Marcos Jiménez de la Espada

Marcos Jiménez de la Espada (Cartagena, March 5, 1831 - Madrid, October 3, 1898) was a Spanish zoologist, explorer and writer. He is known for participating in the so-called Pacific Scientific Commission, the largest carried out by Spain in America after losing most of its overseas territories on this continent, which Jiménez de la Espada and his companions between 1862 and 1865. He also published works on Geography and History of the American continent. He was the father of the Nipponologist, orientalist and translator Gonzalo Jiménez de la Espada.

Training

As the son of a civil servant, Jiménez de la Espada had to change residence several times during his childhood and adolescence, going so far as to attend high school in cities as far apart as Valladolid, Barcelona and Seville.

In 1850 he began his degree in Natural Sciences at the Central University of Madrid, which he would finish five years later with the work The amphibians of Blainville and the batracians of Cuvier form a class apart. The study and taxonomy of amphibians would be a recurring theme in his subsequent scientific work.

Two years before finishing his degree, he got his first job as an assistant in the Natural History section of the university. Without abandoning this, he obtained another position in 1857, also as an assistant, at the Museum of Natural Sciences of the Court, today the National Museum of Natural Sciences. In both cases his research work (which lasted 7 years in these two positions, and 43 in other similar positions in the same museum) focused on zoology and comparative anatomy. However, it must be admitted that the positions he obtained within the Museum were never very important (except at the end of his life), largely due to the fall from grace of his teacher and director of the Museum, Mariano de la Paz Graells., in 1867.

The Pacific Scientific Commission

The future Commission initially began to take shape in the court of Isabel II as a simple military operation to reinforce the lost Spanish presence on the American coasts of the Pacific Ocean, not too different from other Spanish military interventions of the same time in Hispaniola., Morocco or Indochina. However, influenced by the rise of European scientific expeditions in the rest of the world (especially those of the German Alexander von Humboldt), those responsible for the operation decided to give it a new scientific approach, although its activities would be subordinated to military command. The so-called Pacific Scientific Commission was expected to carry out a complete analysis of the biodiversity, geography and anthropology of the American continent, as had never been done until then. It would also be the largest scientific expedition carried out by Spain to date, in which not only would it be graphically documented but also a multitude of specimens would be collected, both live and dead, which would be destined for the Museum of Natural Sciences and the Botanical Garden of Madrid. For this, eight naturalists were chosen, of which four were zoologists. Jiménez de la Espada managed to be one of them thanks to the efforts of Graells, who considered him his favorite disciple.

The expedition departed on August 10, 1862 from the port of Cádiz in a squadron made up of the frigates Nuestra Señora del Triunfo and Resolution and the schooner Covadonga, it made a couple of stops in the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, skirted the coasts of Brazil and arrived in Uruguay. There the expedition was divided into two, one of which went inland to the west, while the other (in which Jiménez de la Espada appeared) followed the sea route around the South American coast and crossing the dangerous Strait of Magellan, to meet again with his colleagues in Chile. From there the expedition made a complete reconnaissance of the coasts of Peru, Central America, Mexico and California (with a stopover included in San Francisco), and then returned again to Peru, where it had to continue the study inland. Having just arrived there in March 1864, they found that a conflict was breaking out between Spain and the Andean country, which would lead to an open war against this country and Chile. Unable to land on most of the South American Pacific coast, military commanders ordered the suppression of the expedition. However, Jiménez de la Espada and three other scientists from the Commission (the young zoologist Francisco de Paula Martínez y Sáez, the Cuban anthropologist Manuel Almagro and the botanist Juan Isern Battló) refused to do so and opted to continue the expedition on dry land. on their own, despite the constant orders to the contrary that came to them from Spain. Thus began the so-called Great Journey, during which they would cross the entire South American continent in its widest part, from Ecuador to the mouth of the Amazon River. The return to Spain of the expedition's photographer at the outbreak of the war, Rafael Castro y Ordóñez (the first to join a scientific expedition), meant that the graphic testimony of the Great Journey was carried out by Jiménez himself. de la Espada, who included numerous drawings of the landscapes he visited during the journey in his diary.

Many of these drawings are of volcanoes, for which he seemed to feel a special attraction that led him to climb as many as he found along the way. These include the Izalco volcano in El Salvador, visited during the first phase of the trip, and the Ecuadorian volcanoes Cotopaxi, Sumaco and Pichincha. In the latter he was lost for three days, but was able to be rescued at the last moment by his companions. After crossing the Andean mountain range, he and his companions arrived at the Napo River, followed its course to the Amazon and from there reached the Atlantic Ocean. The four exhausted expedition members returned to Spain in December 1865, after which Jiménez de la Espada quickly rejoined his positions at the Museum of Natural Sciences and the University of Madrid.

Scientific work and works

Zoology

During the entire American adventure, Jiménez de la Espada collected all types of animals that he not only studied, but also sent, alive, to Madrid. Before embarking on the expedition he had worked for several years on the acclimatization of foreign animals in the Botanical Garden of Madrid, all under the guidance of Graells. With the experience acquired then, it was not difficult for him to do the same with different specimens of mammals, birds and reptiles that until then had never been brought to Europe, among them some as characteristic as the Patagonian mara or hare, the guanaco, the black-necked swan and the Andean condor. Many of the descendants of these animals would later be transferred to various European zoological gardens, which earned Marcos Jiménez de la Espada the award of the first class medal of the mammal division by theSociété impériale zoologique d'acclimatationof France, granted on March 23, 1866.

He spent six years dedicating himself exclusively to rearranging and thoroughly studying the materials collected during the expedition, which he would capture in his later works. In 1870 he published the article Some new or curious data about the fauna of the Upper Amazon. Mammals. in the Bulletin-Magazine of the University of Madrid. Within this he described (among others) the appearance and behavior of the bat Thyroptera albiventer and made known for the first time in the West the monkeys Leontocebus graellsi (named in honor of his teacher) and Leontocebus lagonotus. In 1871 he published the report Faunae neotropicales species quaedam nondum cognitae ("Unknown species of the neotropical fauna") in the Jornal de la Academia de Ciencias de Lisboa, and that same year he founded, together with other colleagues, the Spanish Society of Natural History, in whose annals he would publish a good part of his later works.

He was already a reference author throughout Europe when, in one of these annals, he published his greatest work in the field of zoology, Vertebrates from the voyage to the Pacific. Batracians. Made after exhaustively studying the 786 amphibians collected during the trip. In the work, published in 1875 and republished in 1978, he describes a total of 18 genera and species already known, as well as 2 genera, 12 species and 3 subspecies totally ignored at that time. In it, he not only describes the species from an anatomical point of view, but also talks about their biology and customs. The reference to Darwin's little frog (Rhinoderma darwinii) stands out, of which he refuted the erroneous conception (considered true at the time) that it gave birth to live young through its mouth, instead of (as he demonstrated) lay eggs that the male then incubated in his buccal sac. This complex study is considered, even today, a classic in zoological literature.

But not everything was going to be success. The governmental dissolution of the commission in charge of studying the materials collected during the Pacific expedition deprived him of many of his specimens, among them those corresponding to his collection of mammals from the Upper Amazon, which was made up of animals of 100 different species, 35 of which not yet described and nominated. Twenty of these mammals were later described by foreign naturalists, based on specimens collected on expeditions that took place later. The remaining thirteen could be studied by Ángel Cabrera, a disciple of Jiménez de la Espada, in 8 volumes that he published between 1900 and 1917. The diary that he wrote during the trip was published by Agustín J. Barreiro in 1928.

Geography, History and Anthropology

Despite being at the height of his prestige as a zoologist, Jiménez de la Espada momentarily put aside his scientific work and devoted himself to the study of American geography and history. In 1876 he founded the Geographical Society of Madrid, and in 1883 he entered the Academy of History. From there he directed the reissue of the works of great medieval and modern travelers such as Pero Tafur and the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, and the studies on pre-Hispanic Peru by Pedro Cieza de León and Bartolomé de las Casas. Between 1881 and 1897 he published the 4 volumes of his work Geographical Relations of the Indies , about the former Viceroyalty of Peru, which earned him the Loubat Prize from the Academy of History. In 1889 he published the famous anonymous document Epitome of the Conquest of the New Kingdom of Granada

He participated in the Americanist congresses of Brussels (1879), Madrid (1881), Turin (1886), Berlin (1888) and Paris (1890). His work in favor of the dissemination of ancient Inca culture earned him the award of a gold medal by the Peruvian Government. He was also named a member of the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnography and Prehistory, of the Royal Geographical Society of London and of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Madrid. In 1895 he became president of the Spanish Society of Natural History that he himself had helped to found.

Curiously, he did not present his doctoral thesis until April 1898, three months before being appointed professor of comparative anatomy and six before his death. His death cut short the extensive study he was preparing on Alessandro Malaspina's maritime expedition in the 18th century . Francisco Giner de los Ríos and other friends he had made at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza presented him as a symbol of Spanish scientific regenerationism during a tribute ceremony held after his death.

Abbreviation (zoology)

The abbreviation Jiménez de la Espada is used to indicate Marcos Jiménez de la Espada as an authority on description and taxonomy in zoology.