[Deathwatch] Luis Marden, explorer, 90

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

National Geographic Legend Luis Marden Dies at 90
Mon Mar 3, 8:41 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Luis Marden, a legendary explorer, photographer
and writer for the National Geographic Society, died of complications
from Parkinson's disease on Monday at age 90, the society said.

Born Annibale Luigi Paragallo in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Marden spent
64 years with National Geographic, where he is remembered as a "legend"
and "the last of the old-time adventurers."

The scientific and educational organization said Marden's work helped
shaped its National Geographic magazine.

Marden, who arrived at the Geographic in 1934, pioneered 35mm color and
underwater photography, discovered the remains of Williams Bligh's
"Bounty" off Pitcairn Island in 1975 and with his wife, a
mathematician, replotted the route Christopher Columbus sailed from the
Canary Islands to the New World.

He contributed more than 60 articles to National Geographic as a writer
or photographer or both, including an account of his 1955 voyage aboard
Jacques-Yves Cousteau's yacht Calypso.

Marden made 11 documentary films for the National Geographic Society's
lecture series and authored two books: "Color Photography With the
Miniature Camera," and "The Angler's Bamboo," a book about the making
of classic bamboo fly fishing rods.

"He didn't just write about bamboo; he grew a stand of tonkin bamboo in
his yard. In addition to buying the finest bamboo fly rods he could
find, he built his own; at last count he had 50 split-cane rods,"
writer Cathy Newman wrote in an excerpt of a profile on the magazine's
Web site.

"There didn't seem to be a corner of the universe that didn't interest
him. He never just covered a story; he lived it -- rather; he inhabited
it -- wrapping himself in the subject as if in a cashmere coat," Newman
wrote in the article, entitled "The Art of Being Luis Marden."

National Geographic editor Gilbert Grosvenor wrote in the magazine's
April 1978 issue that Marden's career was so remarkable that he
sometimes seemed like a character out of fiction.

Marden's formal education ended with high school graduation, but he was
fluent in five languages. He was a diver, sailor, pilot, fisherman and
a botanist who, while on assignment in Brazil in the late 1960s,
discovered a new orchid species, named Epistephium mardeni after him.

He is also quoted six times in "Webster's Third New International
Dictionary," National Geographic noted in a statement released on
Monday.

Marden retired in January 1976. But the relationship that began four
decades earlier continued, with Marden working as a freelancer for the
magazine until 1998, when he contributed his last piece.

Marden is survived by his wife Ethel, of Arlington, Virginia.