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Is it possible for a man these days to be a world explorer, a science nerd, well-mannered and nicely dressed, literate, good company, wittily risqué but never vulgar, and have a purpose-driven life? Never mind women – can men truly have it all?
I’m beginning to doubt it. I’ve just received a staggering and epic three-volume set of books, National Geographic: Around the World in 125 Years. These are the largest, heaviest, and most amazing books I have ever seen – which is probably why they go for $500. Full disclosure: my father was an editor at National Geographic for three decades. But he retired in 1990 and passed away in 1996, and I now have no living connection to the organization.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that holding the three volumes of Around the World in 125 Years for any length of time constitutes weight lifting. The photographs are like paintings you can linger over for hours. Going through them, I noticed that some of the best shots were taken by Luis Marden.
Marden who was born in 1913 and died in 2003, was the most interesting man in the world. And between the digital revolution, which has men on sofas all over the world watching porn and playing Call of Duty, and the feminist who have declared the End of Men, and the conservatives who preach that shooting and mounting your own bear is the sure path to manliness, we’re not likely to see Marden’s kind again. He was a gentleman, he was a polymath, he was an adventurer, and he knew his French wines.
To list Marden’s accomplishments would take too long, as well as sound like a parody of those Dos Equis beer commercials about “the most interesting man in the world”. But a few bullet points might give a general idea of who Marden was. I must note that a lot of this information comes from the wonderful obituary about Marden written by Cathy Newman in the September 2000 issue of National Geographic. Newman is an accomplished writer, photographer and explorer herself; she wrote a wonderful book about fashion throughout the world I called Miss Newman when I was preparing this piece, and she gave permission to use some of the information she had gathered. I also used another obituary by Mark Jenkins. And of course there are my own memories and the stories I heard from my father.
- Luis was born in 1913 and christened Annibale Kigi Paragallo. The son of an insurance broker father and a mother who was a teacher, he grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts. He got interested in photography and had a radio show on the topic. It was there that he shortened his name Luis Marden.
- He never went to college.
- He was hired by National Geographic at age 21.
- He was a pioneer of underwater photography.
- He spoke five languages.
- His house, on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia, was custom built for him by Frank Lloyd Wright.
- He found the wreck of The Bounty and dove with Jaques Cousteau.
- He wore a Brooks Brothers suit, a “shirt of sea island cotton,” and a silk tie.
- He was friends with both King Hussein of Jordan and the King of Tonga.
- His discoveries: an Aepyornis egg, discovered in Madagascar; the Brazilian orchid Epistephium mardenii (yes, named after him); a lobster parasite that became a new species of crustacean; the first report of underwater florescence.
- At age 70 did a story on ultralights, small airplanes. He acquired one and flew it around his house in Virginia.
I got to meet Luis Marden on several occasions, the most eventful being the 1986 search for the Columbus landfall. My father, Joe Judge, was an editor at National Geographic at the time. After years of research, and with the help of Luis Marden, he argued that Christopher Columbus had first landed in America not at San Salvador Island, but at an island called Samana Cay. Marden had traced Columbus’s trip using then-new computer technology, which allowed for ocean currents and the effect of wind on sails over long periods of time. His track landed in Samana Cay. My father wrote the cover story on the find, and the press conference announcing it was the largest in the history of the National Geographic Society.
I was in high school at the time, but I remember meeting Mr. Marden often during that time. For someone who was so legendary, he struck me as being understated, even quiet – although I also knew he was a brilliant conversationalist and very funny. I now realize that he knew the customs of people all over the world, and as the times I met him were in our house, he was undoubtedly conscious of his manners. Cathy Newman captures it in her obituary: “He combines the refined sensibility of the Old World with a swashbuckling New World sense of adventure. He is a symphony of contradictions. He understands the intricacies of French vintage as thoroughly as those of Fijian etiquette….Although at ease with everyone from princes to street sweepers, he prefers solitude to society. He is a gentle misanthrope at heart.”
Luis Marden was all man, but he put his testosterone to good use. He once dove so deep in the waters near Yucatan that he got decompression sickness and had to be airlifted out – but he got the photographs he had come for. He put his male energy to the service of improving himself, exploring the world, writing books and taking photographs, and generally learning everything he could about everything. You can’t imagine him sitting on his backside playing Grand Theft Auto. Or getting into twitter wars.
I know the arguments about the end of men, the feminization of men, or how a real man hunts and mounts his own shark, grow tiresome. But ask yourself a question. Does America produce Luis Mardens anymore?
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