Jacques Cousteau (20 page)

After its harrowing beginning, Cousteau’s first expedition to the Red Sea with
Calypso
was a thirty-eight-day triumph. The geologists found
evidence of oil-bearing shale and volcanic mineral deposits using the echo sounders. Aqua-Lung divers systematically took samples from different layers of water down to 150 feet, giving the hydrologists glimpses into the complexity of seawater. Aided by divers with nets, spearguns, and explosives, the biologists caught and jugged hundreds of sea creatures, many of them new to science. Cherbonnier and Drach named three of them in honor of their ship, its captains, and the expedition commander:
Calypseus, Saouti
, and
Cousteaui
.

Over the vast coral reefs in crystalline water, Cousteau and Dumas shot color movie film underwater, and still photographer Ertaud took hundreds of pictures using Kodak Ektachrome transparency film. They used lights in waterproof housings powered by electrical cables from the surface for the deepwater work, and captured spectacular images of parrot fish, jacks, bonitos, sardines, triggerfish, and dam-selfish. Their pictures of corals, sponges, and other invertebrates were equally sensational, wild splashes of color that looked like organ pipes, deer antlers, and petrified plants, none of which had ever been seen by people other than pearl divers.

As
Calypso
steamed home through the Suez Canal, Cousteau and his crew enjoyed raucous, hours-long meals under the glowering portrait of Pierre Cambronne, confident that what had seemed like a pipe dream a month and a half earlier could become reality. With scientific grants and charters from oil companies and other commercial ventures, they would very likely be able to fulfill what for Cousteau was really their mission: to film the world underwater and show it to the world above.

When Cousteau got back to Toulon, he received a letter from James Dugan, the American writer who had broken the story on the first menfish two years earlier. For Dugan, the article was just the beginning. Now, he suggested that the photographs and logs from the Red Sea would make a great book. Cousteau was much more intent on eventually producing a full-length movie, but Dugan’s idea made sense. No one but
Calypso
and its divers had perfected the combination of the Aqua-Lung and underwater cameras. The results would surely captivate readers as well as theater audiences. In addition to publicizing the equipment Cousteau was testing, a book might even contribute to the bottom line of French Oceanographic Expeditions.

With a suitcase full of his Red Sea photographs, his notebooks, and
an outline for an article he hoped to sell to
National Geographic
, Cousteau boarded an Air France Lockheed Constellation in Paris and flew to New York to meet Dugan and Perry Miller. While he was gone, his crew would resupply
Calypso
for its next expedition to the wreck of an ancient Greek freighter reported to be off the coast near Marseille. Sunken treasure also had the potential of turning a profit for
Calypso
, and the film of Aqua-Lung divers salvaging two-thousand-year-old artifacts would be sensational.

Cousteau and Dugan decided that their book should begin with the invention of the Aqua-Lung and end with the successful expedition to the Red Sea. It would be the story of the first human beings in history to swim free underwater. Dugan happily agreed to ghostwrite the book from the notebooks and logs of Cousteau and Dumas. Dumas would be a coauthor. Philippe Tailliez had also been with Cousteau from the beginning, but he would not share credit on the cover of the book. Cousteau was still deeply attached to the memory of their time together, but when Tailliez chose the navy over
Calypso
, Cousteau’s old friend became part of the past.

Leaving Dugan to prepare a proposal for selling the book to a publisher, Cousteau went to Washington, D.C., to see Gilbert Grosvenor, president, editor, and son of the founder of the National Geographic Society. Grosvenor jumped at the chance to publish the account of the expedition to the Red Sea with photographs. What else, he wanted to know, did Cousteau have planned? Cousteau was ready for the question. The society had been sponsoring expeditions since it awarded Robert Peary $1,000 for his quest to reach the North Pole, and had since funded William Beebe and Otis Barton’s bathysphere descents, Auguste Piccard’s balloon flights into the stratosphere, and countless other pioneering adventures.

Cousteau had no doubts that
Calypso
should fly the flag of the National Geographic Society as well as the French tricolor. He proposed an expedition to take stock of all the world’s oceans using not only Aqua-Lung divers but a pressurized submarine capable of reaching depths of 1,000 feet. With
Calypso
as the mother ship for the divers and the sub, he told Grosvenor,
National Geographic
would help him banish the world’s ignorance of the most vital, fascinating, and mysterious realm on the planet. Grosvenor did not sign a check on the spot, but he was clearly interested. What is your biggest problem?
Grosvenor asked. Aside from money, that would be lights for deep-ocean photography, Cousteau said. As a first step, Grosvenor suggested that Cousteau immediately meet some other members of the society’s board, its staff, and a man who might help with lights. Harold E. Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had succeeded in freezing what the eye cannot see with strobe lights and shutter speeds of a millionth of a second, Grosvenor explained. He might be interested in helping solve the puzzles of underwater lighting.

On his way home to France, Cousteau passed through New York, where he met again with Perry Miller, who had more good news. The flood of technological innovation in cameras, film stock, and audio recording had thrown the movie business into a revolution that was bringing heightened reality and intimacy to films. One of Miller’s new jobs was to find new documentaries for CBS television. The producers of a ninety-minute weekly show called
Omnibus
wanted very much to see whatever Cousteau did next.

The future for French Oceanographic Expeditions looked promising, but until
National Geographic
made its decision to support Cousteau’s ambitious survey of the oceans or CBS signed a contract, he had to put
Calypso
to work to make some money. Dumas came up with what sounded like the perfect idea. A year before, one of the first independent Aqua-Lung divers, Gaston Christianini, had surfaced too quickly, got hit with a severe case of the bends, and was taken by ambulance to the Undersea Research Group’s recompression chamber in Toulon. Christianini lost his toes but survived, becoming friends with Dumas, who tended him in the chamber and afterward in the hospital. He had been scraping out a living salvaging scrap from the seafloor, but after his accident he said he was finished with diving forever. Out of gratitude, Christianini spent an afternoon before leaving the hospital telling Dumas what he had seen during his hundreds of hours underwater off the Riviera. He talked about enormous piles of military scrap from which the salvaged metal was endless, secret places where there were thousands of lobsters, rock piles on the coast where he always found giant groupers and other big fish. What had interested Dumas most, however, was Christianini’s recollection of piles of old jars a few hundred meters off the barren rock called Grand-Congloue, just 12 miles from Marseille.

Cousteau and Dumas knew from past experience that Christianini’s
jars might be amphorae from a wrecked Roman ship. They remembered the immense satisfactions of their underwater archaeological expeditions aboard
L’Elie Monnier
, and decided to risk the little remaining cash in the French Oceanographic Expeditions’ treasury to retrieve at least a sample from the wreck. If it proved to be important enough for an all-out recovery job, Cousteau would approach the Borely Museum in Marseille and maybe even
National Geographic
to pay for it. With a job like that, French Oceanographic Expeditions could survive until Cousteau raised the money for his grand exploration of the world’s oceans.

In midsummer 1952,
Calypso
sailed with Cousteau, Dumas, and enough men for the day trip to Grand-Congloue. The director of antiquities of Provence, Fernand Benoît, was aboard to immediately determine the provenance of the jars when they brought one of them to the surface. Cousteau anchored
Calypso
well off the jagged white cliffs of the island, and left the ship in a launch with Benoît and Dumas, who would make the first dive. Dumas went over the side wearing triple tanks and surfaced twenty minutes later. He had found the underwater arch Christianini had described but no sign of amphorae, a shipwreck, or anything that looked remotely like a jar.

Noticing Benoît’s frustration at having taken a full day out of his schedule because a scrap diver had passed on a tale about sunken treasure, Cousteau said he would dive to take a look himself. Because of his trip to New York and chronic ear trouble, Cousteau hadn’t been in the water in three months, but he didn’t want to give up without searching a wider area in the same vicinity. Christianini had had no reason to make up the story.

Passing 50 feet, Cousteau felt good, no pain in his ears. At 170 feet, where he could clearly see the bottom, he began to feel the onset of nitrogen narcosis. No amphorae. He forced himself to pay attention, knowing that at that depth breathing ordinary compressed air he had a maximum of ten minutes left before the rapture would force him to decompress and surface.

“My right hand means south,” Cousteau thought, struggling to remember how he had oriented himself during his descent. He looked south, toward the arch where Dumas had come up empty. Visibility was 100 feet. There was nothing but the gray talus and boulders of the sloping bottom.

“My left hand means north.” He moved off in that direction, knowing that Dumas and the others in the launch would simply follow his bubbles to keep up with him. Fatigue reminded him that he was out of shape, and he slowed his kick as he scanned the bottom. Nothing. Then he saw something, a long dark object rising from the bottom. He descended to investigate, felt himself swooning into the fog of narcosis, and checked his depth gauge. Two hundred and fifty feet. “Stupid,” Cousteau thought, kicking back up to 170 feet and encountering what he assumed to be the upward sloping edge of the island. He tripped his reserve valve to give himself an extra five minutes on the bottom.

And there it was. Looking like an object in a museum diorama of an ancient shipwreck, an amphora lay half buried on the slope in front of him. With the last measure of his strength, Cousteau pulled the amphora free of the bottom and stood it upright as a marker he or Dumas could easily find on their next dive. He ascended slowly up the slope he believed to be the rocky outcrop of the island. At a depth of 100 feet, Cousteau realized that he had been swimming over a huge mound of cargo and debris from a shipwreck. He hovered for his first decompression stop, reached into the wreckage through the fog of narcosis, and picked up what looked like three stone chalices. Ten feet from the surface, he stopped to breathe off the rest of his air, hoping it would be enough for complete decompression. His brain cleared, and he marveled at what he held in his hands.

“These cups are almost certainly Campanian ware,” Benoît said, while Cousteau lay exhausted on the deck of the launch. “It is enough evidence to assume that the wreck is as old as the second century before Christ.”

Dumas asked Benoît if it was worth an all-out salvage job.

“Absolutely,” the antiquarian said.

If Benoît was right about the provenance of the cups, the discovery would be among the most sensational of all time in the young field of underwater archaeology, which claimed only a handful of important shipwrecks. A week later, Cousteau had promises of funding from the museum, the city of Marseille, and
National Geographic
.

Salvaging artifacts on a scale as large as what apparently lay on the bottom off Grand-Congloue was not simply a matter of sending divers down to pick things up and bring them to the surface. In the
great heap Cousteau had seen there would surely be many artifacts, requiring that divers remove hundreds of tons of rock, sediment, and debris to get at them. To invent methods and machines for the specialized job, Cousteau created his second nonprofit corporation. The French Office of Undersea Technology, based in Toulon, would promote development of underwater exploration tools, patent them, and manage the revenues they generated.

For the better part of a year—with cameras rolling on deck and underwater—Cousteau and his crew worked from
Calypso
and a base on shore to raise thousands of artifacts. The amphorae, Campanian pottery, and pieces of the wreckage were from not one but two Roman ships that sank more than two thousand years ago. To clear the sediment and debris without breaking the artifacts, they used a suction dredge powered by a gas-powered compressor onshore. It was a finicky contraption, but when it worked a diver blasted air into the debris pile, loosening shards, artifacts, rocks, and wood, which were sucked into a second larger hose by the pressure differential between the surface and the depth of 130 feet. Divers also used baskets lowered by a deck crane and air bags to raise amphorae and other large pieces to the surface.

Though the salvage job off Grand-Congloue barely paid for itself, it made headlines and newsreels all over Europe. In one film clip, Cousteau is shown taking a drink of 2,200-year-old wine from one of the amphorae. The expedition became a cause célèbre on the Mediterranean coast, drawing sailboats and launches full of curious spectators to the island. Because of the publicity, the job also attracted several new crew members to
Calypso
, young men for whom the adventure was more the reward than the salary. Among them were two sixteen-year-olds, Albert Falco and Raymond Coll, and the more seasoned divers André Laban, Henri Goiran, Raymond Kientzy, Yves Girault, and Jean-Pierre Servanti. Together with Dumas and the others who remained from the Red Sea expedition, they formed what Cousteau hoped would be the nucleus of
Calypso’s
crew for years to come. They were tireless, every man brought diving and one or more other essential skills to the expedition, and Cousteau simply could not ignore the fact that they were incredibly charismatic and photogenic. He had sensational scenes of his men working underwater, but the shots of them kidding around on deck and sitting down in Roman togas for a
meal on Grand-Congloue added unique dimensions of charm and character to his film. Simone was rarely seen on camera, so life as a
Calypso
diver was a man’s fantasy world both above and below the surface. Cousteau was quick to recognize that Dumas, Falco, Laban, and the rest were natural movie stars.