Jacques Cousteau (7 page)

Jean-Pierre, Jean-Michel, Jacques, Simone, and Philippe
(
PRIVATE COLLECTION
)

After trying unsuccessfully to find one of the forty-year-old Rouquayrol-Denayrouze rigs,
Les Mousquemers
discovered that in 1870, novelist Jules Verne had equipped the divers of the submarine
Nautilus
with a fictionally enhanced version that allowed them to walk underwater for hours instead of just a few minutes. In 1878, an Englishman, Henry Fleuss, had come up with the idea of replacing oxygen from a reservoir through a manual valve and absorbing carbon dioxide with caustic soda, freeing a diver from any sort of connection to the surface. Fleuss fitted a standard metal diving helmet with double
walls, and charged the space between them with oxygen at 16 atmospheres, or about 235 pounds per square inch. The diver wore a modified diving dress into which were sewn two bladders, front and back, containing pieces of sponge rubber soaked in a solution of soda lime. The diver wore a mask that covered his nose and mouth inside the helmet. He inhaled through his nose from inlet valves on both sides of the mask and exhaled through a flexible mouth tube. The pressure of exhalation pushed air laden with carbon dioxide through the two soda lime bladders, and finally out into the helmet, where it could be inhaled again.

The problem, everyone agreed, was deciding when to turn the control valve to release oxygen from the reservoir in the double wall of the helmet into the inside to enrich depleted air. A mistake could be fatal. Too much oxygen under pressure delivered to the lungs and blood of an air-breathing animal would cause convulsions and even death. Too little oxygen and the diver simply suffocated unless he surfaced immediately.

In 1934, a French navy officer, Yves Le Prieur, had combined a tank of compressed air instead of oxygen, a hand-controlled regulator, and a full face mask into a different kind of self-contained breathing apparatus. Advances in materials technology allowed foundries to cast stronger tanks to hold the air at higher pressures, which meant more time underwater. With the improved Le Prieur apparatus, an untethered diver could swim free for twenty minutes at 20 feet or fifteen minutes at 40 feet, manually releasing air from the tank on his chest whenever he needed a breath. But breathing underwater was far from perfected.

In August 1939, Leon Veche, a gunsmith aboard the cruiser
Suffern
, to which Cousteau was then assigned, showed up for dinner at the house in Sanary. Cousteau introduced him, telling the others that Veche had a fully equipped machine shop in which they were going to build a real self-contained breathing apparatus. Cousteau was convinced that it was only a matter of improving on the designs that had been around for seventy-five years.

A week later, Tailliez had requisitioned one of the Le Prieur rigs at the navy base, and
Les Mousquemers
and the rest of the household,
including Simone, trooped to the beach to give it a try. Tailliez went first. Two minutes after submerging, he surfaced gasping and sputtering. The air flowed from the tank in powerful bursts when he opened the valve, he reported. Dumas and Cousteau each took a turn, with the same results. Because the valve was not calibrated to the depths at which the air was released, it was impossible to keep it from free-flowing and overwhelming a diver. In more tests, they got better at controlling the bursts of air and reached 50 feet, but all agreed that what they wanted was not brief dives to a single depth but longer dives at many depths. Le Prieur had given
Les Mousquemers
their first delicious sample of swimming free and breathing underwater, but they were far too busy wrestling with the air supply to hunt or run a movie camera.

Cousteau went back to Veche and his machine shop. They assembled a gas mask canister of soda lime, a small oxygen bottle with a bleed valve, and a length of motorcycle inner tube into a compact, self-contained system. With it, a diver would have to enrich his air supply with oxygen only every few minutes, which would give him plenty of time to get something done underwater.

In November, a month before Simone was due to give birth to their second child, Cousteau tested the device he called a rebreather. He left
Suffern
in an officer’s gig with two sailors, motored a mile out of Toulon harbor near Porquerolles Island, jumped in the water, and submerged. For a few minutes Cousteau was in heaven. He exhaled, inhaled, opened his oxygen valve when the air tasted stale, and marveled at the view through the clear water of the offshore Mediterranean. Using the porpoise kick with his legs together that Tailliez had taught him, he imagined himself, finally, to be a creature of the sea. Visibility was 100 feet, the bottom 50 feet below. Cousteau gave himself another squirt of oxygen and instantly noticed the improvement in the air quality.

Breathing through the closed loop into the scrubbing canister, he could be as stealthy as a fish. Five minutes into his dive, he sneaked up on a school of several hundred chrome-bright giltheads with their distinctive red patches over their gills, getting to within 4 feet of the school before the fish spooked and disappeared into the distance. Cruising at about 30 feet, he saw a silver-blue bream hovering 15 feet below him. He circled around and in a maneuver similar to the
wingovers he had learned in flight school, he dove down to see how close he could get to it. Cousteau was at 45 feet when, with no warning, his reverie was shattered by excruciating pain in his chest, back, and neck. His lips trembled uncontrollably. He lost his mouthpiece, gagged on a breath of salty water, and felt himself blacking out. In a final desperate move, Cousteau clawed at the buckle on his weight belt and released it. Seconds later, he bobbed to the surface a few feet from the boat, where his guardian sailors pulled him from the sea.

For a month afterward, Cousteau lived with sore muscles and Simone’s indignation, while rebuilding his rebreather for another try. Cousteau incorrectly assumed that he had been poisoned by a buildup of carbon dioxide, so he refined that part of his rebreather. He went back to Porquerolles Island, this time with Dumas and Tailliez, and descended straight down to 45 feet to see if his changes to the CO
₂
scrubber made any difference. This time, he convulsed so violently that he did not remember jettisoning his weight belt. He was limp, a dead weight, when Dumas and Tailliez hoisted him from the sea. The first thing he said when he regained consciousness was “It is the end of my interest in oxygen.”

What Cousteau didn’t know was that oxygen under pressure can be deadly to an animal that has evolved to breathe air containing precisely 20.947 percent oxygen at a sea-level pressure of one atmosphere, or 14.7 pounds per square inch. Because he brought his oxygen with him from the surface, his body had received more than one and a half times the amount it was designed to accept. Cousteau also had a particularly low tolerance for pure oxygen, and at the relatively shallow depth of 45 feet, his nervous system sounded the alarm that he was about to die by triggering the convulsions as the overrich gas moved through his lungs and into his bloodstream.

Stymied by the vagaries of breathing oxygen under pressure and the limitations of a hose to the surface,
Les Mousquemers
returned to breath holding. In September 1939, they were snatched from the pleasures of hunting and playing in the Mediterranean when one and a half million Germans crossed the Polish frontier. Two months later, Poland surrendered. The peacetime routine in Sanary-sur-Mer ended abruptly, as though a curtain had dropped. It seemed unlikely that the Germans
would stop in Poland, so France prepared to defend itself. Cousteau was at Toulon or at sea on maneuvers every day, leaving Simone and the children alone in Sanary with instructions to begin stockpiling food. In April 1940, the Germans bombed airfields in northern France, and two months later took Paris. Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, who was stationed in northern France, became one of more than one hundred thousand prisoners of war.

After France surrendered, PAC spent a year in a hastily constructed camp near Sens, 140 miles east of Paris, enduring hunger, dysentery, and humiliation. Living outdoors in fenced cages, some of the men survived on food thrown over the fences by relatives, but thousands died. When PAC was released from the internment camp, he found his wife Fernande, their two children, and his mother alive but near starvation in a freezing apartment in Paris. His father, he learned, was waiting out the war at the Imperial Hotel in Torquay, England, still looking after eighty-seven-year-old Eugene Higgins.

With his prewar reputation as a fascist, anti-Semitic journalist, PAC found a job as the editor in chief of the pro-Nazi tabloid newspaper
Paris-Soir
, which had been started by Otto Abetz, German ambassador in Paris. Fernande remained with her husband in Paris, but he was able to arrange refuge in an alpine village near the Italian border for their children, who were then two and three years old. Pierre-Antoine Cousteau was soon part of the most powerful circle of French collaborators, which included the celebrated author Robert Brasillach, who became the editor of another pro-Nazi newspaper,
Je Suis Partout
. PAC attended a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, where he interviewed Adolf Hitler for an article in which he declared the Führer’s terms for defeated France to be extremely generous. In 1942, PAC published his first book, the 120-page
L’Amerique juive
(
Jewish America)
. Set in the context of the Cousteau family’s two years in New York, the book’s central thesis was that German Jews had brought anti-Semitism down upon themselves by methodically accumulating much of the nation’s wealth and installing themselves in positions of power. He asserted that if left unchecked, German Jews would have completely taken over the European economy as they had in America, while at the same time grabbing political power by installing secret Jews such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his book, PAC traced Roosevelt’s lineage back to the Rossocampo family of
Sephardic Jews in Spain, which migrated to Holland, where they became known as Rosenvelt.

During the first year of the occupation,
Les Mousquemers
were scattered. Dumas became an army mule driver in the Alps. Tailliez was assigned to the destroyer
Valmy
, in charge of torpedoes. Cousteau was transferred from
Suffern
to the cruiser
Dupleix
as a munitions officer. A little less than half the country was under the control of a collaborationist puppet government led by the aging general Philippe Pétain, who ruled unoccupied France from his headquarters in Vichy. When France surrendered, all its territory, military forces, and resources passed into the hands of Germany in the occupied northern zone, and to the Vichy government in the south. Practically, however, the French fleet and bases on the Mediterranean remained in the hands of the officers and sailors of the defeated nation under only cursory supervision by the conquering Germans and Italians. During the first year after France surrendered, Cousteau supervised a crew of sappers clandestinely rigging explosives aboard most of the ninety ships in the harbor at Toulon, while continuing to live in Sanary. If necessary, France would scuttle its Mediterranean fleet to keep it from the Axis powers.

Though the Germans promised the Vichy government postwar status as a self-governing part of the Third Reich, French resistance forces in the unoccupied zone began forming immediately after the capture of Paris. Cousteau, like most of the officers in the Mediterranean fleet, held no illusions that the fascists were planning a bright future for their defeated enemies. As long as he was not dead or in a prisoner of war camp, he decided to fight the Germans and Italians in whatever way he could. Quietly, without telling his family or friends, he made sure his superiors knew that he and his cameras and his experience underwater were ready to serve the resistance.

IN THE WINTER OF 1941,
Les Mousquemers
reunited in the relative peace of Sanary-sur-Mer in the unoccupied south of France. Cousteau and Tailliez were assigned to the detachments watching over the idle fleet at Toulon. Dumas just showed up one day, having fled south from the Alps on foot after his mule driving unit surrendered. During their off hours,
Les Mousquemers
hunted underwater, the fish they killed now vital to the survival of their families, who otherwise would have been living on tightly rationed bread, butter, and dried beans. The menu was grilled fish, baked fish, and fried fish, but everyone knew they were having a much easier time of it than their relatives in the occupied zone to the north. They also knew that things in the south were going to get worse. The beans, bread, and butter were growing scarcer by the day, and hunting fish was a solution to hunger only if the calories they provided exceeded the calories they consumed to kill the fish. A hunting free diver burns more calories than a stoker in a steel mill. As
Les Mousquemers
grew weaker from fatigue and their meager diet, they had to spend much more time in the water for each fish.