For most individuals, time journey is a whole impossibility. For Corey Malcom, it’s a lifestyle. (And sure, there’s just one L in his final identify.)
That’s as a result of Malcom, lead historian for the Florida Keys Historical past Heart and a famend shipwreck archaeologist, has spent most of his skilled life immersed in Key West’s previous.
He has overseen the preservation of artifacts excavated from the wrecks of the Spanish galleons Nuestra Señora de Atocha and Santa Margarita, each sunk off the Marquesas Keys in a 1622 hurricane. He spearheaded the conservation of supplies from the English service provider slave ship Henrietta Marie, wrecked 35 miles off Key West in 1700 and yielding important data concerning the tragic commerce.
He additionally helped lead a staff that rediscovered Key West’s 1860 African Burial Floor, a Higgs Seashore website believed to be the one African refugee cemetery in america, and presently spends his days exploring different features and eras of Key West and Florida Keys historical past.
“For those who’re up to now, the Florida Keys are the place to be,” Malcom stated, surrounded by books, paperwork and classic images at his desk on the historical past heart. “It looks like virtually every little thing on the earth has occurred right here sooner or later or one other — actually inside the final 500 years.”
Malcom was an Indiana graduate pupil when he first noticed Key West in 1985, shortly after native shipwreck salvor Mel Fisher found the $450 million “mom lode” of the Atocha — arguably essentially the most implausible archaeological discover because the opening of King Tut’s tomb. His employer on the time, employed as a contract archaeologist on the Atocha mission, introduced his prime assistants down to assist.
“I had been working in archaeology for a few years, however the Atocha expertise modified the course of my life,” Malcom stated with a reminiscent smile. “I used to be completely, fully smitten with shipwrecks.”
The Atocha yielded a priceless cargo of gold and silver bars and cash, in addition to private jewellery, uncommon spiritual artifacts and hundreds of emeralds. Throughout the excavation of the location, nonetheless, Malcom was most fascinated by objects whose major worth wasn’t financial.
“I bear in mind we introduced an astrolabe, a bronze navigational machine, up on deck and it had a bit of wing nut on the again of it, holding a part of it collectively,” he stated. “This factor had been underwater nearly 400 years, and that little wing nut nonetheless labored completely. That was such a second for me.”
When the contract work ended, Malcom didn’t return to Indiana. As a substitute, he started a profession with Key West’s Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, a nonprofit instructional and analysis group established by Fisher. In 1988, he turned the director of archaeology.
His tenure with the society and its totally accredited Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, which holds the Western Hemisphere’s richest single assortment of Seventeenth-century maritime and shipwreck antiquities, lasted some 35 years. In addition to excavating, conserving and finding out artifacts from the 1622 galleons and the Henrietta Marie, he guided archaeological exploration and identification of the Santa Clara — an astonishingly full shipwreck relationship again to 1564 — and quite a few different initiatives.
Throughout that point Malcom married Lisa Petrone they usually had two kids, Robert and Alexandra, now attending school in Tallahassee. He additionally has an older son, Cameron, who works on the State Division.
Malcom nonetheless undertakes work for the society, however in 2022 his ardour for historical past led him in a brand new route. Whereas researching regional shipwrecks, he had typically consulted with historian and longtime pal Tom Hambright, head of the Florida Keys Historical past Heart and its intensive archive on the Key West library. When Hambright determined to retire, Malcom turned his successor.
“I all the time stated if there’s one different job that I’d wish to have, it could be doing what Tom was doing,” he stated, “as a result of there’s simply a lot right here to check.”
His duties nowadays embody serving to individuals discover solutions referring to native historical past or properties, persevering with to digitize and itemize the middle’s huge assortment of images and paperwork, and including to its fashionable on-line photograph archive that now holds some 26,000 pictures.
Malcom additionally researches and writes “This Day in Keys Historical past,” which seems on the middle’s social media platforms and within the Citizen newspaper, and maintains the uncommon supplies contained within the facility’s climate-controlled fireproof vault — from centuries-old handwritten diaries, logbooks and maps to accounts of the shipwreck salvage trade that introduced nice wealth to Nineteenth-century Key West.
“I’m not diving underwater and discovering cool artifacts, but it surely’s simply as thrilling to scan a damaging that no one’s seen in 100 years,” stated the person whose profession continues to take him touring by way of time. “On this workplace, we’re doing every little thing we will to collect, protect and make obtainable the historical past of the Florida Keys — and I simply adore it.”