by Brad Matsen
The French army eventually identified Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, seized him from the Americans, and transferred him to a military prison outside Paris. PAC knew that his chances were not good. Robert Brasillach had been executed despite a public outcry against killing so revered an author, regardless of his wartime crimes. There would be no dramatic outpouring of support for a relatively obscure newspaper editor. The volleys of firing squads echoed dozens of times a day in France’s prison towns, sending men far more luminous than he into eternity. PAC’s trial for treason was brief, little more than a recitation of undeniable facts about his very public life during the German occupation.
Jacques Cousteau testified in his navy uniform wearing the crimson ribbon of the Légion d’honneur awarded to him for his undercover work with the resistance. Cousteau knew he was there to plead not for acquittal but against the death sentence. PAC’s guilt as a collaborator was undeniable.
On November 23, 1946, the tribunal ignored Cousteau’s plea and sentenced Pierre-Antoine Cousteau to death by firing squad, setting April 6, 1947, as the date for his execution. A month later, as part of a general amnesty declared to heal the tormented nation, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at hard labor.
During the first months after the war, the tribulations of Jacques Cousteau’s family in Torquay, Paris, and the military penitentiary at Clairvaux produced a steady hum of anxiety. He refused to let it distract him, however, from the revolution he was leading with the Aqua-Lung. Simone and their sons Jean-Michel and Philippe were safe with him in Sanary-sur-Mer. His parents, Daniel and Elizabeth, had taken PAC’s wife and children to England so they would not suffer the pains of being the family of a convicted traitor. There was simply nothing Cousteau could do about his brother. As always, his primitive sense for knowing what he could change and what he could not allowed him to live vigorously in the present.
(Left to right) Jacques-Yves, Daniel, and Pierre-Antoine Cousteau during World War II (PRIVATE COLLECTION)
Meanwhile, Émile Gagnan shipped a steady stream of Aqua-Lungs to Cousteau at the Undersea Research Group base in Toulon for training submariners, munitions experts, spies, and reconnaissance teams to scuba dive. Gagnan had replaced the original rectangular Bakelite case of the regulator with a round metal housing with two cast-metal horns to which were attached specially made flexible rubber hoses leading to a single mouthpiece. Each regulator bore a plate with the engraved inscription Scaphandre Autonome Cousteau Gagnan. There had been no publicity about the Aqua-Lung, except for a slight flurry of interest after Épaves won the prize at Cannes. Cousteau and Gagnan knew, however, that reports of dives to greater and greater depths and sensational discoveries beneath the sea would eventually find their way into newspapers, magazines, and newsreels.
The first internationally covered story on the Aqua-Lung was one that Cousteau, Gagnan, and the Undersea Research Group would much rather have done without. On September 17, 1947, Maurice Fargues—who had tended the ropes for Cousteau and Dumas in the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse—attempted a new depth record. He descended rapidly, tugging on a safety line attached to his weight belt as he went down to let the men on the surface know he was alive, a method of communication that was standard for hard-hat divers. Fargues reached 385 feet in three minutes, scratched his initials on a slate he tied to the anchor rope to verify the record, and signaled that he was okay. Long seconds passed with no tugs on the line. Tailliez barked the order to haul him up. At 150 feet, another diver on the way down the anchor rope saw Fargues hanging limply from the safety line, his mouthpiece dangling free. On the surface, they worked for hours to revive him but to no avail. Fargues had been breathing ordinary compressed air. Almost certainly, Cousteau and the others concluded, he was the first scuba diver to be killed by rapture of the deep. His death, and the new depth record confirmed by his scribbled initials on the slate at 385 feet, made headlines across Europe.
The death of Maurice Fargues hit everyone in the group hard. Cousteau was especially distraught. His Aqua-Lung had killed its first diver. “Maurice had shared our unfolding wonderment of the ocean since the earliest days of the Undersea Research Group,” Cousteau wrote in his memoir The Silent World. “We retain the memory of his prodigal comradeship. We will not be consoled that we were unable to save him.”
Since the time Cousteau had suffered convulsions while testing the first oxygen rebreather seven years earlier, he had known that breathing compressed gas underwater would be dangerous in some unexpected ways. Every incident was above all else a problem to be solved. Fargues’s handwriting on the slate at 300 feet was completely legible; at 385 it was a scribble. Apparently, 300 feet was the maximum depth a scuba diver could reach while breathing ordinary compressed air. Cousteau and the other divers immediately began experimenting with mixing air and helium to replace the nitrogen and reduce the possibility of narcosis.
As a tonic to banish the grief and the implications of a diver dying while using an Aqua-Lung, the Undersea Research Group embarked on its first archaeology expedition, to a sunken Roman ship off the coast of Tunisia. Tailliez, who was still in charge of the group, gave Cousteau command of the former German dive tender Albatross. The 78-foot vessel had been seized by the Russians, then given to the British, and finally handed over to the French navy as the spoils of war were shuffled around Europe among the victors. The group renamed it L’Ingénieur Elie Monnier to honor a navy engineer and hard-hat diver who had died when a bomb detonated under him while he was inspecting the wreck of the battleship Bretagne. With it, they would be able to travel across the Mediterranean, live relatively comfortably, make dozens of dives to the wreck, and use the ship’s cranes to haul up what they found.
As Cousteau directed the preparations for departure, he was very aware that he was developing a model for the self-contained diving expedition that, until then, had not existed. He planned for a fourteen-day voyage, constructing detailed lists of supplies and equipment, including food, wine, water, cigarettes, sidearms, rifles, and flare guns; Aqua-Lung regulators with spares for every part; air tanks; compressors; a one-man recompression chamber; still and movie cameras; pressurized camera housings; film, including some experimental color movie film; medical kits; the towed sled they had developed for minesweeping; cables, ropes, and baskets for hauling up artifacts; and hoses to carry compressed air to the bottom, with which Cousteau thought he might be able to scour sediment from the wreck. Cousteau’s biggest challenge was stowing the mountain of equipment while leaving enough room for accommodations for his crew of thirty. L’Elie Monnier had a large, tugboatlike deckhouse but not much hold space, so he and his crew spent weeks building bins, racks, and compartments on deck to hold their diving gear.
The wreck of the Roman ship they set out to explore had been first discovered, coincidentally, in 1907 by Simone Cousteau’s grandfather, Admiral Jean Baehme, after a Greek sponge diver told him he had seen giant cannons half-buried in the sand about 130 feet down. Baehme had sent navy helmet divers down to investigate. The cannons turned out to be Athenian marble pillars typical of the first century b.c., one of which the divers hoisted to the surface with a crane on their tender. Baehme had called in an archaeologist who told him that the wreck was probably the remains of a ship that had been carrying an entire Greek temple or villa, most likely plunder from a Roman raid. The French navy turned the wreck over to a museum in Tunis, which salvaged enough to fill five of its rooms with the most sensational underwater artifacts ever found. In another coincidence, James Hazen Hyde, who was then employing Daniel Cousteau as his traveling companion, had contributed $20,000 to the five-year operation. It had been enough to salvage less than half the precious cargo. The rest was still there.
Cousteau’s first stop in Tunisia was the archaeological museum, where he found sketches that pinpointed the wreck by triangulating landmarks on shore: a castle, some odd vegetation in the sand dunes, and a windmill. The next day, as L’Elie Monnier cruised a few hundred yards off the coast
in the vicinity of the wreck, Cousteau peered through binoculars and discovered that thirty-five years of wind, erosion, and shifting sands had spared only the castle. One landmark was worthless, but Cousteau still had two solid facts. He had seen the depth-sounding records from 1907 and knew that the wreck was at 127 feet, and he knew from rough positioning notes on the chart that it was somewhere nearby.
At the center of the estimated position of the wreck, divers laid out a steel wire grid covering 100,000 square feet, then systematically searched every inch of it. According to the decompression tables, a diver could stay at 130 feet for fifteen minutes and surface without stopping. To mark time during the dives, a rifleman on the surface fired a shot into the sea every five minutes, and two shots at fifteen minutes. After each shot, the divers instinctively looked up and watched the rifle bullets sink harmlessly to the bottom through crystal clear water, with the hulking shadow of L’Elie Monnier above them. They dove all day in shifts of two divers, each man making no more than three dives, but found nothing but sand, gravel, and occasional debris that slowed their search and proved to be meaningless. The next day, they towed divers on the sled in ever increasing concentric circles around the estimated position at a depth of 100 feet, from which they could see the bottom but remain in the water for almost a half hour without decompressing. Still nothing.
On the fifth day, as Cousteau and his divers grappled with the demoralizing possibility that their expedition would be a failure, Tailliez volunteered to be towed behind their auxiliary launch without the sled to take a wild stab at getting lucky. Tailliez made his offer to break the tension by taking all the responsibility for success or failure on his own shoulders as the group’s commanding officer. Every other diver also volunteered. The following morning they began a series of twenty-minute shifts that went on fruitlessly until late in the day. Tailliez went down for the last of his three dives at about four thirty in the afternoon, searching in an arc about 700 yards off the headland that was a half mile from where they had expected to find the wreck. Ten minutes into the dive, Tailliez glided over what was unmistakably a marble column, then another, and another. They were splayed like jackstraws around the clearly discernable outlines of a ship’s hull.
After finding the wreck, they had just a week to explore it before their navy orders required them to be back in Toulon for another assignment. Cousteau’s scouring air hoses worked beautifully. Though they sent a plume of muck, bubbles, and rocks toward the surface, forcing the divers using them to lie flat on the bottom beneath the debris, the hoses accomplished in minutes what would otherwise have taken hours. The wreck, which only vaguely resembled a ship, was 130 feet long by 40 feet wide—twice the size of L’Elie Monnier—lying on a plain of sand and mud, swarming with fish whose numbers increased as the hoses tore organic debris from the bottom. Before the first dive, Cousteau and the others had agreed they would not spear any of the fish, chiefly to keep down the possibility that sharks might be attracted to the blood. After a single day of diving on the wreck, the fish had become so comfortable with the giant but harmless invaders that they swam a few feet away from the divers to snatch the first morsels of food stirred up by the hoses.
For six days, rotating in two-man teams, the group worked from sunup to sundown, controlled by the “rifle clock” from above. Only Dumas, who could not resist three extra minutes on the bottom after he spotted something shiny on the wreck at the end of his third dive of the day, got bent. He seemed fine until he sat down to dinner complaining of a slight pain in his shoulder. Cousteau and two other men jumped up and pulled the grumbling Dumas onto the deck and into the recompression chamber. They set the depth to 4 atmospheres—132 feet—and locked the door. The chamber was equipped with a telephone connected to a loudspeaker in the galley, through which Dumas kept up a steady banter, accusing his fellow divers of starving him as a prank. All of them knew, though, that they could not take even the slightest chance with the bends.
Conditions were perfect for testing some new color film Cousteau had gotten from the French Film Institute. In the dim blue light at 130 feet, he shot the faint yellow sunlight winking off the divers’ chrome regulators, with their bubbles streaming behind them like capes of shimmering jewels. The divers themselves, swimming only in brief bathing suits, were putty-colored and ghostly. The bright sand bottom reflected enough light to illuminate the fluted marble columns, capitals, and bases as the divers attached cables and maneuvered them into position for their return to the surface after two millennia on the bottom of the Mediterranean.
Cousteau and his men were delighted with the efficiency of the world’s first industrial salvage operation using the Aqua-Lung, and awestruck by ancient artifacts from the wreck. Iron nails corroded to the thickness of needles, bronze nails worn down to wires, and still-varnished ribs of Lebanon cedar revealed the ship to them. They recovered a millstone used by the ship’s crew to grind grain stored for the voyage in the amphorae they found intact in the center of the wreck where a hold might have been. They found and raised two 1,500-pound iron anchors. With ropes and cables, they brought four 3-ton columns to the surface, scrubbed them off, and marveled at the white marble that emerged from the slime. The stone clearly showed the chisel marks made by a carver more than two thousand years before, when the Mediterranean was the center of the known world. Except for a few artifacts kept by the divers as souvenirs—including an Ionic capital that Cousteau took home with him to Sanary-sur-Mer—everything recovered by the first international archaeological expedition of the Undersea Research Group remained at the museum in Tunisia.
“The finest treasures in the world are waiting in the Mediterranean, now within range of the lung,” Cousteau boasted in an interview after the Tunisian adventure. “She is the mother of civilization, the sea girt with the oldest cultures, a museum in sun and spray.”
In the most frequently published newspaper photograph from the expedition to Tunisia, Guy Morandière is shown guiding a spectacularly detailed Ionic capital slung in a rope cradle from a crane that is out of the frame. Sunken treasure had always been sensational fare for writers and reporters. The possibility that archaeological stories from the ancient past could now be told by divers who could breathe and swim free underwater sent a minor shock wave through postwar Europe, hungry for reassurances that humanity was back on the right track.
Among those who noticed the tremor was an American reporter for Yank magazine, James Dugan, who had met Cousteau shortly after VE day, when Cousteau was in London trying to interest the British and American navies in his Aqua-Lung. Dugan had never wanted to be anything but a writer. He was born to middle-class parents in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1912, and took advantage of the peaceful years between the world wars to graduate from high school and become a member of the class of 1935 at Penn State. It was an era in America during which—thanks to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Walter Winchell—becoming a writer, reporter, or radio announcer could make a young man popular and attractive. Dugan parlayed a little talent into the editor’s chair of the college literary magazine, then went to New York to write articles for Holiday, The Saturday Evening Post, and the flood of magazines that made newsstands the center of the information world.
After serving for two years as an enlisted man teaching language classes to soldiers while the United States sat out the beginning of World War II, Dugan shipped out to England as a combat correspondent with the Army Air Corps. He flew missions over the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, wrote good stories, and later found a job as a reporter for Yank magazine. In early 1945, with the Allies closing in on victory, Dugan was in London, where he saw a short film of men swimming around a shipwreck wearing tanks of air on their backs. He was fascinated and so sure his friends and editors would not believe what he had seen that he went back to the newsreel theater with a still camera and clicked off a couple of frames. Dugan noted that the credits of the film, Épaves, listed Jacques-Yves Cousteau as director and cameraman and knew that he had to find this br
ave or foolhardy Frenchman who had figured out a way to swim underwater like a seal.
The following spring, Dugan heard that Cousteau was in London, prowling the hallways at the admiralty with photographs and sketches of his underwater breathing apparatus, and tracked him down for an interview. They met for breakfast and talked through lunch and dinner. Dugan was charmed by the Frenchman’s enthusiasm and sense of purpose. Cousteau was not a man who would waste much time with anyone who did not fit into his plans. After dinner, Dugan spent what remained of the night typing out his notes, which became a long magazine article, “The First of the Menfish,” betraying the writer’s enthusiasm for his scoop and his instant attachment to Cousteau:
In the clear, warm waters of the French Riviera a new species of large mammalian fish have been observed in the last few years, one-eyed monsters shaped and colored like nude human beings with green rubber tail fins, gills of metal, and tubular scales on their backs. They are called Cousteau Divers. They swim around sportively at hundred-foot depths, examining sunken ships, taking photographs, and harpooning big fish. They are the first of the menfish, a new order of marine life invented by Lieutenant de Vaisseau Jacques-Yves Cousteau of the French Navy.
In ten thousand words, Dugan methodically traced the evolution of the new aquatic species: the invention of the Cousteau-Gagnan valve, which delivered a measured breath of air regardless of the diver’s depth or attitude in the water; the pioneering Aqua-Lung divers’ flirtations with death as they tested the limits of their invention and experienced the dangers of breathing gas under pressure; Cousteau’s obsession with making movies underwater.
“The entire motive of the fifteen years of work Cousteau has put into his lung was to make films under water. He has the movie bug bad,” Dugan wrote. “Lieutenant de Vaisseau (gunnery officer) Cousteau is 37, a lean, bronzed man with a bold Mediterranean profile and eyes of ocean blue. He bought his first movie camera when he was 13 …”