Jacques Cousteau (25 page)

“What would you advise a baby to do when it is first born?”
Cousteau replied. “When a person takes his first dive, he is born to another world.”

Calypso
’s crew had enjoyed the festivities surrounding their port calls in New York, Woods Hole, and Washington, but everyone was happy to get back to the routines of life at sea. They savored the hand shaking, tinkering with equipment, mealtime conversation, and even the nicknames. Cousteau was Pasha, because he was the oldest man. Albert Falco was Bébert. Dumas was Didi. The crowds swarming aboard
Calypso
and requesting autographs had been heady, but most important, their fame meant that there were no limits on what they could propose and accomplish as filmmakers and explorers. Cousteau and his divers had proved their worth on so many fronts of oceanography and the popularization of the sea that they could now choose from an unlimited pool of adventures and make money doing it. They headed south to finally test their new submarine.

Hull Number Two, renamed
La Souscoupe Plongeante
—The Diving Saucer—because of its resemblance to a comic book flying saucer, was an improved version of the lost prototype. Twin propulsion jets on the bow of the flattened sphere swiveled on command from the pilot, giving it an infinite range of motion. On a strut that extended from the starboard bow—determined on the round saucer by the location of two viewing ports—was an Edgerton stroboscopic camera, with its synchronized light mounted on a similar extension from the port bow along with the movie camera floodlight. The camera itself was inside the sub, so the crew could reload it on long dives. It was mounted on a bracket between the two viewing ports and trained through its own window. Three small Plexiglas ports in the top of the dome gave pilot and observer a view above, and three sonar transducers up, down, and above transmitted their signals to a screen on the instrument panel. The pilot and observer lay on foam cushions surrounded by gauges showing air pressure, oil pressure, sonar readings, depth, voltage in the battery-powered electrical system, the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, and a compass. The oxygen rebreathing system and carbon dioxide scrubbers could keep two people alive for twenty-four hours. If the sub was crippled, the pilot could pull a hand lever releasing ballast to send it to the surface.

Laban and Mollard had worked frantically but failed to finish the sub before
Calypso’s
scheduled cruise to New York for the World Oceanographic Congress in the summer of 1960. On the voyage across the Atlantic and at the dock in New York, they finally got Hull Number Two ready for testing.

Cousteau decided to test the second diving saucer in just 80 feet of water on the Caribbean continental shelf off Puerto Rico. If anything went wrong, there would be no problem retrieving the sub. The first manned descent off Puerto Rico, with Falco and Mollard aboard and a winch cable still attached, lasted only fifteen minutes. The second, to a depth of 100 feet, lasted an hour, after which Falco popped from the hatch shouting, “What a hot rod!” He had been able to control the descent of the neutrally buoyant saucer by pumping mercury ballast forward to point the bow down, level off by neutralizing the ballast, and spin on the saucer’s axis with the propulsion jets. Visibility through the observation ports was excellent. He had been able to follow a swimming grouper almost as effortlessly as a scuba diver. The noise of the motors and pumps startled fish, but the presence of the big yellow saucer didn’t seem to drive them completely away.

For the third dive, they removed the safety cable and went to 200 feet. Cousteau remained on deck for the first eight dives, knowing that if the saucer got into trouble his decisions would be critical. Next, Harold Edgerton, who had joined
Calypso
at Woods Hole, became the first scientist to dive in
La Souscoupe
. In his diary, Papa Flash recorded the clarity of the view through the Plexiglas ports and the clean taste of the air he was breathing. “Being in the saucer is no different from being in an automobile,” he wrote, “except that we are more comfortable and loll on our mattresses like Romans at a banquet.”

The next day, with Cousteau and Jacques Ertaud outside in scuba gear to film the diving saucer maneuvering, Falco took the sub through its paces. Writing on a white dinner plate with a grease pencil, Cousteau set up the shots. “Spin,” he wrote, holding the plate up to Falco’s porthole, then backing away with the camera. Falco spun the saucer. “Lazy eights,” he wrote, asking Falco to perform a well-known airplane maneuver, then watched the saucer fly through water
as easily as a plane through air. They went on for an hour, returned to the surface for fresh tanks, and went back down for one last shot of the saucer dropping the emergency ascent ballast. Cousteau wrote, “Drop in one minute,” pushed the plate up to the porthole, and was starting to back into position for the shot when he heard and felt the hollow thud of an underwater explosion. He darted back to the window. The inside of the saucer was completely dark. For long seconds, the Plexiglas was a mirror reflecting only Cousteau’s own face. Finally Falco’s replaced it, his puzzled expression letting Cousteau know he had no idea what had happened. Cousteau left the window, looked around the hull of the saucer, and saw streams of bubbles coming from the fairing on which the camera lights were mounted. He wrote “Battery Fire” on the plate and thrust it at the view port. Falco’s face instantly disappeared. Cousteau heard the clatter of the ascent ballast release and the sub shot to the surface.

In its cradle on Calypso’s deck,
La Souscoupe
spewed billows of smoke. Falco and Mollard popped the hatch and scrambled out. Laban and Edgerton tore open the fairings around the battery compartment and hit the smoldering fire with CO2 extinguishers. The nickel-cadmium batteries were brand-new, supposedly a vast improvement over heavier, less powerful lead batteries, but they had never been tested underwater. Cousteau and Laban hoisted the saucer and dropped it back into the sea with the battery cases open, finally extinguishing the fire. During the postmortem, Cousteau discovered that his new batteries had not shorted out and caught fire. They had given off so much heat that the fiberglass boxes filled with oil that surrounded them had caught fire.

Three weeks later, after dissecting the batteries to find nothing wrong with them and refitting the sub with brass battery boxes that vented the heat, Cousteau and Falco prepared to dive into Inferno Bay in the Cape Verde Islands. They lowered the saucer on the end of a cable, fully powered up, to a depth of 1,500 feet with no problems at all. The batteries in their new housings worked perfectly.

Cousteau had been living in anticipation of his first dive in
La Souscoupe
for seven years. He made two dry runs on deck. When he and Falco settled into their cushions, the launching was second nature to both of them. Falco closed the hatch. Cousteau set the pressure on the oxygen valves. Falco uncovered two racks of CO2 absorbent and
flicked a switch to start the hydraulic motors controlling the steering system. Cousteau gave the thumbs-up for launch to Laban, who was replacing him as dive master on deck. The interior flooded with the rippling aquamarine light of the shallows. Outside, scuba divers gave them an underwater acrobatic show.
La Souscoupe
sank 100 feet and came to rest on a sloping, sandy bottom. Falco pumped mercury ballast into the forward tank, pointing the sub’s nose downslope, and squeezed a burst from the propulsion jets. Hovering at 4 feet, they descended along the bottom as it fell away into the depths. Two hundred feet … 250. “From now on we’re on our own,” Cousteau said. “The divers can’t help us if anything goes wrong.”

At 300 feet, the temperature in the sub plunged suddenly as it passed through a thermocline separating distinct layers of water. Cousteau and Falco put on sweaters. At 360 feet, they felt the sub scrape bottom, even though Falco had not put it there. For some reason,
La Souscoupe
had lost positive buoyancy. Falco shut down the motor, hoping that the silence would give them a clue about the condition of the sub. Then they heard it, a teakettle hissing of bubbles from the area around the battery boxes. Falco grabbed the lever to release the ascent ballast. The sub began to rise through a dense cloud of bubbles that should not have been there. On the instrument panel, the battery voltmeter pegged on zero. They definitely had a short circuit, and the batteries were venting gas. Through the view port, Cousteau and Falco saw the plankton moving up instead of down. They were sinking again. Falco seized a knife from its case on the wall and slashed at the tape securing the handle of the lever to release a 450-pound emergency weight from the bottom of the sub. Jettisoning the weight was the last resort, never before used. It worked. The nose of the sub tilted up 35 degrees and they were on their way to the surface. During the fifteen minutes it took
La Souscoupe
to reach the world of sunlight, Cousteau and Falco ate chicken sandwiches and shared part of a bottle of Bandol. Cousteau had brought the wine, made at a vineyard near his home in Sanary-sur-Mer, in anticipation of celebrating a successful dive to 1,000 feet. He and Falco agreed that being alive was reason enough for a toast.

Two months later off Corsica, equipped with the old, heavy, lead batteries that did not catch on fire,
La Souscoupe
took Cousteau and Falco to 1,000 feet and returned without incident to the surface. During the next year, with Falco or Laban at the controls, the diving
saucer made fifteen dives in the Mediterranean Sea, carrying geologists and biologists to places none of their kind had ever been before. With
La Souscoupe
’s hydraulic claw, they collected samples of mud, rocks, sediment, and dozens of sea creatures, many of them new to science. Falco and Laban kept logs on tape and filmed their descents with movie cameras, while Aqua-Lung divers captured the nimble little yellow submarine descending into the darkness of the abyss.

After their successes on the mid-Atlantic rift, in New York, and with
La Souscoupe
, Cousteau and his divers were more capable of visiting the world beneath the surface of the sea than any other human beings in history. Now, Cousteau declared when
Calypso
returned to Marseille at the end of 1960, they would find a way to live there for extended periods of time. It was not a new idea. In the seventeenth century, the freethinking bishop John Wilkins advocated the development of underwater houses to colonize the oceans. Two hundred years later, American Simon Lake built wheeled submarines with hatches through which his submariners could leave and return while submerged. Recently, Commander George Bond had been trying to persuade the U.S. Navy to explore the possibility that scuba divers could work for days and even weeks underwater by living in gas-filled shelters on the bottom instead of surfacing. Bond called it “saturation diving,” which meant that a diver’s blood and tissues became saturated with nitrogen, which caused no ill effects as long as the diver didn’t return to the surface, where decompression sickness could injure or kill him. Saturated divers could do all kinds of work that hard-hat divers and ordinary scuba divers could not do, such as installing offshore oil rigs and pipelines in deep water and setting up antisubmarine sonar networks. The U.S. Navy wasn’t interested. Bond, who had been awed by
The Silent World
, called Cousteau and asked him to help test his radical concept for working underwater.

“I have long felt that undersea exploration is not an end in itself, although it is spiritually rewarding merely to be an onlooker,” Cousteau said. “The privilege of our era, to enter this great unknown medium, must produce greater knowledge of the oceans and lead to assessment and exploitation of their natural resources. In the end man must and shall colonize the deeper ocean floor.”

The first phase, Continental Shelf I—known as Conshelf I—was
simple. Two divers would live for one week in a watertight steel cylinder 18 feet long and 8 feet in diameter, anchored with chains 7 feet above the bottom at a depth of 37 feet. The divers would work several hours each day to depths of 80 feet, but never shallower than the depth of the cylinder. They would enter and leave their home through an open hole in the bottom of the cylinder called a moon-pool, the water kept out by the air pressure inside.

Since successfully testing
La Souscoupe
, Falco had been Cousteau’s de facto second in command aboard
Calypso
. He led the Conshelf expedition, christening the cylinder
Diogenes
after the beggar-philosopher who lived in a bathtub on an Athens street. Cousteau selected another
Calypso
diver, Claude Wesly, to join Falco in becoming the world’s first aquanauts. Wesly, who was thirty years old, had been with
Calypso
since the first expedition to the Red Sea. He had a parrot that was older than he was, a raucous, foul-mouthed bird that usually lived ashore with Wesly’s wife and daughter but had made short trips aboard
Calypso
. Wesly pleaded to take his parrot with him. The bird could easily make the quick descent to
Diogenes
in a pressure cooker and would, like a mineshaft canary, die first to warn the men if the air became toxic. Cousteau and Falco said no.

On the morning of September 14, 1962,
Calypso
towed
Diogenes
from Marseille to a bay on Frioul, an abandoned island that had last been home to a yellow fever quarantine hospital.
Espadon
, a power barge packed with equipment, friends, families, reporters, and photographers, followed
Calypso
. In a little more than an hour, scuba divers had set the anchors to hold
Diogenes
in place, turned on the remote television cameras inside and outside of the cylinder, and checked the connections of tubes from the surface carrying air, water, and electricity. A few minutes after noon, Falco, a bachelor, said goodbye to his mother, and Wesly kissed his wife and daughter and stroked the parrot, which they had brought with them for the day, and they were gone.