Jacques Cousteau (24 page)

With the security and status of his appointment to the museum in Monaco and the success of his other enterprises, Cousteau no longer harbored the illusion that he would ever return to service as a full-time naval officer. His sons were nearly grown. Jean-Michel was studying to become an architect after finishing his two years of military service. Philippe, two years younger, was still sampling his future, most of which revolved around the passions of his father—flying, engineering, diving, and cinematography. Cousteau’s decision to become a civilian, however, was not an easy one. He had spent twenty-seven of his forty-seven years in the navy. As an officer on inactive duty, he had maintained his uniforms, received a small monthly paycheck, and had the use of navy facilities and equipment when he needed them. He was, however, the lowest-ranking member of the naval academy class of 1933 as a lieutenant commander. The decision was difficult for Simone as well. Though she shunned the tight-knit culture of officers’ spouses in favor of life aboard
Calypso
, she was the daughter and granddaughter of French admirals. Simone had never experienced life without the navy. It was clear to both of them, however, that the navy no longer needed the Cousteaus and the Cousteaus no longer needed the navy. Shortly after accepting Prince Rainier’s offer, he resigned his commission.

DURING THE SUMMER OF 1958, Cousteau’s first after returning to civilian life, he tested the revolutionary research submarine on which he and the Undersea Research Group had been working for five years. Its chief engineers, André Laban and Jean Mollard, were finally ready to launch the saucer-shaped craft they called simply Hull Number One. On its cradle aboard
Calypso
, the yellow metal submarine stood 5 feet high with a diameter of 6 feet 7 inches, looking very much like the two saucers Cousteau had clapped together on the table to show Falco and the rest of his crew what the shape of a nimble research submersible should look like. Since October 1948, when
Les Mousquemers
had accompanied Auguste Piccard on an expedition to test his deep-diving bathyscaphe, Cousteau had been tantalized by the ocean beyond his reach with scuba gear. The bathyscaphe had been perfectly suited for setting depth records and gathering samples from a small area of the bottom, but it was far too clumsy for real undersea exploration and filmmaking. Hull Number One could carry a crew of two, who entered through a hatch in the top of the saucer, lay on their bellies, looked through a pair of Plexiglas viewing ports, and steered with buttons that controlled swiveling jet thrusters.

“Cousteau really did come up with the idea that it should look like a saucer at lunch that day off Grand-Congloue in the early fifties,” André Laban recalled. “But it took a lot of people a lot of time to figure out the details.”

Laban was in charge of the first unmanned descent to a depth of 2,000 feet at the end of a cable. If Hull Number One survived, he would then send it to 3,000 feet before approving it for manned dives to no more than 1,000 feet. Laban and Mollard had modified an industrial crane on
Calypso
that could lift 5 tons, more than the
weight of the submarine and ballast for the unmanned test, and the much lighter weight of the manned sub and its steel cradle.

La Souscoupe (
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
)

Off the coast southeast of Marseille, Laban lowered Hull Number One to a depth of 2,000 feet. He let the craft soak for fifteen minutes, during which a mistral kicked up a swell from the south. When the sub was 100 feet from the surface, clearly visible to the anxious crew on
Calypso’s
pitching deck, the cable snapped, almost beheading the winch man as its end lashed back. Falco dove into the sea but was helpless as Hull Number One plunged 3,300 feet to the bottom.

Cousteau quickly took radar bearings on three shore targets to mark the spot. The following day, Laban returned aboard
Calypso
and conducted a sonar survey of the bottom for 10 square miles around the site. He, Mollard, and the other engineers at the Office of Undersea Technology were already working on Hull Number Two from the same design. If Number One had not survived the descent to 3,000 feet, they were wasting their time. When Cousteau and Laban analyzed the sonargrams, they clearly saw that the lost sub was hovering over the bottom, secured by a cable they knew to be 30 feet long that tied it to the 4 tons of lead ballast required for the test descent. Obviously, it was still airtight at 3,270 feet. They could go ahead on Hull
Number Two without the expense of retrieving the first one. Cousteau knew it was only a matter of time before he added 750 feet to his reach into the sea.

The following year, 1959, after what had seemed to have been an endless streak of good luck for Cousteau, PAC died. He had battled cancer for five years while continuing to publish unapologetic accounts of his war years as a collaborator. His estrangement from his brother had deepened, as JYC increasingly kept his distance to avoid a public connection with a man who had betrayed his country. A few hours before PAC lapsed into the coma from which he would not wake, JYC was at his bedside to offer his once-beloved brother something more than his friendship in life. For the rest of his own life, JYC would care for PAC’s children as his own. Cousteau never intended to separate himself from PAC, never condemned him as a traitor. He simply excluded the man who had been his best friend until politics and war took him away, learning from that painful detachment that all relationships are transitory. Cousteau could be immediately and passionately present with people, but he also wore a hardened suit of emotional armor that allowed him to move on without them.

Seven months after PAC’s death, Cousteau sailed for New York to attend the World Oceanographic Congress at the United Nations. It was the first international gathering of its kind, with a thousand scientists and explorers from thirty-eight countries convening across the ordinarily impassable borders of academic disciplines to assess the future of the world’s oceans. Cousteau was one of the featured speakers, and the mayor of New York promised him and
Calypso
the kind of welcome usually reserved for the maiden voyages of great ocean liners and heroic men-of-war.

Crossing the Atlantic was no mean feat for the 139-foot, flat-bottomed
Calypso
. Cousteau and the crew knew their little ship could take a pounding and stay afloat, but the ride was anything but comfortable. Most days, the rule was one-hand-on-the-ship to keep their footing, and even the veteran sailors among them were not immune to seasickness during the worst of it. North of the Canary Islands,
Calypsos
crew and a team of French oceanographers under the leadership of American geologist Lloyd Breslau took historic photographs
of the mid-Atlantic rift zone using cameras towed on underwater sleds and Papa Flash’s new lights. The sleds, nicknamed Troikas after horse-drawn Russian sleighs, took pairs of color photographs that could later be viewed stereoscopically, giving depth and dimension to the bottom terrain. The mid-Atlantic rift, a great gash in the seafloor discovered during the
Challenger
expedition in 1863, runs 18,000 miles from Greenland to the fringe of Antarctica, marking the line where the supercontinent of Pangaea tore apart 180 million years ago and started the formation of the current landmasses of the earth. The theory of plate tectonics, spreading seafloor rift zones, and drifting continents was new, controversial, and the most thrilling discovery in the history of the young science of oceanography. Geologists, biologists, physicists, chemists, and metallurgists were crossing interdisciplinary lines in droves to contribute to this new idea about how the planet was formed and to explain the remarkable role of the deep ocean in creating the earth’s crust. They had sampled the midocean ridges and rifts with dredges and probes, and sketched their contours with echo sounders, but actually getting a look at big black cliffs in photographs was fantastic.

The mayor of New York made good on his promise. Cousteau and
Calypso
passed the Statue of Liberty under fireboat water showers, accompanied by sirens, horns, and whistles. Overhead, a dirigible hovered with a camera crew filming the brave little ship. Her white hull was weathered and streaked with rust from the long Atlantic crossing, her crew at the rails waving to their escorts through the fog of the August morning. For the next week,
Calypso
was open to the public at her berth on the Lower West Side, while across town Cousteau attended the congress and Breslau’s presentation of the spectacular photographs of the mid-Atlantic rift. In dozens of sessions, oceanographers outlined a revolutionary new human relationship with the world’s oceans. Increased knowledge and the rapid development of technology to exploit ocean resources were transforming the industrial world. It was also obvious that the sea was not the infinite source of wealth and life it had been thought to be just a decade earlier.

Cousteau had recently seen firsthand how quickly human impact can transform a piece of the resilient, beautiful, fruitful ocean into a wasteland. His first big idea as the director of the Oceanographic
Museum had been the creation of a marine sanctuary beneath the cliffs of Monaco that would be tended by Aqua-Lung divers and viewed by visitors ashore via television cameras. He called it the Marine Biotron. In it, divers and scientists would live in underwater houses to study a pristine section of the ocean that did not experience the pressures of fishing, sport diving, and most of all coastal development. Cousteau was forced to abandon the Biotron when towns on both sides of the proposed preserve, Fontvieille and Monaco Beach, embarked on aggressive landfill projects to expand their territory in the tiny principality, with no limits on the amount of concrete, rocks, dirt, and gravel they poured into the sea. For months, the water was clouded with sediment that killed the delicate marine organisms upon which fish and other sea life depended. Worse, Cousteau learned, the breakneck expansion of nuclear energy plants in southern Europe
meant that the entire Mediterranean coast was going to be polluted with low-level radioactive waste. Cousteau had been exploring and filming the underwater world as much for the sheer pleasure of the adventure as anything else. After the World Oceanographic Congress, there was no question in his mind that by showing as many people as possible the beauty, power, and paradoxical vulnerability of the world’s oceans he could help save them from destruction.

Cousteau and Simone aboard Calypso in New York during the World Oceanographic Congress in
1959 (
ASSOCIATED PRESS
)

Cousteau and
Calypso
left New York to show the flag on the Atlantic seaboard, sailing first to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Nantucket Sound, then south to the Potomac River and Washington, D.C. There, as the guest of honor at the National Geographic Society, Cousteau was presented with a gold medal and his crew were treated as visiting dignitaries. A never-ending stream of people who considered themselves to be friends of Cousteau’s great adventure toured
Calypso
. A writer and photographer from
Time
magazine came aboard to interview Cousteau for a brief article, which grew into the lead feature story.

On the cover of
Time
, Cousteau’s beaming, weathered face appeared at the center of a montage depicting a scuba diver, reef fish, and corals. In the upper-right-hand corner, a banner announced: “SKINDIVING. Poetry, Pleasure, and Pelf.” Inside, the story began with Cousteau’s description of the transformation he and every scuba diver experience underwater: “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth, but man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free. Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction—up, down, sideways—by merely flipping his hand. Underwater, man becomes an archangel.”

The story filled ten pages, with photographs, covering Cousteau’s life, the early adventures of
Les Mousquemers
, the invention of the Aqua-Lung,
Calypso
and its charismatic crew,
The Silent World
, the revolutionary new and untested submarine in
Calypso
’s cargo hold, and Cousteau’s recent appointment as the head the world’s oldest oceanographic museum in Monaco. There were more than a million Aqua-Lung divers in North America, all of whom had bought their equipment from U.S. Divers, the Air Liquide subsidiary. Cousteau was its president. The writer concluded by asking Cousteau what advice he would give to a person trying scuba diving for the first time.