Luis Marden - Underwater Photography and Diving

Underwater Photography and Diving

• Marden's knowledge of Spanish led to his appointment during World War II as National Geographic's "Latin America man," and Marden was sent on assignments throughout Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. In 1941, he dove off Antigua, where he saw his first coral reef.

• Deciding he wanted to photograph the riches of the deep, Marden worked with Jacques Cousteau aboard the Calypso in the mid-1950s. A pioneer of underwater color photography, Marden developed many techniques in this field that are still used today, such as the use of filters and auxiliary lighting in order to enhance color.

• Marden discovered the remains of Captain Bligh's HMS Bounty in January 1957. After spotting a rudder from this ship in a museum on Fiji, he persuaded his editors to let him dive off Pitcairn Island, where the rudder had been recovered. Despite the warnings of one islander -"Man, you gwen be dead as a hatchet!"— Marden dived for several days in the dangerous swells near the island, and found the remains of the fabled ship. He subsequently met with Marlon Brando to counsel him on his role as Fletcher Christian in the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty. Later in life, when he stuck with his tailored English suits while his colleagues wore more casual attire, Marden wore also cuff links made of nails from the Bounty. MGM had a reconstruction of the Bounty built for their 1962 film, also named the Bounty. This vessel was built, of wood, to the original plans, in a traditional manner in a shipyard in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. However, all the dimensions were increased by approximately one third to accommodate the large cameras in use at that time.

• At the island of Tofua (Bligh spelled it Tofoa), Bligh and eighteen loyalists had sought refuge in a cave in order to augment their meager provisions. In the March 1968 issue of the National Geographic Magazine, Marden claimed to have found this cave as well as the grave of John Norton, a crewman stoned to the death by the Tofuans. Both findings were later disproved by Bengt Danielsson (who had been a member of the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition) in the June 1985 issue of the Pacific Islands Monthly. Danielsson identified Bligh's cave as lying on the sheltered north-west coast, where Bligh identified it; Marden's cave lies on the exposed south-east coast. Additionally, Danielsson thought it highly unlikely that the Tofuans would have allotted any grave site to Norton, or that the grave, if allotted, would have been preserved for two centuries.

• For the October 1985 story, "In Bounty’s Wake: Finding the Wreck of the HMS Pandora", Marden dove off the coast of Cape York Peninsula, Australia in 1984 to cover the wreck of HMS Pandora, the ship sent to capture the Bounty mutineers. The Pandora had foundered on an Australian reef with manacled prisoners still inside a deckhouse cell.