Explorer Sir Robert Marx to Speak on Yucatan Adventures March 9 at Gleason

Free Lecture Open to the Public 

MELBOURNE, FLA. — Famed explorer and undersea adventurer Sir Robert Marx will offer tales of discoveries and exploration during five years he lived on the Yucatan Peninsula at a free lecture at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, at Gleason Performing Arts Center on the Florida Institute of Technology campus.

The lecture is the first in a series of Marx lectures hosted by Florida Tech and the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. The focus of each lecture will be one of the many regions of the world Marx has explored.

Wednesday’s lecture is free and open to the public.

Marx spent the mid-1950s living in and around Cozumel and the jungles of Yucatan. On the island he discovered and excavated many Mayan ruins, early European colonial sites, cenotes (sinkholes) and, offshore, over a dozen colonial-period shipwrecks. He started the first hotel there as well as the first diving school in the Caribbean.

Among his underwater finds were the “La Nicolosa,” a ship that belonged to the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes that was lost in 1519, and the Spanish galleon “El Matanceros,” which was sailing between Spain and Mexico in 1739 with a huge cargo of trade goods and then wrecked on the Yucatan coast. Marx recovered over two million artifacts from that ship.

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

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