Jacques Cousteau (33 page)

In the next episode, “Time Bomb at Fifty Fathoms,” Cousteau put a much finer point on the human threat to the oceans of the world. On July 14, 1974, the 330-foot Yugoslavian freighter
Cavtat
had collided with the much larger Panamanian bulk carrier
Lady Rita
in the
Strait of Otranto, between the southeastern tip of Italy and the Albanian coast.
Lady Rita
survived, but
Cavtat
and its cargo of nine hundred 55-gallon drums of tetramethyl lead went to the bottom, 300 feet below. Tetramethyl lead is a flammable, colorless liquid with a slightly sweet odor that is used primarily as an additive in gasoline to prevent engine knocking. If TML, as it is known, is inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through the skin, it attacks the central nervous and cardiovascular systems, causing nausea, convulsions, and death.

Philippe Cousteau
(©
BETTMANN/CORBIS
)

The sinking
Cavtat
was moving at 20 miles an hour when it slammed into the seafloor, rupturing its hull in uncountable places and scattering broken drums of TML into a poisonous corona around the ship. Instantly, fish, crustaceans, and mollusks within a half mile of the wreck began to die; many rose to the surface in the enormous oil slick marking the site of the collision. Two years later, after constant pressure from coastal villages whose people were afraid to eat from the sea, and an article about it in
Saturday Review
by Jacques Cousteau, the Italian parliament agreed to pay $12 million for a salvage attempt.

“Time Bomb at Fifty Fathoms” begins with Cousteau, in a plaid lumberman’s jacket and his red knit diver’s cap, inspecting primitive diving chambers that had been used for deep salvage attempts before
the Aqua-Lung. The scene shifts to the village of Otranto, where Cousteau, now more stylishly dressed in khakis and a blue chambray shirt, walks along a cobbled street among playing children. “Around us children wheel like birds,” Cousteau says, with a note of tenderness in his familiar voice. Cousteau stops in front of a half-dozen boys and asks if they remember the
Cavtat
. “Oh, yes,” they say. “It is the ship that sank with the poison.”

From there, a narrator with an accent similar but not identical to Cousteau’s takes over with an account of the collision of
Cavtat
and
Lady Rita
, over images of the crowded shipping channel between Italy and Albania. A third narrator and the writer of most of the series, Ted Strauss, then recites in plainspoken, sonorous English the history of the battle led by a local judge that resulted in the salvage attempt. The seven or eight hundred drums of TML that did not rupture when
Cavtat
hit the bottom are ticking bombs, he says. Soon, they will rust and break open, leaking deadly poison into the sea for a generation. The only hope is to dive to the wreck, pick up the drums of TML, and bring them to the surface.

The Italian government hired an international offshore exploration company for the job. In a month its salvage ship, heavy-lift crane, and supply boat were anchored over the wreck. Cousteau arrived aboard
Calypso
. In a scene shot during lunch around the familiar table in
Calypso’s
galley, the Italian judge credits Cousteau and his magazine article with turning the tide in his battle to save the Strait of Otranto, its people, fishing fleets, and tourist trade. Cousteau, dressed exactly as he had been in the shots of the children in the village, listens and nods, radiating pride and resolve. The narrator stresses that it is the judge and the people of the southeastern Italian coast who are really responsible for saving themselves and their piece of the ocean.

Over images of the wreck shot by Falco in
La Souscoupe
, with the Italian judge as a passenger, the narrator explains that death waits in orderly rows in the crumpled cargo hold. Apparently, he says, the toxins released during the initial impact have completely dissipated. The wreck is swarming with fish, barnacles, and other sea life. The scene cuts every thirty seconds or so to
Calypso
’s wheelhouse, where Cousteau barks advice into a handheld microphone to Falco about the strong currents on the bottom.

For the rest of the episode, Cousteau is an honored guest, arriving
by
Calypso
’s helicopter for guided tours of the salvage ship and explanations of the difficult, dangerous work of diving to retrieve drums of poison lying 300 feet beneath the surface. Using techniques that Cousteau pioneered during the Conshelf experiments fifteen years earlier, divers live in a compression chamber for three weeks, allowing them to work at 300 feet without fear of nitrogen narcosis. They are transported from the chamber on the deck of the ship to the wreck of the
Cavtat
inside a steel diving bell, in which they return at the end of their workday. Most of the time they read, listen to music on headphones, play checkers, and eat meals delivered through an air lock. Like Cousteau’s Conshelf divers, the
Cavtat
divers are tested daily for signs of sickness or gas contamination.

On the bottom, captured on film by Falco from
La Souscoupe
, the divers, wearing loose white biohazard suits over their dry suits, glide like finned ghosts among the drums of poison amid the tangle of wrinkled steel in
Cavtat
’s cargo hold. They breathe through air hoses from compressors on the surface, and communicate with telephone sets built into their full-face masks. The tension of men surrounded by torn metal is magnified by a music track a lot like that from the recent hit movie
Jaws
.

The diver in the frame wipes a glove over one of the white drums, clearly marked with a skull and crossbones on the label. Rust stirs from the surface. But it is not rust. The drum is leaking. The diver swims quickly upward through his own bubbles to the open hatch of the diving bell, sheds the biohazard suit, and climbs into the bell. In the next scenes, two men on the surface are shown burning a load of used biohazard suits, while others on the ship carefully wash the divers’ dry suits and masks. On closed-circuit television, a doctor examines the diver who brushed off the contaminated surface of the drum, and analyzes his blood passed through the air lock. He is suffering from a mild case of TML poisoning from his brief contact with the ruptured drum. After a day off in bed, he is cleared to go back to work. One by one, he and the other divers lift the drums into a steel basket that can hold a dozen of them. The basket is hoisted to the ship on the surface, where a gang of men, also wearing biohazard suits and masks, loads them aboard. From there the TML is taken to shore and burned.

After the last load of drums came aboard in October 1977,
Calypso’s
crew shot the final scene of the celebration as soon as Cousteau returned from the last of the Involvement Days in Seattle. All but 3 percent of the poison had been taken from the sea. The episode was Cousteau’s greatest critical success in a decade, a powerful, entertaining statement of what he wanted the Cousteau Society to tell the world: the oceans are in trouble, but we humans are not helpless to save them.

Though the rest of the
Odyssey
series was nowhere near as tense or dramatic as “Time Bomb at Fifty Fathoms,” PBS ratings shot up when an episode aired. In “Diving for Roman Plunder,” the narration of Greek superstar Melina Mercouri saved Cousteau’s hyperbolic return to the proven plot of salvaging ancient artifacts, which he had used many times before. “Lost Relics of the Sea” was a hodgepodge of shipwrecks and their links to ancient sea battles, commerce, and storms, but it was mostly
Calypso
divers doing what millions of Americans expected them to do. The two-part
“Calypso
’s Search for Atlantis” was a breezy quest for the lost continent of Atlantis in the Aegean Sea north of Crete. In it, Cousteau hypothesized but didn’t really prove that the Greek island of Santorini was the former home of the lost civilization destroyed by a volcanic eruption thousands of years ago. But his failure didn’t really matter. A television show about Atlantis was perfect for the late 1970s, when songs about the lost continent were on the
Billboard
charts.
“Calypso’s
Search for
Britannic”
drew a huge audience.
Britannic
, which was almost identical to
Titanic
, was sunk by a German mine off Greece four years after the iceberg disaster claimed her famous sister. Until Cousteau found the wreck, its location had been veiled in wartime secrecy, because the Germans alleged that
Britannic
, sailing as a hospital ship, had really been carrying troops and munitions. The British wanted nothing to do with proving it one way or the other, and suspiciously mismarked the location on admiralty charts. Cousteau’s divers, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen to descend to the wreck at 400 feet, found a huge gash in the hull. Cousteau and his on-camera experts solved the mystery by theorizing that the hole came not from exploding munitions but from the ignition of coal dust in the ship’s bunkers.

For the two episodes they shot on the Nile River, Cousteau and Philippe left
Calypso
to showcase their latest acquisition, a surplus U.S. Navy PBY amphibious airplane. For Cousteau, adding the twin
engine seaplane to his equipment inventory gave him much more mobility and shortened production time because he could keep two or three camera crews on land and at sea all the time.
Flying Calypso
, tail number N101CS, also allowed him to share his own passion for flying with his son, who remained uncomfortable and irascible in the shadow of his father. The plane was also a peace offering to Philippe, whose love for flying far exceeded his attachments to diving and filmmaking. Philippe was already licensed to fly hot air balloons, helicopters, and single-engine light planes, and he easily made the transition to a multi-engine seaplane rating. A few years earlier, after a blowup with his father, he had come very close to leaving the family business altogether and becoming a commercial airline pilot.

In the acronym “PBY,” “PB” stands for Patrol Bomber and “Y” is the code for Consolidated Aircraft, the company that built the planes. Nicknamed the Catalina by the navy, the PBY could be armed with bombs, torpedoes, depth charges, and machine guns. From its first flight in 1935, it was in military service in twenty countries for fifty years.
Flying Calypso
was a PBY-6A, the final model in a production run of about 4,500 planes built between 1936 and 1945. Unlike earlier PBYs, the 6A was fully amphibious with retractable tricycle landing gear, so it could land on a runway or on the water. It had stabilizing floats on the wing tips that folded up in flight. The two main wheels tucked into the sides of the middle of the hull, the nose wheel into a compartment that was sealed for water landings.

Powered by two 1,200-horsepower Pratt and Whitney Wasp engines mounted on a high wing, the PBY-6A had a range of 2,500 miles while cruising at a sedate 125 miles per hour. It had a top speed of about 190 miles per hour. It was not pressurized, but equipped with an oxygen system that gave it a 25,000-foot ceiling. Designed for a crew of eight, the later models of the PBY could carry twice that many people or up to 15,000 pounds of cargo. After World War II, retired military PBYs were snapped up by airlines serving coastal towns and villages without runways, medical emergency aircraft companies, firefighting teams, and private owners. For as little as $50,000, they got a yacht that slept four and could also fly.

The stars of the two episodes on the Nile River were
Flying Calypso
and its dashing pilot, Philippe Cousteau, against background shots from the cockpit and the pair of enormous glass observation blisters
on the sides of the plane. The hypothesis, delivered again in the basso profundo voice of the show’s writer Ted Strauss, was that after thousands of years of natural existence, human beings were affecting the course, condition, and future of the great river.

“Not only are ancient cultures and animal sanctuaries being threatened by extinction, but men are learning that technological triumphs,” Strauss intoned, “sometimes create problems greater than the ones they seek to solve.”

From there, the film was a natural history travelogue, with shots of the beautiful gold-and-white
Flying Calypso
over the Great Pyramids, cruising low over the sinuous, muddy river, dodging whirlwinds of insects over Lake Victoria and stampeding herds of animals below it. They rendezvoused with a convoy of Cousteau Land Rovers and headed inland for a catalog of African animals on the savanna, the same giraffes, hyenas, lions, gazelles, and the rest that everyone watching had already seen dozens of times. Somehow with a Cousteau it was better.

Backed by a symphony orchestra playing George Delarue’s romantic score, Strauss’s narration gave the PBY the same almost human personality that had worked so well for
Calypso
for twenty-five years. The camera spent a lot of time showing viewers how things worked, with shots of both Cousteaus and other crew members peering out into the wind of the open observation blister looking as if they were having every bit as wonderful a time as they did on their famous little ship.