626 Casa Bella Drive • Bradenton, Florida 34209
e-mail: peckhistory@earthlink.net

The New World Explorers, Inc., is a non-profit educational corporation chartered by the State of Florida and approved by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Officers of the corporation and Advisory Board members are dedicated scholars in the broad discipline of history and serve in their particular specialty without pay or remuneration. The corporation is dedicated to historical research of seafaring exploration voyages in the New World during the prehistoric and early Spanish historic period. Another goal and function of the corporation is to publish scholarly papers of independent historians and make them available to students, libraries, and the lay public interested in this period of history. Independent historians or lay persons interested in becoming active in or contributing members of the organization are urged to contact the president by postal or E-Mail - peckhistory@earthlink.net.

Previous historical research under the auspices of the corporation has been centered on studies of the navigation of early Spanish and Portuguese explorers, and sixteenth-century cartography resulting from these exploration voyages. Most previous historical research of early exploration voyages has been limited to library study of extant fifteenth and sixteenth-century documents related to the subject with very little emphasis on empirical field research. The research studies of the New World Explorers, Inc., have pursued both library research and empirical field research in the voyages of Columbus (1492-1493), Ponce de Leon (1513), Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba (1517), Juan de Grijalva (1518), and presently is investigating the voyages of the Ancient Maya from northern Yucatan. The most recent and continuing studies have revealed that the prehistoric Chontal Maya from northern Yucatan were a seafaring culture who journeyed in pre-Columbian times to the islands of the Caribbean and to Florida using a form of celestial navigation centuries before it was developed in Europe.

To support the field research of prehistoric Maya explorers from the Yucatan and the research related to the early historic Spanish exploration voyages to the Yucatan, the New World Explorers, Inc., maintains an office on Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, Mexico, where Mexican scholars can obtain more information about ongoing research and bound copies of the published reports. For details, contact the office manager:
Enriqueta M. de Avila at - casaisla@cancun.com.mx