12 Expedition of Alejandro Malaspina and José de Bustamante y Guerra

Alejandro Malaspina and José de Bustamante y Guerra had started their political-scientific expedition around the world in July 1789, aboard the warships the Descubierta and the Atrevida.^[1] It was an enlightened scientific maritime enterprise, which responded to the existing European interest in science in the so-called Age of Enlightenment. The purpose was to visit the possessions of the Hispanic Monarchy in the Americas and Asia to map the coasts, make more precise marine charts, and collect information of the places visited in terms of geography, botany, zoology, geology, ethnography, and so forth. Curiously, at the end of a stage of the Malaspina expedition when they arrived at the port of Acapulco, one of the orders they had received from the Hispanic monarch was to search for the so-called Northwest Passage, but also to report on any settlement that existed in those lands of Alta California, whether it was Russian or English.  Malaspina then sailed to Yakutat Bay and Prince William Cove, to verify that such a passage did not exist. After passing through Nootka’s post, he returned to Monterrey.

In the diary written by Malaspina during his navigation, the following paragraph can be read about the coasts of California:

La California is commonly divided into the Old and the New ones. The former includes the entire Peninsula that runs from Cape San Lucas to the port of San Diego at latitude of 32 degrees 16 [minutes], and by New California it is understood as the terrain that continues from this last parallel to the 43rd, at which the Cabo Blanco de Martín de Aguilar is located.^[2]

About the lands beyond the 43rd parallel, Malaspina indicates in the account  of his trip that he cannot give high quality news:

(…) since none of our modern navigators have described them, and they have probably not enjoyed them, and the news that the writer gives about Sebastián Vizcaíno’s trip, in addition to not understanding those particularities that are so necessary in the day, also seem somewhat exaggerated, comparing them with the current state of these countries.^[3]

Malaspina also collected in his diary the news received after the 1775 expedition:

The gentlemen Heceta and Cuadra, who in 1775 were in the port of Trinidad and in the immediate river of Las Tórtolas, make particular mention of the lushness of these places, as well as that of the Port of Cuadra, which this Commander visited in 1790 returning from the North. The Martín Aguilar river has trees and trunks of a singular size on its banks, and even in its waters, and, finally, the Englishman Sir Francis Drake remarked that the coast resembles those of England due to its leafiness and pleasant aspect. What should be excepted from this general fertility are the mountain ranges that form Cape Mendocino, which, as the most salient to the west and almost as a barrier to the violent efforts of the ocean, that presents a cliff, composed of a single mass of stone and steep almost to peak, so that the vegetation seems to be a secondary object in this opportune antemural.^[4]

The Yakutat-tlingit and the Nuu-chah-nulth

In order to know the lands of the Natives of the Northwest Coast a little better in the second half of the 18th century, and to delve into the ethnographic part of Juan Pérez’s expedition of 1774, modern researchers have resorted to the study of some of their clothing and objects preserved in the collections of the Museo de América in Madrid. Likewise, to study the ethnographic aspects of Alejandro Malaspina’s expedition, as well as that of Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés and the Hispanic settlement in the Bay of Núñez Gaona, we have resorted to the drawings of the painters who accompanied them, in addition to the texts collected in the expedition Diaries. These drawings have also been studied in depth by the anthropologist and archaeologist, Sánchez Montañés.^[5] She states that on June 27th, 1791, the ships of the Malaspina and Bustamante y Guerra expedition anchored in the so-called Mulgrave port, inside Yakutat Bay, in southeastern Alaska, and there is clear evidence that objects were obtained from the Yakutat Tlingit, which could also be Eyak, since at the end of the 18th century it was Eyak-speaking peoples that were found in the vicinity of Yakutat Bay, although they were being dominated by Tlingit expansion. Therefore, the Natives that the expedition encountered were still partly Eyak, although the prominent families were Tlingit or had already adopted their language and customs.

Going back to the Malaspina expedition, after a stay of 12 days in port, and after sailing northeast, until reaching the entrance of Prince William Cove on August 12th, the expedition members arrived at the Nootka entrance, where a small establishment had already existed since the previous year. This was the San Miguel fort, which was the northernmost outpost of the empire of the Spanish Monarchy, and where they stayed for 16 days. During the expedition, a group of artists, some of them professional, illustrated with their pencils and brushes the reality they observed of the Native peoples both in Yakutat Bay, and at the entrance to Nootka. In both Yakilat Bay  and at the Nootka entrance, despite the few days the ships stopped in both cases, the illustrators made portraits of the chiefs, as well as a series of drawings of Indian men and women in which they show diverse aspects of their material culture, dresses, headdresses, ornaments, social organization, and even some hint of their belief system. In addition, in Yakutat Bay they made a series of vignettes illustrating the incidents that occurred between natives and Spaniards on the last day of the expedition’s stopover, fortunately without serious consequences. All these drawings provide us with information on various aspects of this Native Americans traditional culture.

The cultures they represented are the Yakutat-Tlingit, the Nuu-chah-nulth, (particularly the Mowachaht), and some representatives of other peoples around the entrance to Nootka. Nuu-chah-nulth is the current denomination of the erroneously denominated Nootka in traditional anthropology and Nutka in the Hispanic sources. The origin of the denomination, rejected today by the native population, comes from Cook, as José Mariano Mociño tells us in his 1793 Description of the Island of Mazarredo:

I do not know by means of which misunderstanding (Cook) would give the name of Nutca, since the Natives do not know this word, and they assured me they never had been there, until the English began to traffic on that island. I suspect that the word Nut-chi, which means mountain, gave rise to this error, since those that Cook called Nut-ca have never had any other name among the islanders than Yut-qual.^[6]

As Sánchez Montañés points out, in addition to the drawings of the illustrators who traveled on this expedition, in the diaries and the descriptions made by Malaspina there is very interesting information about the area that he then called the Northwest Coast.^[7] It is information of both a geographical and cultural nature, already differentiating three regions or provinces: the north, the center, and the south. This is a division that is still used by anthropologists and scholars of these areas in ethnographic terms. Malaspina and his team considered that all the inhabitants from Yakutat Bay to Dry Bay in southeastern Alaska belonged to the same nation, and although he called them the Tejunés tribe (because their bows were made of this wood), this is the group that anthropologists now call the Yakutat Tlingit. The term Tejunés (or Tejuneses) is not typical of the Tlingit language but rather an Eyak word that means ‘person’. This indicates that at that time, the Tlingit were expanding into Eyak territory and were incorporating some of the Eyak’s terms into their language.

Tomás de Suria traveled on this expedition as an illustrator, and the drawings he made in his notebook are sketches al natural, accompanied by his own writings.^[8] Among the illustrations stand out those of Yakutat Bay, where, as soon as the expedition ships had rounded Point Carrew and began to enter the Bay of Monti in the southeast of the great bay, Indian canoes began to approach them and contact was made. This bay is closed to the north by the island of Khantaak, in whose southern end and in a motley cove was the town that was called Puerto Mulgrave. The expedition arrived there at the end of June, after 54 days of navigation from Acapulco, and a league from the port the first contact with the Tlingit natives took place. It was then that the Malaspina’s expedition members had the opportunity to carefully observe the kayak, the peculiar boat that is usually associated with the more northern latitudes, but that was also used by the Tlingit. Suria described and drew them on more than one occasion and also made a portrait of a person who probably was the chief of the nearby lands of where the warships anchored, called Ankaìvi. In view of this portrait and the comments in the different expedition diaries, and despite the fact that Malaspina’s brief stay in Puerto Mulgrave made it impossible for them to realize the complex social organization of the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast, particularly the Yakutat Tlingit, the expedition members did gather insights into social inequality and perceived the existence of a nobility, commoners and slaves; that is, of completely differentiated social classes. In particular, the inhabitants of Yakutat Bay, like all Tlingit, had a form of aristocracy made up of chiefs and their closest relatives, who were in sharp contrast to ordinary people.

Continuation of the Malaspina Expedition

While they remained in Mulgrave, the relationship between the expedition members and the natives was friendly, and although there were some specific conflicts, mainly related to alleged thefts made by the Tlingit when they went up on the deck of the Hispanic ships, none of them escalated. Thus, the results of the stay in said port were positive for the Hispanic explorers and, in addition to the trade and exchanges carried out with the natives, it was possible to verify that the imagined Northwest Passage did not exist. The coast was mapped and the latitudes and longitudes were taken from both the port and from nearby places, the flora and fauna were studied and a great contribution to ethnography was made through the study of the culture and customs of the Natives.

From Mulgrave, Malaspina’s men continued sailing north; they observed Cape Hinchinbrook, at the entrance to Prince William Cove, and then they entered the channel formed by Montague Island and Magdalena Island, arriving up to 61 degrees latitude, exceeding the 60 marked in their travel instructions. They then debated whether or not to continue until the 70 or 80 degrees, but the lateness of the season made them turn back south, making Nootka their next stop. There, Captain Alberni was to receive them, in the Santa Cruz establishment, since Eliza was absent. They were also visited by Chief Tlupanamibo, who offered them his help in the face of the distrust from the first Chief Macuina. Macuina himself, after the expedition members explored the coast to his main residence of Tasis, also visited them and even agreed to have some of his women board the ships to be portrayed. Suria reflected in his drawings and in his Diary all these events, and the officers in command of the expedition also compiled interesting information on the customs of the Natives of Nootka in their diaries before setting sail south, to navigate all the way back to Monterrey. Once there, Malaspina received the news of the Santa Saturnina expedition members. Those related to the discovery of the Canal de Nuestra Señora del Rosario (current Strait of Georgia) made him think about the importance of carrying out a specific exploration of his own, so he sailed first to San Blas and then to Acapulco. After receiving instructions from the viceroy, he ordered two of his favorite officers, Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés, aboard the schooners Mexicana and Sutil to sail to the Bay of Nootka, circumnavigate the Vancouver Island, and study the Strait of Juan de Fuca up to the Canal del Rosario.