Jacques Cousteau (21 page)

The celebrated archaeological expedition took a tragic turn in November 1952. Because winter weather made it too dangerous to anchor
Calypso
so close to the rocky cliffs of Grand-Congloue, a team of six divers lived ashore in a base camp they called Port Calypso. On a routine supply run from Marseille, Cousteau arrived aboard
Calypso
to find that the mooring buoy to which he tied up the ship had been blown a half mile from its usual place by a storm the night before. Veteran diver Jean-Pierre Servanti volunteered to check out the situation. He discovered that the mooring chain between the anchor and the buoy had broken and the anchor was nowhere to be seen.

Other divers searched all day for the anchor with no luck. Finally, Servanti went back into the water to follow the furrow left in the bottom by the dragging chain. Though the sounder showed that the depth was 230 feet, Servanti thought he could make a quick dive and return to the surface without much decompression. Five minutes after he splashed into the water, his bubbles stopped. Falco, Ertaud, and Girault threw on tanks and were in the water in seconds, but they found Servanti lying dead on the bottom. All of France grieved with
Calypso’s
crew when accounts of the tragedy appeared in newspapers the following day.

The following spring, Cousteau tested the world’s first underwater television camera on the wreck at Grand-Congloue. It was in a clumsy housing that looked like half a 55-gallon oil barrel, and sent low-resolution images through a cumbersome cable to a monitor on
Calypso
, but it worked. With it, archaeologists who were not Aqua-Lung divers stood in the galley and saw for themselves what was going on 130 feet below. They could then brief divers on what to spend their time on and what to ignore.

The video camera gave Cousteau another idea for opening the underwater world to people who could not scuba dive. At lunch one afternoon, he was thinking out loud about a highly maneuverable
submarine that could do what Piccard’s clumsy bathyscaphe could not do: real work underwater.

“The
commandant
took two saucers, placed one right side up on the table and the other upside down on top of it,” Albert Falco remembered. “‘There: our submarine.’” When
Calypso
returned to Toulon, Cousteau sketched out the design of his diving saucer at the Undersea Research Group workshop. He wanted a two-man submarine that could be launched from
Calypso
, reach a depth of at least 1,000 feet, and move as freely through the water as a scuba diver.

WHEN COUSTEAU COMMISSIONED James Dugan to write the story of the invention of the Aqua-Lung and the wonders of the undersea paradise he had opened to the world, he knew the book would be an important historical document. He had no idea that it would be wildly popular. In a little over a year, Dugan had written
The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, by the First Men to Swim at Record Depths with the Freedom of Fish
. A month after publication in February 1953,
The Silent World
was on the
New York Times
best-seller list, where it remained through the summer. The first half of the book is an account of the invention of the Aqua-Lung by Cousteau and Gagnan, followed by riveting tales of
Les Mousquemers
clearing mines, cave diving, shipwreck diving, and their encounters with fish, dolphins, seals, and sharks.

Rachel Carson reviewed
The Silent World
for the
Times
. Her own 1951 book,
The Sea Around Us
, proposed that the oceans were not indestructible but fragile natural treasures threatened by the growing human population. It had won the National Book Award and been on the best-seller list for eighty-six weeks. What Carson wrote in her review of
The Silent World
anointed Cousteau as her ally and a powerful force for transforming the human relationship with the sea:

By the end of 1953,
The Silent World
had sold 486,000 copies and was being translated into French and twenty other languages. The
success of the book improved Cousteau’s financial picture, but the royalties weren’t enough to finance an expedition to turn
The Silent World
into a movie. Every bit of his cash was going to meet payrolls and expenses for the venture at Grand-Congloue and his Office of Undersea Technology. He was expecting a grant from the French Ministry of Education but the collapse of the government forced him to start over with new bureaucrats in Paris.
National Geographic
continued to encourage him, but had not written any checks. In December 1953, just as Cousteau was beginning to think he might have to fold the research center and tie up
Calypso
, he got lucky.

Jacques Cousteau (in wet suit), Louis Malle (right), and an unidentified man on Calypso with underwater television apparatus
(
COURTESY MIT MUSEUM
)

On a wet afternoon, while Cousteau was ashore in Marseille, a man decked out in a banker’s suit appeared at
Calypso
’s gangway and asked permission to come aboard. Simone showed him into the galley, offered him a whiskey, and asked him what brought him to the waterfront on so dreary a winter day. He said he represented the
D’Arcy Exploration Company, a subsidiary of British Petroleum, and he had a proposition. Simone said she knew of British Petroleum since her cousin, Basil Jackson, was president of it. The man said the chief of D’Arcy Exploration had read
The Silent World
and thought that Aqua-Lung divers might help his company prospect for oil. Would Captain Cousteau consider a four-month charter of
Calypso
and its divers in the Persian Gulf? An hour later, Cousteau returned and agreed to a fee that was nowhere near the cost of an ocean oil exploration rig but was more than enough to save him. The D’Arcy Exploration had no objections to having a film crew aboard.

By the spring of 1954, everyone in France seemed to know about the bold and handsome Aqua-Lung divers who were retrieving stunning artifacts from ancient Roman wrecks and making underwater motion pictures of their adventures. Cousteau received a steady stream of letters and inquiries from men and women who wanted to join in the adventure, regardless of the danger, the long voyages away from home, and the meager pay. He was looking for sailors, engineers, and divers. He also wanted moviemakers. To scout for talent, Cousteau went to a film festival at the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris. There, he met Louis Malle, a compact, sharp-featured young Frenchman born to wealth, who was a recent graduate of the institute. Malle was looking for a job.

Louis Malle was the fifth of seven children of Pierre Malle and Françoise Beghin, the heir to a sugar beet fortune built by her ancestors during the Napoleonic Wars. His mother went to mass every day of her life, and insisted that her son’s education be steered by the Catholic church, first at French boarding schools and then with the Jesuits in England. The family summered in Ireland, where Louis mastered English and settled into himself as a citizen not only of Europe but of a wider world revealed to him in theaters. The flowering of French cinema threw blossom after magnificent blossom in front of him. Jacques Tati, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson were directing dazzling films on the aftermath of the war, love, revenge, and the rest of the human condition. Malle could not resist making a wholehearted attempt to join them. His parents had plotted a far more conservative course for their fifth child, which would have
taken him into the management of their sugar beet empire, but they continued to support him after he turned his back on business in favor of cinema.

Cousteau could see himself in Malle. He recalled that his own young life had been a similarly uneven quilt of absent parents, new surroundings, a succession of different schools, and the irresistible lure of moviemaking: Daniel Cousteau’s constant traveling with his American employers; the sojourn to the United States, where Jacques had become comfortable with the English-speaking world; boarding school after the rock-throwing incident; and then his fascination with movie cameras, which saved him during adolescence.

Like Cousteau, Louis Malle had stories to tell. In 1944, with the Allies advancing on occupied Paris, his father had predicted a bloody battle for the city and sent Louis to a monastery near Fontainebleau, where he would be safer. The Carmelite monks, whose role in the resistance would become legendary, were sheltering as many Jewish children as they could feed until they were betrayed by a kitchen worker. With twelve-year-old Louis Malle watching in horror, retreating Germans seized the Jewish boys, none of whom would survive the war. Years later, Malle would make two films on the participation of the French collaborators in the horror of the Third Reich, branding himself as a controversial filmmaker. After coming of age in occupied France, Malle knew that evil and good were present in every human being. Only the passion of the moment really mattered. On the evening he met Cousteau in Paris, Malle could not have expressed his cinematic vision so clearly, but later he was to say, “Each movie is a piece of life, a different adventure. It expresses my interest of the moment, somewhat like a love.”

On their first meeting, Cousteau asked Malle what kind of films he wanted to make. Malle said he believed that both documentaries and dramatic features revealed human events and passion, so he was willing to try anything. He had seen Cousteau’s film
Épaves
several times and thought that underwater films were somehow between fact and fiction because they revealed so alien a world. Cousteau made his offer. He had just published a book about the invention of the Aqua-Lung that was selling well in the United States and wanted to make a movie from the same material and additional film from a two-year expedition back to the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean. Cousteau
told Malle that he had very little money, so he could pay almost nothing. Malle said the money wasn’t important.

Cousteau used part of the advance payment from British Petroleum to buy a 60-foot fishing boat to finish the job at Grand-Congloue, freeing
Calypso
to move on to another adventure. The day after Christmas 1954, he called Louis Malle in Paris and told him to catch the next train to Marseille. A week after New Year’s, with the Cousteaus, Dumas, Malle, Laban, Falco, twelve other crewmen, and a Portuguese water dog named Bonnard aboard,
Calypso
sailed again for the Suez Canal. After nine months of repetitive industrial diving on the Roman shipwrecks, everyone was overjoyed by the prospect of a few months on the open ocean.

In the Red Sea, Louis Malle became a qualified Aqua-Lung diver and proved to be an inspired choice as head cameraman. He immediately began improving the cameras, lights, and housings, and, best of all, he shared the enthusiasm of everyone else for the wonders he saw below the surface. Underwater, Malle, Cousteau, and Dumas anticipated each other’s moves as if they had been diving together for years. On deck, Malle moved easily among the crew with an instinct for the quirks, humor, and personality that might charm an audience. Malle was completely comfortable in the cramped little observation chamber on
Calypso’s
bow and filmed an enormous school of dolphins from it off the coast of Yemen.

Cousteau took a month rounding the Arabian Peninsula into the Persian Gulf. In Elphinstone Inlet, a narrow fjord between limestone cliffs in the Strait of Hormuz that is reputed to be the hottest place on earth, they found delicious oysters that no one knew existed. Farther up in the gulf, Malle filmed the remains of the once-legendary pearl diving industry that had been displaced by cultured pearls from Japan. The pearl divers were all old men who dove with no goggles, fins, or snorkels, reminding Cousteau and Dumas of their earliest days together as free divers on the Riviera. On the bottom, at 60 feet, Malle’s camera captured them groping like blind men but somehow coming up with full baskets of oysters.

As Cousteau and
Calypso
turned north into the Persian Gulf, the petroleum geologists briefed the crew on the history of oil. Since
the first wells began pumping oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, petroleum exploration had spread around the world, first to banish the night with kerosene lamps, then to power the machines and automobiles on which the modern world depended. In 1922, after Royal Dutch Shell had been drilling successfully in the basin surrounding Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela for ten years, Standard Oil of New Jersey took the risk of drilling wells beneath the surface of the lake. Some Standard Oil executives thought their venture was folly, joking that they would be better off going into the fishing business, but the Lake Maracaibo field turned out to be one of the most productive in history. In 1932, a British-American joint venture had struck oil on the little island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. It was 20 miles off the Arabian Peninsula and made of rocks that were geologically identical to those on the already proven oil fields on the mainland.