I point out these letters were not to me>
May 1, 1997
Dear Mr. Frazier
Thanks for telephoning me about the things you have been reading about me on the Internet. As I told you on the telephone, I'm too busy working in various underwater archaeological projects around the globe to waste time reading what numerous people are saying about me. In most cases, I bet, these people have never even been on a shipwreck and some probably don't even know how to dive. Instead they get their kicks by blasting people like me who have accomplished so much in their lives. It's just a bad case of jealousy.
Your big question was ?Why don't I respond to these accusa-tions and lies ?" Well, I just don?t want to stoop down to their level and provide entertainment for everyone who subscribes to Sub-Arch.
Instead, I am sending you a copy of a letter I wrote to Tom Gidus last December - who, like you, contacted me about the slander on Sub-Arch. If you can, get these letters on Sub-Arch. If this doesn't quiet my few detractors, then I really don't care one way or the other.
Portugal is a great nation with a fabulous maritime past and its a shame when people like Dr. Margaret Rule and Robert Stenuit try to show the world this past and some jerks do everything possible to stop them.
My critics keep talk-ing about the wonderful work they are doing in Portugal on ship-wrecks. Where are the results ? Where are the archaeological pub-lications ? All they do is talk and talk and do virtually nothing underwater.
Anyhow, many thanks for your interest in protecting my re-putation. What I have done in my life stands for itself and no mat-ter what some jerks say -won't change what I have accomplished in the field of underwater archaeology.
Best Regards,
Robert F. Marx
December 27, 1996
Mr. Tom Gidus
Historic Shipwreck Salvors
1037 Covington St.
Oviedo, FL. 32765
Dear Tom:
Many thanks for your letter and the copies of the sick communications going back and forth on SUB-ARCH. I just had a meeting with my lawyer and he feels that we have a great libel/slander suit both in the US -against SUB-ARCH (Anita Cohen Williams) and in Portugal against Filipe Castro (my lawyer in Lisbon has wanted to go after him for a long time for the lies he has been putting in the Portuguese press about me.)
The amazing thing is that until recently I was unaware of all this crap going on about me on the internet (SUB-ARCH). Various people sent copies of some of the trash to my wife but she knew I would go ballistic so she kept it a secret. She tried numerous times to subscribe to SUB-ARCH but was denied access. I find this incredible; SUB-ARCH has permitted Filipe Castro and others to lie about me but denies me the forum to respond to these blatant lies!
I'm very sorry that they blackballed you. However, I want to thank you and all the others who stood up for me and tried to get some truth into the matter. If you have any way to get this letter on SUB-ARCH, please go ahead as you have my full permission. Or at least send it to some of the subscribers so they will know the truth.
I don?t know where to start since I'm sure that I don't have copies of all of the stuff about me that has appeared on SUB-ARCH. So I will be jumping around from topic to topic in an attempt to show you the truth. Some of the stuff I have actually found very funny such as the business about my knighthood. I was made a Knight-Commander in the Order of Isabela the Catholic in 1963 for making my Nina II voyage. It was hilarious to read Filipe Castro saying that I got the knighthood from Franco when Spain was a Fascist Government. He obviously forgot that when Franco was in power the Portuguese were under Salazar - a fascist!
Since all of this controversy about me started with Filipe Castro, I guess it is best to start with him. He claims he met me but he couldn?t have left much of an impression on me as I don?t remember the meeting. He most likely attended one of the more than 50 lectures on underwater archaeology that I have given in Portugal in the last 20 years. Actually we should start with his ?boss?. In his recent private E-Mail to you he started it with "My boss was really pissed off that I might be pro-voking the anger of Robert Marx so I propose we amuse ourselves in private." This "Boss? he refers to is Dr. Francisco Alves who is the Director Arquenautica. Sometimes he also refers to Alves as the Director of the National Archaeological Museum of Portugal. Alves was fired (not retired as he claims) from that post in August 1995 (a feat that I am proud to say I had some input into). Until about five years ago Alves and I were actually friends. However, this ended when my lawyer started to draft the new shipwreck law for Portugal and did not seek Alves? advice. The fact is Alves is not all that knowledgeable in U.W. arch. and there were so many other people around who could provide better advice. I even have a letter from Alves prior to these troubles in which he asks to work for me if I ever got the permit to work in the Azores.
Let?s look at Alves? record. Castro refers to the three important wrecks found in Portugal in recent years but he neglected to mention that all three were founded by amateur sport divers. Alves did make several very brief surveys on each site, but did almost no excavation, and found virtually -nothing but exposed cannons-and published no archaeological reports! However he did get a great deal of publicity, which he loves. Two years ago at the Lisbon Subtrerranean exhibition at the National Museum in Lisboa, an exhibition about the Roman and medieval artifacts found under the city, the only artifacts displayed in the section dealing with underwater archaeology were artifacts found by dredge boats and sport divers. There was not one goodie found by Alves, his museum or his Arquenautica group.
The reason that the "Boss" (Alves) is not doing his own dirty work and has his flunky Castro doing it
for him, is because my lawyer in Lisbon threatened to sue him for slander shutting him up for good.
During the time that we were working on the Portuguese shipwreck law (1989-1994) Alves led a
vicious campaign to discredit my lawyer, me and others working on the law. They did everything
possible to prevent the law from being made into law - which was done in August 1994. Mainly, Alves
attacked me in the press. In one magazine article he claimed that I never wrote an archaeological
report dealing with any of my work, so on my next trip to Portugal I brought a pile of my reports
over two feet high, and took the man to lunch who wrote the article and he then made a retraction.
Then Alves claimed I tried to sell a fake astrolabe to the King of Spain. Here are the facts: The King
of Spain is a friend of mine and I have spent time diving with him in Majorca. If the King wanted an
astrolabe, I would give him a real one. How this lie got started, and keeps coming up over and over
again, despite my proving it false, is the following. For three years I had a traveling Exhibition in
Spain named Las Flotas De Las Indias sponsored by the Quinto Centennario Commission (an official body of the Spanish Government). It contained artifacts I found on over dozen different ship-wrecks dating as far back as the El Matanceros wreck I found on the coast of Yucatan. Visitors to the to the exhibition (including the King who opened the opening exhibition in Madrid) were given catalogues showing many of the objects on display. The Spaniards goofed in making the cata-logue and the page showing a coral encrusted astrolabe listed it as a replica (a pretty dumb mistake since it was coral encrusted!) and on the page with the replica astrolabe, they listed it as an original. I could go on and on about the other lies that Alves created and are still being spread by Castro, but I don?t have the time.
Now its time to attack Alves and archaeology in general in Portugal. There is a court case going on now in Lisbon in which several members of Arquenaticas were caught robbing a large bronze 17th century cannon from a shipwreck near Lisbon. They were arrested, prosecuted and Alves was quick to tell the press that they had resigned from Arquenautica a short time before - a bloody lie! Then there is a matter that I personally observed. During the construction of the Cultural Center of Belem, which is only 50 meters from Alves? old office in the National Museum of Archaeology, numerous old shipwrecks were ex-posed by bulldozers (this area is landfill and long ago was part of the Tagus River) and Alves and his staff did nothing about even pick-ing up any of the uncovered objects, let alone do any archaeology on the site. Yes, I scream quite often and I did so numerous times to Alves when these depredations were going on. Alves? only reply was that he was short of staff and had no funds for the operation. Just how much money is needed to excavate objects before buildings were built over them losing them forever? And even more recently during the construction of a railroad extension (Cais do Sodre) the whole lower hull of a 16th or 17th large ship was exposed. Other than his photo taken for the press at the site, Nobody in Portugal - not Alves or Arquenautica did anything. The site is now covered over forever.
Castro keeps saying that I am lying when I claim to have found two Phoenician wrecks in the Arade River (Portimao). The fact is I did find these ships way back in 1963, dove on them later on, and then during the dredging of the river they were obliterated forever! So I first made a big deal in the media about this construction or I should say destruction and the best way for Alves not to lose face was to say that I invented the wrecks. Then when I wrote about this in the UNESCO "Courier" magazine, as well as about the dozens of other Classical Period wrecks destroyed at Sines, south of Lisboa, they took even more offense. I watched the dredge boats at Sines spitting out parts of dozens of wrecks on the beach where the sediment was used as landfill and the biggest oil refinery in Portugal now stands.
And even more recently Portugal and Alves felt like jerks when a great deal of international outrage arose over Foz da Coa. In northern Portugal there is a river which has Stone Age markings on hundreds of stones along the 12 miles of riverbank and the govern-ment decided to use this river as part of a water reservoir being constructed. Alves was the first to say that it was O.K. to cover over these priceless archaeological treasures. Castro keeps referring to my big political connections. Well sometimes they serve all man-kind which is what happened in the case of Foz da Coa. Despite the international bad press (even in Archaeology magazine) to stop this desecration, the government was going to go ahead anyway. It was "my big connections?, in this case my contacting President Mario Soares (since retired as President of Portugal) who went to the site personally and then announced that the site would be protected and not covered over by the reservoir. I didn't see Alves, Castro or my other detractors do a damn thing to protect this site! They were too busy harassing me and fighting against the Shipwreck Law.
And now lets talk about "Dr Jean Yves Blot" and his "brilliant work" as Castro describes him. First off all Blot does not have a Ph.D. As far as "his brilliant work during the past 15 years" this "work" mainly consists of his working two brief summers over ten years ago on the San Pedro Alcantara and finding only a few dozen artifacts and some silver coins. Is he a ?treasure hunter? because he found coins?
The fact is that the first summer expedition on the San Pedro ended prematurely because of the scant funds allotted by the National Museum of Archaeology. According to Blot, who instituted a law suit against Alves, the funds were squandered by Alves buying himself a jeep, which he still has today.
I know Blot and his wife very well and for years treated them as part of my family. For many years they worked with me on shipwrecks in the Bahamas, Florida, Philippines, etc. And in one instance I worked for them on a project in Mauritius. Both of them spent years working for me doing archival work in Spain, Portugal and elsewhere. A great deal of this data was turned over to Alves when the National Museum of Arch. made what they called ''the Chart of Portugal? showing hundreds of sites of shipwrecks with supporting data. Ironically, after Maria Luisa Blot spent three years working in the National Museum of Arch putting this "chart" and supporting documentation together, Alves fired her. And until Alves lost his job at the museum only he had access to this ?chart? and data.
WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? Jealousy would be a good place to start. Yes I have been trying for 36 years to work in the Azores and came damn close to making this life-long dream come true when I was finally able to get Portugal to produce a Shipwreck Law. Alves and his cronies knew that the minute I got the permit for Terceira Island that I would pro-duce great results and although this would be great for the Portuguese in general, especially with EXPO 98 opening in Lisboa in 15 months from now, it would be bad for Alves. It would show that during his long sojourn working in the National Museum of Arch and the countless expeditions and expenditures of money, his work in underwater archaeology produced NOTHING ! I and the other 10 groups applying for per-mits to work in mainland Portugal and the Azores would find fabulous archaeological treasures and this would make Alves and his minions look like complete amateurs - which is exactly what they are. If they did such good and important work already, where the hell is a single archaeological report? None exist.
When it became apparent that despite all the crap they spread about me, I would finally get the permit for Terceira Island, Alves made one last stab at stopping me. He went to the Azores stating that he was against the Portuguese Shipwreck Law, that he believed that all the shipwrecks belonged to the Azoreans and not the mainland gove-rnment, and that he would lead them in bringing up the goodies from countless wrecks. In Terceira he helped set up the "Friends of the Museum of Angra (the local port used for centuries) and promised to lead them to greatness. He did a brief seminar, allegedly teaching these kids (mainly local spearfishermen) the basics of underwater archaeology. Friends of mine who attended the five day course des-cribed it as a "funny circus" and it amounted to nothing more than everyone rushing off from shore, grabbing a few artifacts off the bottom and proudly coming back claiming ?we don?t need Bob Marx to find our treasures, we can do it ourselves.? Then in true Alves fashion, he abonded the "Friends" and instead is messing around with projects on the main-land. So the "Friends? then sought help from Bass? I.N.A. who conducted a brief survey several months ago. Their big find was a 19th century wreck everyone on the island already knew about.
There are over 2,000 shipwrecks dating between 1437 and 1850 (according to my research) and less than 5%, of these lay in waters reachable by scuba diving. My goal was to find these deep water wrecks, some of which I know lay in anaerobic areas and are semi-intact, and work on them using - ROVs and submersibles - something I have been doing a great deal of during the past 25 years. Can I.N.A. or the "Friends" find money to run a deep water operation which costs an average of $35,000 per day? I sincerely doubt it. In the end the people of the Azores, Portugal and everyone throughout the world will suffer from this deep water work never being done because of the jealousy of Alves -and his cronies. ?As Castro states in one of his dispatches: ?We have never had money problems and yet we are very poor. And that?s because we do it for pleasure. With our guts. We are no mercenary business men.?
Castro is right about never having any money problems and that's mainly because they never do
anything! And when they do it's more like a summer boy scout outing then a serious underwater
archaeological project. About 10-12 years ago I visited two of these summer outings in the
Algarve when they "working? on the L?Ocean and I had a big laugh both times. There was a lack of
skills and leadership. The work consisted of tying lines between cannons (not setting up proper grid), tagging the guns and taking some underwater photos - just as they did the year before and the year after. The only recovery was bringing up a few of the guns. We lived ashore in tents and more time was spent spearfishing, as there was always a shortage of food, and drinking like Prohibition times.
I might add that doing it for "pleasure? does not produce any results, other than Alves being able to claim they did some under-water archaeology. This business is not about "pleasure". This busi-ness is a BUSINESS and it takes great amounts of money, technology, equipment, and tenacity --something that Alves, Castro, etc. do not have and I doubt will ever have.
Furthermore, I really enjoyed Castro referring to me as "boring" and in the private communication to you he said I was a "funny bunny" and "a greedy old fart, and a "fat asshole disguised as a scientist". I wonder what he is going to say when I make my next trip to Lisbon and confront him face to face? I'm going to give him the opportunity to say all this to my face and then this "fat old Man" is going to teach him a lesson in manners!
I was going to tackle all of the other things said about me by others in the various communications but
unlike most of those blasting me, I'm too busy to sit around and write garbage. This "old" body still
has a lot more good underwater archaeology to do and I'm off Monday on another expedition in the
Far East. Maybe I?ll be lucky enough to run into Jeremy Greene and over beers - which he loves- tell
him the whole story about the Flor do Mar. As I mentioned in the beginning, feel free to send this
letter to anyone - especially to Castro!
Happy Holidays,
Robert F. Marx
May 1, 1997
Dear Mr. Frazier
Thanks for telephoning me about the things you have been reading about me on the Internet. As I told you on the telephone, I'm too busy working in various underwater archaeological projects around the globe to waste time reading what numerous people are saying about me. In most cases, I bet, these people have never even been on a shipwreck and some probably don't even know how to dive. Instead they get their kicks by blasting people like me who have accomplished so much in their lives. It's just a bad case of jealousy.
Your big question was ?Why don't I respond to these accusa-tions and lies ?" Well, I just don?t want to stoop down to their level and provide entertainment for everyone who subscribes to Sub-Arch.
Instead, I am sending you a copy of a letter I wrote to Tom Gidus last December - who, like you, contacted me about the slander on Sub-Arch. If you can, get these letters on Sub-Arch. If this doesn't quiet my few detractors, then I really don't care one way or the other.
Portugal is a great nation with a fabulous maritime past and its a shame when people like Dr. Margaret Rule and Robert Stenuit try to show the world this past and some jerks do everything possible to stop them.
My critics keep talk-ing about the wonderful work they are doing in Portugal on ship-wrecks. Where are the results ? Where are the archaeological pub-lications ? All they do is talk and talk and do virtually nothing underwater.
Anyhow, many thanks for your interest in protecting my re-putation. What I have done in my life stands for itself and no mat-ter what some jerks say -won't change what I have accomplished in the field of underwater archaeology.
Best Regards,
Robert F. Marx
December 27, 1996
Mr. Tom Gidus
Historic Shipwreck Salvors
1037 Covington St.
Oviedo, FL. 32765
Dear Tom:
Many thanks for your letter and the copies of the sick communications going back and forth on SUB-ARCH. I just had a meeting with my lawyer and he feels that we have a great libel/slander suit both in the US -against SUB-ARCH (Anita Cohen Williams) and in Portugal against Filipe Castro (my lawyer in Lisbon has wanted to go after him for a long time for the lies he has been putting in the Portuguese press about me.)
The amazing thing is that until recently I was unaware of all this crap going on about me on the internet (SUB-ARCH). Various people sent copies of some of the trash to my wife but she knew I would go ballistic so she kept it a secret. She tried numerous times to subscribe to SUB-ARCH but was denied access. I find this incredible; SUB-ARCH has permitted Filipe Castro and others to lie about me but denies me the forum to respond to these blatant lies!
I'm very sorry that they blackballed you. However, I want to thank you and all the others who stood up for me and tried to get some truth into the matter. If you have any way to get this letter on SUB-ARCH, please go ahead as you have my full permission. Or at least send it to some of the subscribers so they will know the truth.
I don?t know where to start since I'm sure that I don't have copies of all of the stuff about me that has appeared on SUB-ARCH. So I will be jumping around from topic to topic in an attempt to show you the truth. Some of the stuff I have actually found very funny such as the business about my knighthood. I was made a Knight-Commander in the Order of Isabela the Catholic in 1963 for making my Nina II voyage. It was hilarious to read Filipe Castro saying that I got the knighthood from Franco when Spain was a Fascist Government. He obviously forgot that when Franco was in power the Portuguese were under Salazar - a fascist!
Since all of this controversy about me started with Filipe Castro, I guess it is best to start with him. He claims he met me but he couldn?t have left much of an impression on me as I don?t remember the meeting. He most likely attended one of the more than 50 lectures on underwater archaeology that I have given in Portugal in the last 20 years. Actually we should start with his ?boss?. In his recent private E-Mail to you he started it with "My boss was really pissed off that I might be pro-voking the anger of Robert Marx so I propose we amuse ourselves in private." This "Boss? he refers to is Dr. Francisco Alves who is the Director Arquenautica. Sometimes he also refers to Alves as the Director of the National Archaeological Museum of Portugal. Alves was fired (not retired as he claims) from that post in August 1995 (a feat that I am proud to say I had some input into). Until about five years ago Alves and I were actually friends. However, this ended when my lawyer started to draft the new shipwreck law for Portugal and did not seek Alves? advice. The fact is Alves is not all that knowledgeable in U.W. arch. and there were so many other people around who could provide better advice. I even have a letter from Alves prior to these troubles in which he asks to work for me if I ever got the permit to work in the Azores.
Let?s look at Alves? record. Castro refers to the three important wrecks found in Portugal in recent years but he neglected to mention that all three were founded by amateur sport divers. Alves did make several very brief surveys on each site, but did almost no excavation, and found virtually -nothing but exposed cannons-and published no archaeological reports! However he did get a great deal of publicity, which he loves. Two years ago at the Lisbon Subtrerranean exhibition at the National Museum in Lisboa, an exhibition about the Roman and medieval artifacts found under the city, the only artifacts displayed in the section dealing with underwater archaeology were artifacts found by dredge boats and sport divers. There was not one goodie found by Alves, his museum or his Arquenautica group.
The reason that the "Boss" (Alves) is not doing his own dirty work and has his flunky Castro doing it
for him, is because my lawyer in Lisbon threatened to sue him for slander shutting him up for good.
During the time that we were working on the Portuguese shipwreck law (1989-1994) Alves led a
vicious campaign to discredit my lawyer, me and others working on the law. They did everything
possible to prevent the law from being made into law - which was done in August 1994. Mainly, Alves
attacked me in the press. In one magazine article he claimed that I never wrote an archaeological
report dealing with any of my work, so on my next trip to Portugal I brought a pile of my reports
over two feet high, and took the man to lunch who wrote the article and he then made a retraction.
Then Alves claimed I tried to sell a fake astrolabe to the King of Spain. Here are the facts: The King
of Spain is a friend of mine and I have spent time diving with him in Majorca. If the King wanted an
astrolabe, I would give him a real one. How this lie got started, and keeps coming up over and over
again, despite my proving it false, is the following. For three years I had a traveling Exhibition in
Spain named Las Flotas De Las Indias sponsored by the Quinto Centennario Commission (an official body of the Spanish Government). It contained artifacts I found on over dozen different ship-wrecks dating as far back as the El Matanceros wreck I found on the coast of Yucatan. Visitors to the to the exhibition (including the King who opened the opening exhibition in Madrid) were given catalogues showing many of the objects on display. The Spaniards goofed in making the cata-logue and the page showing a coral encrusted astrolabe listed it as a replica (a pretty dumb mistake since it was coral encrusted!) and on the page with the replica astrolabe, they listed it as an original. I could go on and on about the other lies that Alves created and are still being spread by Castro, but I don?t have the time.
Now its time to attack Alves and archaeology in general in Portugal. There is a court case going on now in Lisbon in which several members of Arquenaticas were caught robbing a large bronze 17th century cannon from a shipwreck near Lisbon. They were arrested, prosecuted and Alves was quick to tell the press that they had resigned from Arquenautica a short time before - a bloody lie! Then there is a matter that I personally observed. During the construction of the Cultural Center of Belem, which is only 50 meters from Alves? old office in the National Museum of Archaeology, numerous old shipwrecks were ex-posed by bulldozers (this area is landfill and long ago was part of the Tagus River) and Alves and his staff did nothing about even pick-ing up any of the uncovered objects, let alone do any archaeology on the site. Yes, I scream quite often and I did so numerous times to Alves when these depredations were going on. Alves? only reply was that he was short of staff and had no funds for the operation. Just how much money is needed to excavate objects before buildings were built over them losing them forever? And even more recently during the construction of a railroad extension (Cais do Sodre) the whole lower hull of a 16th or 17th large ship was exposed. Other than his photo taken for the press at the site, Nobody in Portugal - not Alves or Arquenautica did anything. The site is now covered over forever.
Castro keeps saying that I am lying when I claim to have found two Phoenician wrecks in the Arade River (Portimao). The fact is I did find these ships way back in 1963, dove on them later on, and then during the dredging of the river they were obliterated forever! So I first made a big deal in the media about this construction or I should say destruction and the best way for Alves not to lose face was to say that I invented the wrecks. Then when I wrote about this in the UNESCO "Courier" magazine, as well as about the dozens of other Classical Period wrecks destroyed at Sines, south of Lisboa, they took even more offense. I watched the dredge boats at Sines spitting out parts of dozens of wrecks on the beach where the sediment was used as landfill and the biggest oil refinery in Portugal now stands.
And even more recently Portugal and Alves felt like jerks when a great deal of international outrage arose over Foz da Coa. In northern Portugal there is a river which has Stone Age markings on hundreds of stones along the 12 miles of riverbank and the govern-ment decided to use this river as part of a water reservoir being constructed. Alves was the first to say that it was O.K. to cover over these priceless archaeological treasures. Castro keeps referring to my big political connections. Well sometimes they serve all man-kind which is what happened in the case of Foz da Coa. Despite the international bad press (even in Archaeology magazine) to stop this desecration, the government was going to go ahead anyway. It was "my big connections?, in this case my contacting President Mario Soares (since retired as President of Portugal) who went to the site personally and then announced that the site would be protected and not covered over by the reservoir. I didn't see Alves, Castro or my other detractors do a damn thing to protect this site! They were too busy harassing me and fighting against the Shipwreck Law.
And now lets talk about "Dr Jean Yves Blot" and his "brilliant work" as Castro describes him. First off all Blot does not have a Ph.D. As far as "his brilliant work during the past 15 years" this "work" mainly consists of his working two brief summers over ten years ago on the San Pedro Alcantara and finding only a few dozen artifacts and some silver coins. Is he a ?treasure hunter? because he found coins?
The fact is that the first summer expedition on the San Pedro ended prematurely because of the scant funds allotted by the National Museum of Archaeology. According to Blot, who instituted a law suit against Alves, the funds were squandered by Alves buying himself a jeep, which he still has today.
I know Blot and his wife very well and for years treated them as part of my family. For many years they worked with me on shipwrecks in the Bahamas, Florida, Philippines, etc. And in one instance I worked for them on a project in Mauritius. Both of them spent years working for me doing archival work in Spain, Portugal and elsewhere. A great deal of this data was turned over to Alves when the National Museum of Arch. made what they called ''the Chart of Portugal? showing hundreds of sites of shipwrecks with supporting data. Ironically, after Maria Luisa Blot spent three years working in the National Museum of Arch putting this "chart" and supporting documentation together, Alves fired her. And until Alves lost his job at the museum only he had access to this ?chart? and data.
WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? Jealousy would be a good place to start. Yes I have been trying for 36 years to work in the Azores and came damn close to making this life-long dream come true when I was finally able to get Portugal to produce a Shipwreck Law. Alves and his cronies knew that the minute I got the permit for Terceira Island that I would pro-duce great results and although this would be great for the Portuguese in general, especially with EXPO 98 opening in Lisboa in 15 months from now, it would be bad for Alves. It would show that during his long sojourn working in the National Museum of Arch and the countless expeditions and expenditures of money, his work in underwater archaeology produced NOTHING ! I and the other 10 groups applying for per-mits to work in mainland Portugal and the Azores would find fabulous archaeological treasures and this would make Alves and his minions look like complete amateurs - which is exactly what they are. If they did such good and important work already, where the hell is a single archaeological report? None exist.
When it became apparent that despite all the crap they spread about me, I would finally get the permit for Terceira Island, Alves made one last stab at stopping me. He went to the Azores stating that he was against the Portuguese Shipwreck Law, that he believed that all the shipwrecks belonged to the Azoreans and not the mainland gove-rnment, and that he would lead them in bringing up the goodies from countless wrecks. In Terceira he helped set up the "Friends of the Museum of Angra (the local port used for centuries) and promised to lead them to greatness. He did a brief seminar, allegedly teaching these kids (mainly local spearfishermen) the basics of underwater archaeology. Friends of mine who attended the five day course des-cribed it as a "funny circus" and it amounted to nothing more than everyone rushing off from shore, grabbing a few artifacts off the bottom and proudly coming back claiming ?we don?t need Bob Marx to find our treasures, we can do it ourselves.? Then in true Alves fashion, he abonded the "Friends" and instead is messing around with projects on the main-land. So the "Friends? then sought help from Bass? I.N.A. who conducted a brief survey several months ago. Their big find was a 19th century wreck everyone on the island already knew about.
There are over 2,000 shipwrecks dating between 1437 and 1850 (according to my research) and less than 5%, of these lay in waters reachable by scuba diving. My goal was to find these deep water wrecks, some of which I know lay in anaerobic areas and are semi-intact, and work on them using - ROVs and submersibles - something I have been doing a great deal of during the past 25 years. Can I.N.A. or the "Friends" find money to run a deep water operation which costs an average of $35,000 per day? I sincerely doubt it. In the end the people of the Azores, Portugal and everyone throughout the world will suffer from this deep water work never being done because of the jealousy of Alves -and his cronies. ?As Castro states in one of his dispatches: ?We have never had money problems and yet we are very poor. And that?s because we do it for pleasure. With our guts. We are no mercenary business men.?
Castro is right about never having any money problems and that's mainly because they never do
anything! And when they do it's more like a summer boy scout outing then a serious underwater
archaeological project. About 10-12 years ago I visited two of these summer outings in the
Algarve when they "working? on the L?Ocean and I had a big laugh both times. There was a lack of
skills and leadership. The work consisted of tying lines between cannons (not setting up proper grid), tagging the guns and taking some underwater photos - just as they did the year before and the year after. The only recovery was bringing up a few of the guns. We lived ashore in tents and more time was spent spearfishing, as there was always a shortage of food, and drinking like Prohibition times.
I might add that doing it for "pleasure? does not produce any results, other than Alves being able to claim they did some under-water archaeology. This business is not about "pleasure". This busi-ness is a BUSINESS and it takes great amounts of money, technology, equipment, and tenacity --something that Alves, Castro, etc. do not have and I doubt will ever have.
Furthermore, I really enjoyed Castro referring to me as "boring" and in the private communication to you he said I was a "funny bunny" and "a greedy old fart, and a "fat asshole disguised as a scientist". I wonder what he is going to say when I make my next trip to Lisbon and confront him face to face? I'm going to give him the opportunity to say all this to my face and then this "fat old Man" is going to teach him a lesson in manners!
I was going to tackle all of the other things said about me by others in the various communications but
unlike most of those blasting me, I'm too busy to sit around and write garbage. This "old" body still
has a lot more good underwater archaeology to do and I'm off Monday on another expedition in the
Far East. Maybe I?ll be lucky enough to run into Jeremy Greene and over beers - which he loves- tell
him the whole story about the Flor do Mar. As I mentioned in the beginning, feel free to send this
letter to anyone - especially to Castro!
Happy Holidays,
Robert F. Marx
