Famed Explorer Sir Robert Marx to Discuss Island Adventures

Free Lecture May 24 at Florida Tech’s Gleason

MELBOURNE, FLA. — Explorer and undersea adventurer Sir Robert Marx will discuss his travels to a series of Atlantic islands at a free public lecture starting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 24, at Gleason Performing Arts Center on the Florida Institute of Technology campus.

At the lecture, which is hosted by The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, Marx will discuss his explorations of the Azores, Canary, Madeira, Cape Verde, Ascension and Saint Helena islands via land and water.

Like Marx himself, the islands have a colorful history.

The Azores Island group, for example, was the most important maritime crossroads during the Age of Sail and accounts for the greatest concentration of sunken treasure in the world, with over 1,200 sunken treasures lying in its deep waters. Each year during the Colonial Period, an average of 500 ships from the Americas, the Far East and Africa passed through these waters, making it a lucrative hunting ground for pirates and privateers of many nations.

Another island, Madeira, was visited by the Romans around the start of the Christian era and thereafter frequented by most of the European nations. Marx found evidence under the sea of even earlier contact with people, these from West Africa, which predated the Romans.

The Canary Islands were known to the Romans as the “Fortunate Isles” and in constant use, even into the 19th century as a port of call for New England traders.

The Phoenicians were the first to visit the Cape Verde islands. During the Colonial Period, East Indian men passed the islands on their voyages to the Orient.

For more information on the lecture, call 321-674-8962.

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