Jacques Cousteau

by Brad Matsen

  “Cousteau really did come up with the idea that it should look like a saucer at lunch that day off Grand-Congloue in the early fifties,” André Laban recalled. “But it took a lot of people a lot of time to figure out the details.”

  Laban was in charge of the first unmanned descent to a depth of 2,000 feet at the end of a cable. If Hull Number One survived, he would then send it to 3,000 feet before approving it for manned dives to no more than 1,000 feet. Laban and Mollard had modified an industrial crane on Calypso that could lift 5 tons, more than the weight of the submarine and ballast for the unmanned test, and the much lighter weight of the manned sub and its steel cradle.

  La Souscoupe (AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)

  Off the coast southeast of Marseille, Laban lowered Hull Number One to a depth of 2,000 feet. He let the craft soak for fifteen minutes, during which a mistral kicked up a swell from the south. When the sub was 100 feet from the surface, clearly visible to the anxious crew on Calypso’s pitching deck, the cable snapped, almost beheading the winch man as its end lashed back. Falco dove into the sea but was helpless as Hull Number One plunged 3,300 feet to the bottom.

  Cousteau quickly took radar bearings on three shore targets to mark the spot. The following day, Laban returned aboard Calypso and conducted a sonar survey of the bottom for 10 square miles around the site. He, Mollard, and the other engineers at the Office of Undersea Technology were already working on Hull Number Two from the same design. If Number One had not survived the descent to 3,000 feet, they were wasting their time. When Cousteau and Laban analyzed the sonargrams, they clearly saw that the lost sub was hovering over the bottom, secured by a cable they knew to be 30 feet long that tied it to the 4 tons of lead ballast required for the test descent. Obviously, it was still airtight at 3,270 feet. They could go ahead on Hull Number Two without the expense of retrieving the first one. Cousteau knew it was only a matter of time before he added 750 feet to his reach into the sea.

  The following year, 1959, after what had seemed to have been an endless streak of good luck for Cousteau, PAC died. He had battled cancer for five years while continuing to publish unapologetic accounts of his war years as a collaborator. His estrangement from his brother had deepened, as JYC increasingly kept his distance to avoid a public connection with a man who had betrayed his country. A few hours before PAC lapsed into the coma from which he would not wake, JYC was at his bedside to offer his once-beloved brother something more than his friendship in life. For the rest of his own life, JYC would care for PAC’s children as his own. Cousteau never intended to separate himself from PAC, never condemned him as a traitor. He simply excluded the man who had been his best friend until politics and war took him away, learning from that painful detachment that all relationships are transitory. Cousteau could be immediately and passionately present with people, but he also wore a hardened suit of emotional armor that allowed him to move on without them.

  Seven months after PAC’s death, Cousteau sailed for New York to attend the World Oceanographic Congress at the United Nations. It was the first international gathering of its kind, with a thousand scientists and explorers from thirty-eight countries convening across the ordinarily impassable borders of academic disciplines to assess the future of the world’s oceans. Cousteau was one of the featured speakers, and the mayor of New York promised him and Calypso the kind of welcome usually reserved for the maiden voyages of great ocean liners and heroic men-of-war.

  Crossing the Atlantic was no mean feat for the 139-foot, flat-bottomed Calypso. Cousteau and the crew knew their little ship could take a pounding and stay afloat, but the ride was anything but comfortable. Most days, the rule was one-hand-on-the-ship to keep their footing, and even the veteran sailors among them were not immune to seasickness during the worst of it. North of the Canary Islands, Calypsos crew and a team of French oceanographers under the leadership of American geologist Lloyd Breslau took historic photographs of the mid-Atlantic rift zone using cameras towed on underwater sleds and Papa Flash’s new lights. The sleds, nicknamed Troikas after horse-drawn Russian sleighs, took pairs of color photographs that could later be viewed stereoscopically, giving depth and dimension to the bottom terrain. The mid-Atlantic rift, a great gash in the seafloor discovered during the Challenger expedition in 1863, runs 18,000 miles from Greenland to the fringe of Antarctica, marking the line where the supercontinent of Pangaea tore apart 180 million years ago and started the formation of the current landmasses of the earth. The theory of plate tectonics, spreading seafloor rift zones, and drifting continents was new, controversial, and the most thrilling discovery in the history of the young science of oceanography. Geologists, biologists, physicists, chemists, and metallurgists were crossing interdisciplinary lines in droves to contribute to this new idea about how the planet was formed and to explain the remarkable role of the deep ocean in creating the earth’s crust. They had sampled the midocean ridges and rifts with dredges and probes, and sketched their contours with echo sounders, but actually getting a look at big black cliffs in photographs was fantastic.

  The mayor of New York made good on his promise. Cousteau and Calypso passed the Statue of Liberty under fireboat water showers, accompanied by sirens, horns, and whistles. Overhead, a dirigible hovered with a camera crew filming the brave little ship. Her white hull was weathered and streaked with rust from the long Atlantic crossing, her crew at the rails waving to their escorts through the fog of the August morning. For the next week, Calypso was open to the public at her berth on the Lower West Side, while across town Cousteau attended the congress and Breslau’s presentation of the spectacular photographs of the mid-Atlantic rift. In dozens of sessions, oceanographers outlined a revolutionary new human relationship with the world’s oceans. Increased knowledge and the rapid development of technology to exploit ocean resources were transforming the industrial world. It was also obvious that the sea was not the infinite source of wealth and life it had been thought to be just a decade earlier.

  Cousteau had recently seen firsthand how quickly human impact can transform a piece of the resilient, beautiful, fruitful ocean into a wasteland. His first big idea as the director of the Oceanographic Museum had been the creation of a marine sanctuary beneath the cliffs of Monaco that would be tended by Aqua-Lung divers and viewed by visitors ashore via television cameras. He called it the Marine Biotron. In it, divers and scientists would live in underwater houses to study a pristine section of the ocean that did not experience the pressures of fishing, sport diving, and most of all coastal development. Cousteau was forced to abandon the Biotron when towns on both sides of the proposed preserve, Fontvieille and Monaco Beach, embarked on aggressive landfill projects to expand their territory in the tiny principality, with no limits on the amount of concrete, rocks, dirt, and gravel they poured into the sea. For months, the water was clouded with sediment that killed the delicate marine organisms upon which fish and other sea life depended. Worse, Cousteau learned, the breakneck expansion of nuclear energy plants in southern Europe meant that the entire Mediterranean coast was going to be polluted with low-level radioactive waste. Cousteau had been exploring and filming the underwater world as much for the sheer pleasure of the adventure as anything else. After the World Oceanographic Congress, there was no question in his mind that by showing as many people as possible the beauty, power, and paradoxical vulnerability of the world’s oceans he could help save them from destruction.

  Cousteau and Simone aboard Calypso in New York during the World Oceanographic Congress in 1959 (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

  Cousteau and Calypso left New York to show the flag on the Atlantic seaboard, sailing first to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Nantucket Sound, then south to the Potomac River and Washington, D.C. There, as the guest of honor at the National Geographic Society, Cousteau was presented with a gold medal and his crew were treated as visiting dignitaries. A never-ending stream of people who considered themselves to be friends of Cousteau’s great adventure toured Calypso. A writer
and photographer from Time magazine came aboard to interview Cousteau for a brief article, which grew into the lead feature story.

  On the cover of Time, Cousteau’s beaming, weathered face appeared at the center of a montage depicting a scuba diver, reef fish, and corals. In the upper-right-hand corner, a banner announced: “SKINDIVING. Poetry, Pleasure, and Pelf.” Inside, the story began with Cousteau’s description of the transformation he and every scuba diver experience underwater: “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth, but man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free. Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction—up, down, sideways—by merely flipping his hand. Underwater, man becomes an archangel.”

  The story filled ten pages, with photographs, covering Cousteau’s life, the early adventures of Les Mousquemers, the invention of the Aqua-Lung, Calypso and its charismatic crew, The Silent World, the revolutionary new and untested submarine in Calypso’s cargo hold, and Cousteau’s recent appointment as the head the world’s oldest oceanographic museum in Monaco. There were more than a million Aqua-Lung divers in North America, all of whom had bought their equipment from U.S. Divers, the Air Liquide subsidiary. Cousteau was its president. The writer concluded by asking Cousteau what advice he would give to a person trying scuba diving for the first time.

  “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.