the publication of Malaspina's expedition remained scattered in archives to the present day. A significant number of documents are lost, and those that survive are often in a rough, semi-edited form. Alexander von Humboldt, an admirer of Malaspina, wrote, "this able navigator is more famous for his misfortunes than for his discoveries." There was some contemporary publication, but it took two hundred years for the bulk of the records of the expedition to be published. The notes made by the expedition's botanist, Luis Née, while he was at Port Jackson in 1793, were published in 1800. Dionisio Alcalá Galiano's journal of his survey of the straits between Vancouver Island and the mainland, carried out as part of the Malaspina expedition, was published in 1802 with all mention of Malaspina's name excised. In 1809, José Espinosa y Tello published the astronomical and geodesic observations made during the expedition in a two-volume work that also contained an abbreviated narrative of the voyage. This narrative was translated into Russian and published by Admiral Adam von Krusenstern in St. Petersburg in 1815. The journal of Malaspina's voyage was first published in Russian translation by Krusenstern in successive issues of the official journal of the Russian Admiralty between 1824 and 1827 (a copy of the manuscript had been obtained by the Russian ambassador in Madrid in 1806). The journal of Francisco Xavier de Viana, second-in-command of the Atrevida, was published in Montevideo in 1849. Bustamante's journal was published in 1868 in the official journal of the Directorate of Hydrography. An abbreviated account of the Malaspina expedition, consisting mostly of his journal, "Diario de Viaje," was published in Madrid in 1885 by Pedro de Novo y Colson. Malaspina's journal was published in another edition in Madrid in 1984. The definitive version of the expedition was finally published in Spain by the Museo Naval and Ministerio de Defensa in nine volumes from 1987 to 1999. The second volume of this series, Malaspina's journal, was published in an annotated English translation by the Hakluyt Society in association with the Museo Naval between 2001 and 2005.
Later life
In Pontremoli, which by then was part of the short-lived Kingdom of Etruria, Malaspina concerned himself with local politics. In December 1803 he organized a quarantine between the Napoleonic Italian Republic and the Kingdom of Etruria during a yellow fever epidemic in Livorno. In 1805 he received the title of Advising Auditor of the Council of State of the Kingdom of Italy. The Queen of Etruria received him at court in December 1806. Shortly afterwards he was admitted to the Columban Society in Florence with the title of Addomesticato.
The first appearance of an incurable illness occurred in 1807. Malaspina died in Pontremoli on 9 April 1810, at the age of 55. His death was noted in the Gazzetta di Genova, 18 April 1810:
Pontremoli, 9 April 1810: Today at 10 o'clock in the evening the learned and famous navigator Signore Alexandro Malaspina of Mulazzo passed from this life. Such a loss cannot fail to be felt far and wide by all those who, placing high value on the importance of the nautical and travel accounts of this most talented Italian, have known his equanimity in both good and bad fortune; it is without doubt most bitter for those who witnessed the end from close by and who, moreover, had to admire his fortitude in suffering patiently to the very last the most severe pains of a long intestinal illness.
Legacy
Malaspina University-College and Malaspina International High School in the Canadian city of Nanaimo, British Columbia took their names indirectly from the explorer (although these names have been recently changed to Vancouver Island University and the High School at VIU), by way of Malaspina Strait, between Texada Island and the mainland, and the Malaspina Peninsula and adjoining Malaspina Inlet nearby, which are the location of Malaspina Provincial Park and are part of the Sunshine Coast region. Vancouver Island University is home to the Alexandro Malaspina Research Centre.
There is also a Malaspina Peak and Malaspina Lake near Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, just southeast of the town of Gold River; and the well-known Malaspina Glacier in southern Alaska.
Another lasting legacy of Malaspina’s time in South America is the abundance of the Malaspina surname in Peru, specifically in Lima and in the Ancash region. Malaspina in Lima is akin to Smith in the United States, and most Malaspina families proudly trace their lineage back to Alessandro Malaspina.
In New Zealand, Malaspina Reach of Doubtful Sound in Fiordland, explored by him in 1793, has his name.