John Black - Alexandro Malaspina Research Centre, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Discussing Malaspina's Philosophical Views

When Malaspina went on his great voyage of exploration, he took on several tasks, many of them to do with the political analysis of the Spanish empire also scientific tasks and collected ethnographic data about the First peoples that he encountered during these visits. Back in Europe he collated all of the information and was working on the journal of his voyage when he fell into political trouble and was actually imprisoned and it was at that time that his philosophical side came to the fore, he had lots of time in prison naturally, but he was able to read and we have lists of the books that he had taken to him in the prison; they include most of the great enlightenment figures that we associate with the up-growth of more liberal kinds of thought. Rousseau would be one of the examples but many others as well. After that he developed some of his own ideas, writing in a small prison notebook (as it's called), as you might have a journal today with coloured paper on the outside and so on. He wrote four particular essays that I'm interested in, one is the history of Spanish coinage, more numismatics (history of coinage), but also looking at the history of the Spanish economy for the previous 300 years, another one was a critical essay on Don Quixote, the Cervantes novel, the third one has an obscure title it's something like animadversions on the works of a Spanish Jesuit, but nobody really knows what's in it, it's not been translated yet or even published, and the fourth one which is of particular interest to me is an essay on beauty, and the question of whether there exists an essentially unchanging beauty in nature.