For most people, time travel is a complete impossibility. For Corey Malcom, it’s a way of life. (And yes, there’s only one L in his last name.)
That’s because Malcom, lead historian for the Florida Keys History Center and a renowned shipwreck archaeologist, has spent most of his professional life immersed in Key West’s past.
He has overseen the preservation of artifacts excavated from the wrecks of the Spanish galleons Nuestra Señora de Atocha and Santa Margarita, both sunk off the Marquesas Keys in a 1622 hurricane. He spearheaded the conservation of materials from the English merchant slave ship Henrietta Marie, wrecked 35 miles off Key West in 1700 and yielding vital knowledge about the tragic trade.
He also helped lead a team that rediscovered Key West’s 1860 African Burial Ground, a Higgs Beach site believed to be the only African refugee cemetery in the United States, and currently spends his days exploring varied aspects and eras of Key West and Florida Keys history.
“If you’re interested in the past, the Florida Keys are the place to be,” Malcom said, surrounded by books, documents and vintage photographs at his desk at the history center. “It seems like practically everything in the world has happened here at some point or another — certainly within the last 500 years.”
Malcom was an Indiana graduate student when he first saw Key West in 1985, shortly after local shipwreck salvor Mel Fisher discovered the $450 million “mother lode” of the Atocha — arguably the most fantastic archaeological find since the opening of King Tut’s tomb. His employer at the time, hired as a contract archaeologist on the Atocha project, brought his top assistants down to help.
“I had been working in archaeology for a couple of years, but the Atocha experience changed the course of my life,” Malcom said with a reminiscent smile. “I was totally, completely smitten with shipwrecks.”
The Atocha yielded a priceless cargo of gold and silver bars and coins, as well as personal jewelry, rare religious artifacts and thousands of emeralds. During the excavation of the site, however, Malcom was most fascinated by objects whose primary value wasn’t monetary.
“I remember we brought an astrolabe, a bronze navigational device, up on deck and it had a little wing nut on the back of it, holding part of it together,” he said. “This thing had been underwater almost 400 years, and that little wing nut still worked perfectly. That was such a moment for me.”
When the contract work ended, Malcom didn’t return to Indiana. Instead, he began a career with Key West’s Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, a nonprofit educational and research organization established by Fisher. In 1988, he became the director of archaeology.
His tenure with the society and its fully accredited Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, which holds the Western Hemisphere’s richest single collection of 17th-century maritime and shipwreck antiquities, lasted some 35 years. As well as excavating, conserving and studying artifacts from the 1622 galleons and the Henrietta Marie, he guided archaeological exploration and identification of the Santa Clara — an astonishingly complete shipwreck dating back to 1564 — and numerous other projects.
During that time Malcom married Lisa Petrone and they had two children, Robert and Alexandra, now attending college in Tallahassee. He also has an older son, Cameron, who works at the State Department.
Malcom still undertakes work for the society, but in 2022 his passion for history led him in a new direction. While researching regional shipwrecks, he had often consulted with historian and longtime friend Tom Hambright, head of the Florida Keys History Center and its extensive archive at the Key West library. When Hambright decided to retire, Malcom became his successor.
“I always said if there’s one other job that I’d like to have, it would be doing what Tom was doing,” he said, “because there’s just so much here to study.”
His duties these days include helping people find answers relating to local history or properties, continuing to digitize and itemize the center’s vast collection of photos and documents, and adding to its popular online photo archive that now holds some 26,000 images.
Malcom also researches and writes “This Day in Keys History,” which appears on the center’s social media platforms and in the Citizen newspaper, and maintains the rare materials contained in the facility’s climate-controlled fireproof vault — from centuries-old handwritten diaries, logbooks and maps to accounts of the shipwreck salvage industry that brought great wealth to 19th-century Key West.
“I’m not diving underwater and finding cool artifacts, but it’s just as thrilling to scan a negative that nobody’s seen in a hundred years,” said the man whose career continues to take him traveling through time. “In this office, we’re doing everything we can to gather, preserve and make available the history of the Florida Keys — and I just love it.”
