{ "id": "real-expedicion-botanica-de-nueva-espana", "type": "entity", "name": "Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (Sessé and Mociño, 1787-1803) and its botanical chair in Mexico City", "summary": "The third and least-known of the crown's American botanical expeditions, ordered in 1787 under Martin Sesse with the charge of founding a botanical garden in Mexico City. Its teaching chair opened in the university in May 1788, its first Mexican pupils became its own botanists, and its printed public examinations record an indigenous cacique passing pharmacy in 1794. Its results were not printed until a century later, in Mexico.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "science", "botany", "natural-history", "enlightenment", "new-spain", "mexico", "expedition", "education", "indigenous-peoples", "eighteenth-century", "spanish-empire" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "mutis-botanical-expedition" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "flora-peruviana-et-chilensis" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "malaspina-expedition" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "alzate-gacetas-de-literatura-1788" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-seminario-de-mineria" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "protomedicato-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quatro-libros-de-la-naturaleza-1615" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "universities-of-lima-and-mexico" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "academia-de-san-carlos-de-mexico" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "cempoalxochitl-de-la-nueva-espana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "jardin-botanico-de-la-habana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mutis-arcano-de-la-quina-1828" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "volcan-de-jorullo-1759" } ], "questions": [ "What was the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain?", "Who were Martin Sesse and Jose Mariano Mocino?", "When did Mexico City get a botanical garden and a chair of botany?", "Why was the Flora Mexicana of Sesse and Mocino published only in the 1880s?", "What happened to the Mexican botanical drawings held in Geneva?", "Did Mexicans and indigenous people take part in Spanish scientific expeditions?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The expedition was ordered in 1787 and its command carried a building instruction with it. The bibliographer read here states that a voyage of exploration to New Spain was projected and ordered, that Dr Martin Sesse y Lacasta was named chief of the expedition in 1787, and that the post of director of the garden of plants that was to be established in Mexico was annexed to the appointment. Juan Diego del Castillo, Jose Longinos and the draughtsman Juan Cerda were also members, and Professor Vicente Cervantes was designated for the theoretical teaching of botany. The whole personnel was chosen by Casimiro Gomez Ortega, director of the botanical garden of Madrid, who was commissioned for that purpose.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The teaching opened before the fieldwork was done, and the account is quoted from the newspaper of the day. The commissioners were in Mexico in 1788, and on 1 May of that year at five in the afternoon the opening of the Real Estudio Botanico was carried out in the hall of Actos of the Royal and Pontifical University, beginning with an inaugural oration pronounced by the director of the expedition and garden, Don Martin de Sesse. The bibliographer cites the Supplement to the \"Gaceta de Mexico\", tomo III, page 75. The oath of the university professors preceded the act and was taken by the rector, the director of the expedition and Vicente Cervantes; the Audiencia, the body of doctors, all the religious communities, regidores and military attended, and the viceroy, unable to come, sent the lawyer Francisco Xavier Gamboa to represent him.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The opening was also a public lesson in the Linnaean system, staged as fireworks. The university was illuminated at night, and after an orchestra had entertained those present, artificial fires worked by the pyrotechnist Joaquin Gavilan were burnt: three trees known in that kingdom by the name of papaya, imitating the natural in the property of their leaves, flowers and fruits, gave a clear idea of the sex of plants, which being separate in that genus was represented by two female trees dressed in their respective flowers and fruits of various sizes against the male. The sexual system of Linnaeus was explained to a city crowd in a firework set piece built from a Mexican tree.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The chair's first pupils were Mexicans, and two of them were promoted into the expedition itself. Among the first enrolled in the study of botany was Dr Mariano Mocino, a young physician of clear talent and vast instruction; in only six months of study, that is in the first course of botany given by Cervantes, he and his fellow student Maldonado made such progress that in 1791 Martin Sesse proposed them respectively as botanist of the expedition and as dissector naturalist. The same bibliography records that Mocino was born at Temascaltepec and was among the first and most advanced disciples of Cervantes in his chair of botany, and that he served in the commission from 1795 to 1804.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The teaching was examined in public and the examinations were printed, so the names of the students survive. The bibliography lists \"Ejercicios publicos de Botanica\" printed at Mexico in 1788 for Jose Vicente de la Pena, Francisco Giles de Arellano and Jose Timoteo Arsinas; in 1789 for Jose Mocino, Julio Pastor and Jose Maldonado; in 1790 for four more, with notice of how the director of the expedition had proposed Mocino as botanist and Maldonado as dissector; in 1793; and in 1794 an exercise including \"D. Ignacio Leon y Perez, indio cazique aprobado en Farmacia\", who sustains the classification of the hule and invites his antagonist to dispute it with him. An indigenous cacique qualified in pharmacy is on the printed record of the chair's public disputations.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The field range was continental and the division of labour is stated. Longinos, Castillo, Mocino and Maldonado were assigned to explore remote regions, Sesse worked the central districts of Mexico, and Cervantes gave his botany lessons. Mocino explored as far as the coasts of Tabasco, where he was in December 1794, continued to Guatemala, and turned back with Castillo as far as the Tarahumara in the present state of Chihuahua; all California as far as Nootka was travelled, and later the Jorullo, Guadalajara and San Andres Tuxtla.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The cost is on the same pages as the achievement. The Tarahumara spared Mocino but not Castillo, who died in Mexico on 26 July 1793 in consequence of the fatigues suffered in exploring that region, leaving a legacy of 4,000 pesos for the printing of the \"Flora Mexicana\"; his companion Cervantes honoured his memory in the scientific name of the rubber tree, \"Castilloa elastica\". The draughtsman Juan Cerda came from Spain, and the Mexican painter Atanasio Echeverria, described as no layman in matters of natural science, was also a member of the expedition, with the apothecary Jaime Senseve attached to the commission.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "What the expedition did not get was a printing press, and the men who made it ended badly. The same fatality that weighed on the protomedico Francisco Hernandez fell on these botanists, who found a cold reception and no resources to print their works; the hope of one day realising their wish made Mocino accept the very poor pension, exceedingly hard to collect, that the Spanish government assigned him, living meanwhile as a member of Sesse's household until death took that loyal companion in 1809. Mocino was named director of the Gabinete de Historia Natural of Madrid, gave two courses of zoology and classified its collection of animals, helped by another Mexican, the presbyter Pablo de la Llave. After the French invasion he refused to recognise one Barrois as president of the Academy of Medicine of which he was a member; his pupil Llave relates that he was taken to the public jail and marched out on foot roped in a chain gang, an old and sick scholar who could hardly walk, until a general freed the party at the entry to Old Castile.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The drawings left Spain with their author and were saved by a domestic accident in Geneva, recounted by the man who kept them. In his memoirs the Swiss botanist Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle writes that among the refugees whom the disasters of King Joseph forced to leave the peninsula was Joseph Mocino, an old Mexican who had once been charged by the king with making the flora of Mexico together with Sesse, as Ruiz and Pavon had been charged with that of Peru, and that Mocino arrived at Montpellier with a collection of thirteen to fourteen hundred coloured drawings representing Mexican plants then very little known, since the \"Nova genera\" of Kunth and Humboldt had not yet begun to appear. The printed text names the king as Charles VI, which is an error of the memoir for Charles IV.", "sources": [ "candolle-memoires-et-souvenirs-1862" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The copying itself is told as a private scene with a public result. During his Geneva course De Candolle had shown the Mexican drawings, and two ladies with a real talent for drawing had copied one of the plates as a kind of challenge, which drew society's attention to the collection. At the end of the course he received a letter from Mocino saying he had permission to return to Spain but would not dare present himself without his drawings, which in fact belonged to the king, and asking for them back. Madame Lavit, the wife of an old friend, then in the house, proposed that they be copied before being returned; De Candolle objected that by the date of departure barely ten days remained and asked how fifteen hundred drawings could be copied in ten days; she answered that they would copy them all, went out at once to find artists and amateurs who could help, and by the next day several had offered their services.", "sources": [ "candolle-memoires-et-souvenirs-1862" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The copying was a civic operation and the memoir counts it. He reviewed Mocino's drawings and set aside all those representing well-known plants, which reduced the number to about twelve hundred; he had models of the chosen format placed with every paper merchant in the town, and had the pupils of the drawing school, under their master Reverdin, make tracings of the outlines of the figures, which his wife then distributed, with the drawings, to everyone who came to offer help. Close to a hundred and twenty people volunteered their time and their brush, most of them ladies of Geneva society but also artists and a good number of people he did not know; the young women gathered to work in common; he went round the workshops in turn to tell the copyists what had to be done to abridge or to reproduce the botanical part faithfully; the whole city was occupied with the work for about ten days, and some copied as many as forty drawings, giving part of their nights to it.", "sources": [ "candolle-memoires-et-souvenirs-1862" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The papers that stayed in Spain are located, and the herbarium's date of arrival is given. The bibliography states that the manuscripts of the \"Flora Mexicana\" and of the \"Flora de Guatemala\" and a multitude of memoirs, notes, lists, indices and descriptions are preserved in the botanical garden of Madrid, and that the herbarium of the expedition, with more than four thousand plants, reached Madrid in 1820. Quoting Hemsley, it adds that by certain circumstances a small portion of the herbarium of Sesse and Mocino came into the hands of Lambert and at his death was acquired by Delessert; that while with Lambert, David Don described some of the plants, including the genus Cowania and several Compositae; and that the large quantity of Mexican plants in the Pavon collections at Kew and the British Museum is suspected, with reason, to have formed part of the herbarium of Mocino and Sesse, which is likely since Pavon was never in Mexico.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "Getting the text printed took a diplomatic operation run from Mexico. The Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural learned in 1870 where the manuscript of the flora of Mexico was and sought from then on to obtain a copy to publish it, which became possible only later, when Dr Gustavo Ruiz Sandoval, head of the fourth section of the Ministry of Fomento, obtained the necessary orders from General Carlos Pacheco. Quoting Ricardo Ramirez, the bibliography records that to that end the Secretaria de Relaciones addressed a circular on 24 July 1883 to the Mexican envoy in Spain instructing him to obtain a copy of the flora, and that General Ramon Corona, minister of the Mexican republic in Madrid, took the charge up in earnest, obtained the corresponding permission from the Spanish government and commissioned a Mr Vigneau to draw up the budget of what the copy would cost.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c14", "text": "The originals were printed a century after they were made, and in Mexico rather than in Madrid. The bibliography records \"Flora Mexicana\", by Martinus Sesse and Iosephus Marianus Mocino, Mexico 1888, folio, prefaced by a review of the expedition written by the licentiate Ricardo Ramirez, an edition of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, reprinted in 1894 by the Instituto Medico Nacional with good corrections and with indices, one of them formed by Dr Jose Ramirez of vulgar and indigenous names with their scientific correspondence. It also records \"Plantae Novae Hispaniae\", Mexici 1886, folio, with a second title page in Castilian and the preface in Latin and Castilian, an edition of the same society, and the same work reprinted by the Secretaria de Fomento for the Chicago International Exposition of 1893, with the \"Sinonimia vulgar y cientifica de varias de las plantas de Nueva Espana\" of Dr Jose Ramirez added to the first edition.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c15", "text": "Some of the material never came back at all. The bibliography lists among Mocino's papers various drawings of plants existing at that date in Geneva in the possession of the Decandolle family and in the general herbarium of the botanical garden of Madrid, and records a manuscript communication of 1791 to the Conde de Revilla Gigedo on the discovery of the nutmegs of Mexico, with two drawings, then in the hands of Dr Miguel Colmeiro. The corpus treats the fate of the collections as partly documented and partly open.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c16", "text": "Both witnesses used here are interested ones, and the object says so rather than smoothing it. The bibliographer is a Mexican writing in Mexico in 1895 about \"our botanists\", in a work whose purpose is to establish a national scientific pedigree, and the expedition's Mexican members are the heroes of his narrative. De Candolle is recounting, some forty years afterwards, an episode in which he and his friends are the rescuers of a collection that a Spanish crown had failed to publish, and his own page misnames the king who ordered it. Neither is a neutral register; what they jointly establish is the sequence of dates, names and printings, not the apportionment of credit.", "sources": [ "leon-biblioteca-botanico-mexicana-1895", "candolle-memoires-et-souvenirs-1862" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of Spanish Enlightenment science name Mutis and Ruiz and Pavon and stop; the New Spain expedition usually appears as a footnote about drawings that ended up in Geneva. Read from the two printed volumes, it becomes a documented institution rather than an anecdote: a chair of botany opened in the university of Mexico on 1 May 1788 with the viceroy represented by Francisco Xavier Gamboa, a firework set piece of three papaya trees built to teach the sexual system of plants, printed public examinations from 1788 to 1794 that name the students - including an indigenous cacique passed in pharmacy who defends his classification of rubber in open dispute - and two Mexican pupils of the first six-month course promoted into the expedition as botanist and dissector. The costs travel with it in the same sources: Juan Diego del Castillo dead of the Tarahumara march in 1793, leaving 4,000 pesos towards a printing that did not happen; a cold reception in Madrid and no money to publish; Mocino on a pension he could barely collect, then roped in a chain gang out of French-occupied Madrid; the flora finally printed in Mexico City in 1886 and 1888, a hundred years late, with the indigenous plant names indexed against the scientific ones by a Mexican doctor. And the famous Geneva rescue is quoted from the man who organised it, including the detail that decides who owned the work: Mocino wrote that he dared not go home without the drawings, because they belonged to the king.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-10", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/real-expedicion-botanica-de-nueva-espana", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/real-expedicion-botanica-de-nueva-espana.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (Sessé and Mociño, 1787-1803) and its botanical chair in Mexico City", "description": "The third and least-known of the crown's American botanical expeditions, ordered in 1787 under Martin Sesse with the charge of founding a botanical garden in Mexico City. Its teaching chair opened in the university in May 1788, its first Mexican pupils became its own botanists, and its printed public examinations record an indigenous cacique passing pharmacy in 1794. Its results were not printed until a century later, in Mexico.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/real-expedicion-botanica-de-nueva-espana", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-10", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Biblioteca botánica-mexicana: catálogo bibliográfico, biográfico y crítico de autores y escritos referentes a vegetales de México y sus aplicaciones, desde la conquista hasta el presente", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=-KYWAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA323" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Mémoires et souvenirs de Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, écrits par lui-même et publiés par son fils", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=dOcWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA288" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (Sessé and Mociño, 1787-1803) and its botanical chair in Mexico City" } }