Alejandro Malaspina

"Alejandro Malaspina: Portrait of a Visionary chronicles the life of an eighteenth-century Italian navigator in the service of Spain whose thirst for knowledge and adventure took him on a five-year voyage throughout Spain's Pacific possessions. On his return he was imprisoned because his ideas for establishing a modern enlightened state in Spain ran counter to those of the entrenched imperial bureaucracy. Using Malaspina's writings, including the journal of his great voyage and his personal letters, John Kendrick makes the life of this extraordinary man available for the first time in…