Jacques Cousteau

by Brad Matsen

  Four hundred miles off the coast of Kenya, a day from Assumption Island, Calypso steamed into a pod of sperm whales. Several adults with young swam in random patterns around the ship, loping through the water as though in no great hurry to get where they were going. Cousteau throttled back, but not before Calypso’s bow slammed into one of the whales. It was seriously wounded, with blood streaming in its wake. Cousteau and his crew stood in stunned silence as two other whales swam to the injured whale and supported its body with their own. In minutes, all the other whales had converged on the scene of the accident, swimming slowly in a defensive perimeter around the wounded member of the pod. With Calypso barely moving to keep steerage, Cousteau felt one of his propellers hit something. Seconds later, a 15-foot-long infant whale broke the surface next to the ship with deep, bleeding gashes clearly visible on its back.

  As though by a single command, the pod and the first wounded whale slowed and fell behind Calypso, vanishing completely just as the first sharks began tearing at the crippled infant. Dumas ran to the weapons locker on the navigation bridge, grabbed a rifle, and killed the little whale with a single shot. While he was administering the coup de grâce, Cousteau, Laban, and Malle rigged the shark cage to the crane. In minutes, they were in the water capturing a terrifying feeding frenzy never before seen on film. Malle was shaking so badly he had to struggle to hold the camera steady as he watched 12-foot blue sharks methodically rip chunks of flesh from the whale, then follow the skeleton into the depths to scavenge the last morsels.

  Afterward, as always, Cousteau’s evening included updating the ship’s log, in which he recorded his amazement over the behavior of the sperm whales as much more profound than the horror of the sharks’ feeding frenzy. During the encounter, he had listened to the sounds of the whales with Calypso’s echo sounder, hearing the unmistakable cries of distress from the whale wounded by Calypso’s bow. Cousteau told everyone that he believed the whales had spoken to one another, both during the collision and just before the shark attack, when the entire pod vanished, as if on command. He had never seen or heard anything like it, and knew that his film from that afternoon would change the way the world thought about whales and sharks. The shark frenzy had disturbed the bucolic rhythms of life aboard Calypso. Before going back to work, Cousteau gave his crew a week to unwind in Victoria, Mahè, the northernmost port in the Seychelles.

  When they finally reached Assumption Island, a tiny chunk of upthrust limestone fringed with a pristine coral reef north of Madagascar, even the most seasoned divers were stunned by the colorful natural masterpiece below. As always, Dumas and Falco made the first reconnaissance dive on the reef. They had seen more beneath the sea than any two men alive, but both returned to the surface sputtering through their mouthpieces, “Extraordinaire.” At dinner that night, Cousteau announced that Calypso would stay at Assumption Island until the monsoons arrived in about a month. The coral reef and its creatures, Cousteau thought, were the most marvelous movie set he could imagine.

  Cousteau promoted Malle from head cameraman to codirector. They had spent hundreds of hours together planning their dives, repairing cameras, lights, and hydrophones for sound, and talking about their expectations for The Silent World. To Malle, Cousteau was a master technician who constantly strove to improve his equipment and technique for filming underwater. To Cousteau, Malle was the embodiment of the artistic sensibility he considered essential to great cinema. At twenty-three, Malle already believed that film—like dance, theater, and music—allowed him to marry beautiful images, great writing, interesting characters, and music into a story that happened, ended, but remained forever in the consciousness of the viewer. After fifteen years of underwater film, it was no longer enough, Cousteau and Malle agreed, to simply take people beneath the sea. Cousteau wanted a pure documentary, a movie that revealed not only the underwater world and the creatures that inhabited it but the divers responsible for making it. Malle wanted to portray the divers as dancing rather than laboring, making them not so much guides and masters underwater but strange humans weirdly adapted to the alien world. They agreed that The Silent World would be shot in color.

  They compromised on the kind of film they would make together, trading scenes in a carefully edited dance of pictures and sound. Malle’s opening mesmerized its first audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1956. Five Aqua-Lung divers descend through aquamarine water carrying underwater flares that stream pyrotechnic banners of bubbles, accompanied by the sounds of their breath through gurgling regulators and the roar of the burning flares.

  “This is a motion-picture studio sixty-five feet under the sea,” Cousteau narrates, his voice conveying fascination in every word. “These divers wearing compressed-air Aqua-Lungs are true spacemen, swimming freely as fish.”

  The descent seems to last forever. People in theaters find themselves holding their breath. A hundred feet down, the flares die out and the divers turn on floodlights that illuminate a riot of orange, yellow, and red bursting from a coral reef beneath them. They change course and continue to descend. Passing 200 feet, the ocean is a diffuse bluish haze that collapses into blackness below. The Calypso divers are now in the world of rapture, Cousteau continues, with a note of fear in his voice. Nitrogen in their flesh and blood will soon intoxicate them, robbing them of their sense of balance and their ability to make decisions. A minute later, the divers are at 247 feet, the deepest Aqua-Lung dive ever captured on film. In the weird white beams of the camera lights, the divers nod to each other, point to the surface, and begin their ascent.

  The second scene is Cousteau’s, a distinct counterpoint to Malle’s lyrical overture. The divers are back on the surface, exhausted and struggling to board Calypso with the weight of their tanks and the awkwardness of walking in swim fins. Cousteau’s obvious point is that menfish swim free in the sea but are as clumsy as fish out of water on the surface. The first lines of wooden dialogue reveal that great divers are not necessarily great actors, but somehow they strike just the right note. One of the divers complains of a pain in his knee. It might be the bends. Cousteau orders the diver into Calypso’s recompression chamber, where he will have to stay while the rest of the crew eats dinner.

  “Do I have to, Captain?” the diver protests, sounding like a scolded boy.

  “Absolutely,” Cousteau says, pointing to the chamber as if banishing that child.

  After a quick tour of the interior of the chamber and an explanation of the bends, laughing crewmen seal the pouting diver inside. Cousteau’s technical moment segues into the galley, where the crew, crammed around the impossibly small table, feasts on lobsters and talks about diving. All of them are awkward on camera, but they are infinitely likable and unquestionably brave. Everyone in the theater is quite willing to dive with them again.

  For the next eighty minutes, Cousteau, his divers, and a cast of sea creatures make good on the dramatic promises of the opening scenes. A 60-pound giant grouper named Jo Jo le Merou (after a famous Marseille gangster) dances a waltz with Dumas, who feeds him scraps of meat from his hands. Cousteau explains that the fish off Assumption Island have no fear of humans because they have never seen any before. He also says that he has banned spearfishing by anyone except the Calypso’s chef. Jo Jo is shown greeting the divers in the morning and following them to the boarding ladder in the evening. The big fish stuck so close to the divers that they had to lock it in the shark cage when they filmed other reef fish, lest it interrupt the scene by chasing the smaller fish.

  Cousteau leads his divers and theater audiences to the wreck of a sunken freighter in the Red Sea with footage shot on his first and second expeditions. Sixty feet down, he films Dumas scrubbing rust and silt from the ship’s builder’s plate, revealing that it was from a Scottish shipyard, yard number 599. Back aboard Calypso, Cousteau scrapes barnacles and algae from a bell retrieved from the wreck, showing the camera that the ship’s name was Thistlegorm.

  In another of Louis Malle’s scene
s, hundreds of porpoises cavort in front of Calypso, easily able to outswim the ship but clearly slowing down to play, apparently happy to entertain Cousteau and his laughing crew standing on the ship’s bow. Not a single member of the audience at Cannes or in the thousands of theaters in which The Silent World was shown had ever seen anything like the dance of the dolphins.

  Nor had they ever seen the brutal antithesis of the dolphins’ grace and beauty: the shark feeding frenzy on the baby sperm whale, shown while Cousteau matter-of-factly comments on the attack. “The sharks smell the blood in the water. Then comes the first bite. It is the signal for the orgy to begin.” Calypso’s crewmen, Cousteau explains, are outraged by what the sharks are doing. He calls the sharks the mortal enemies of divers. The crewmen bait hooks, catch the sharks, then join the orgy themselves by hacking them to pieces on deck. At the screening of The Silent World in Cannes, audiences moaned and gasped at the carnage on the screen. Many wept.

  During the festival, Calypso was moored in the bay, its rigging strung with lights and pennants, its white hull an unmistakable nautical centerpiece. For the first time, the jury awarded its highest prize, the Palme d’Or, to a documentary. A week later, after making an initial approach to Daniel Cousteau, Columbia Pictures bought the rights to release The Silent World in the United States.

  Four months later, The Silent World opened at the Paris Theater, across the street from the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The otherworldly divers in the opening scene had people holding their breath, Jo Jo le Merou (renamed Ulysses in James Dugan’s English narration) had them laughing, the dolphins were more beautiful than anything they had ever seen on the ocean, and audiences were similiarly caught up in the shark frenzy. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it “the most beautiful and fascinating documentary of its sort ever filmed. The only trouble with the whole thing is that it makes you want to strap on an Aqua-Lung and go.”

  The following spring, after playing to enthusiastic audiences in hundreds of theaters across America, The Silent World won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar as the best documentary film of 1956. Crowther and other critics, however, wondered about the scientific value of running Calypso into a pod of whales, slaughtering sharks for revenge, or dynamiting a reef to collect fish. “Exactly what Captain Cousteau learned for the benefit of oceanographic science is not explained,” Crowther wrote. “However, his voyaging turned up a beautiful and absorbing nature film, and that is enough for anybody whose scientific interest does not range very far outside a theater.”

  Among those who were enchanted by the exploits of Cousteau and the Calypso divers was Prince Rainier of Monaco. After seeing The Silent World, he offered Cousteau a job as the director of the world’s oldest undersea museum and research center, the Oceanographic Museum of Monte Carlo. The museum, which looks like a gigantic limestone castle hanging on the face of a 500-foot cliff outside the harbor, was built by Rainier’s grandfather, Prince Albert Grimaldi. Calling it the Temple of the Sea, he filled it with a collection of specimens and artifacts from his own ocean expeditions. The museum was equipped with laboratories, meeting rooms, and an extensive library, which, for the rest of Albert’s life, drew the cream of European ocean scientists to Monaco.

  The harbor at Monaco (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Monaco itself is less than a square mile of land, bordered on three sides by France and on the fourth by the Mediterranean. Until Louis Blanc, a gambler exiled from Germany, arrived in 1872, the principality was a few narrow streets winding over a precipitous rock cliff, a fishing fleet of a dozen small boats, and a population of eight hundred people who scratched out a wretched existence under the guard of a battalion of French troops With the roulette wheel he brought with him from Bad Homburg, Blanc transformed Monte Carlo into the gambling capital of the world in less than a decade. He ensured his welcome and the continuing health of Monaco by cutting in the Grimaldi family, heirs to the throne of the principality, for 10 percent of his action, which quickly amounted to millions of francs a year.

  Albert’s heir, Prince Louis, inherited the throne in 1922. He had no interest in the sea or its creatures, so the museum went into a quarter century of decline. When Prince Rainier took over in 1949, he made the resurrection of his grandfather’s vision one of the priorities of his reign, spending the next eight years rebuilding the now decrepit fortress on the cliff. In 1957, the museum was just beginning to attract not only tourists but scientists again. Rainier decided that Jacques-Yves Cousteau would be the perfect man to raise it up the next notch to its former glory as one of the world’s great centers of inquiry into the nature of the world’s oceans.

  Rainier saw Cousteau as a celebrated explorer who also knew how to tell the world what he saw underwater in books and movies. He was a master fund-raiser and a great showman, traits that fit perfectly into Rainier’s dream that the museum would, like the casino at Monte Carlo, become a source of revenue for the tiny principality as well as contributing to scientific knowledge of the ocean. The prince envisioned it becoming a self-sustaining aquarium, featuring creatures from the Mediterranean, in particular the dolphins that had so moved him in The Silent World.

  Cousteau told the prince that exhibiting live dolphins in an aquarium had been a dream of his since his first expeditions aboard Calypso. He found out that American marine parks captured dolphins by lassoing them, and put his research group to work figuring out how to do it. They mounted a platform on the front of one of their launches, where Falco stood with a rope and a long pole to place the noose over the animal riding the bow wave. It didn’t work. Falco killed a few dolphins before giving up. Cousteau then realized that the kind of dolphin the Americans captured with lassos was the bottle-nosed dolphin, a much more robust animal than the common dolphin in the Mediterranean, which was lighter and more delicate. Falco tried anesthetizing the dolphins with curare before lassoing them. More dolphins died.

  Finally, Falco got a line on a small female, let her tire herself out pulling against a buoy on the surface, and sent divers into the water to corral her. They brought the exhausted dolphin to shore in Marseille, put her into a large concrete tank, and named her Kiki. She died three months later, but not before bonding with Falco, who was her primary keeper. Coincidentally, or maybe not, Kiki died a week after Falco went to sea aboard Calypso, leaving her with a new keeper. Cousteau insisted that she died of a broken heart when Falco left. Two more dolphins, a male and female, killed themselves by swimming full speed into the wall of the tank. With much better facilities and the help of scientists at the Oceanographic Museum, Cousteau hoped he would eventually succeed in holding dolphins in captivity and make their leaps and playful swimming a major attraction in Monaco.

  Rainier’s offer was a dream come true for Cousteau, who constantly was struggling to make financial ends meet, both for his expeditions and his family. It included a generous salary, an apartment on a hillside in Monaco, and a staff to handle the day-to-day operations of the museum. He was free to manage his movie production company, Calypso, the Office of Undersea Technology, and his role as the spokesman for Air Liquide’s scuba equipment venture. Like Bosley Crowther, almost everyone who saw The Silent World couldn’t wait to go see the world beneath the sea for themselves. Aqua-Lung sales were booming in the United States and Europe.

  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 monthl
y 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.

  13

  LIVING UNDERWATER

  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.