Bauzá y Cañas, Felipe

Felipe Bauzá y Cañas (February 17, 1764 - March 3, 1834) was a Spanish cartographer, navigator, and naval officer active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Bauzá was born on the Balearic Islands in the Mallorcan city of Palma. He attended the Spanish maritime college in Cartagena, Spain. He saw action during the Siege of Gibraltar (1779 - 1782), the capture of Port Mahón, and a campaign against the Moors (1783 - 1784). Exhibiting a proficiency in mathematics and draftsmanship, he subsequently trained as a hydrographer and cartographer under Vicente Tofiño (1732 – 1795), the premier Spanish nautical chartmaker of the day. Bauzá was the head cartographer on the Malaspina Expedition (1789 - 1794) to the Americas, Oceania, and Australasia. From 1797, he worked with the Depósito Hidrográfico / Dirección Hidrografica in Madrid, becoming head of said organization in 1815. Renowned as a cartographer, he was honored with the Russian Cross of St. Vladimir in 1816 and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London in 1819. From about 1800, he began assembling a personal collection of maps and charts intended to form the backdrop of a series of definitive maps of Latin America. Political fate intervened with his plan. Bauzá was a supporter and leader of the of Rafael de Riego Revolution in 1820, and served the Cortes Generales during the Trienio Liberal ('Three Liberal Years', 1820 - 1823), as the deputy for Mallorca. After the fall of that regime, in 1823, he was sentenced to death by King Ferdinand VII. Bauzá fled to England in that year, taking with him his nautical charts and other geographical source materials. Bauzá and his family struggled in London, attempting to support themselves by publishing his cartography and selling parts of his collection to the British Admiralty's Hydrographic Office. His death sentence was finally commuted in 1833, but before he could return to Spain, he died of a brain hemorrhage. He family was left in destitution and his widow Teresa Rivera y Bauzá, made ends meet by selling his map collections. Some went to foreign governments (Venezuela) but most are now part of the Bauzá collection in the British Library.