Jacques Cousteau Read online

  While he recuperated, uncertain of his future in the navy, Cousteau returned to his vision of himself as a filmmaker. He still liked the way his camera set him apart from the rest of the world and gave him permission to look right at people and things around him. It was a novelty. It was almost magic. He was in control. He had the navy as a career but could not bring himself to set aside storytelling with his camera.

  In his film of the soirée where he met Simone Melchior in Paris in 1936, she looks directly at the lens and clearly mouths her name, “Simone.” She exaggerates a coy smile with downcast eyes, the gesture of an actress admitting that she is acting in Cousteau’s movie. The camera pans away from her, then returns to find her beaming as her natural self. Cousteau and Simone became a bonded pair at that moment. The navy and the sea were common to them, and they recognized something in each other that made them feel safe. Both had been children of absent fathers, both had traveled while most people of their generation were living sedentary, predictable lives. They saw in each other a certain delight for their surroundings, as though their presence itself transformed an ordinary parlor into a movie set. Their first conversation, after Cousteau dropped his camera to his side, was about boats. For a year after they met, they were as inseparable as a man and a woman living 500 miles apart could be. JYC shuttled between the navy base in Toulon and Paris while remaining on light duty. Simone finished high school. A month after her graduation, on July 12, 1937, they were married at St.-Louis-des-Invalides, honeymooned in the Alps, and returned to the fleet in Toulon.

  2

  LES MOUSQUEMERS

  IN TOULON, Cousteau spent some days training with other sailors and some days at the hospital enduring painful therapy for the wounds he suffered in the car wreck. The navy had decided to make him a gunnery officer who would eventually be an expert on munitions in charge of a gun crew. He tired easily, rejected painkillers except when he needed them to sleep, and had trouble keeping up during the most ordinary of days. In the fall of 1936, while he was aboard the cruiser Condorcet, one of the other officers drew him aside and gently suggested that there might be a better way to regain the strength in his arms than what the doctors had prescribed. Philippe Tailliez, who was slightly older than Cousteau, seemed shy and spoke with a stammer, but he was obviously a quietly confident officer, respected by his men. Swimming in the sea, Tailliez proposed, would help him build his strength. Cousteau told Tailliez that he knew how to swim, loved the water, and was willing to try anything that could relieve the pain and get him back to full duty. The following day, Tailliez took Cousteau to a rocky beach below the bluffs of Sanary-sur-Mer just west of Toulon.

  Tailliez was anything but shy in the still-warm water of the Mediterranean in autumn. At thirty-one, he was a raw-boned, agile man whose placid exterior concealed boundless energy and a passion for the sea that had been kindled during his childhood on Dunkerque beach in northern France, where he was born in 1905. Philippe’s father was a sailor who returned home from his voyages with tales of the South Pacific, pearl divers, and underwater fishermen who hunted with spears. Philippe’s father also introduced his son to the mortal danger of the sea with a story about a child diving for coins near a warship anchored in the Suez Canal. The little boy, no older than Philippe’s own seven years, waved to the French sailors, disappeared beneath the surface after the coins, and bobbed up dead a few minutes later.

  Les Mousquemers, 1948. (Left to right) Jacques Cousteau, Philippe Tailliez, and Frédéric Dumas (COURTESY OF WWW.PHILIPPE.TAILLIEZ.NET)

  When the Tailliez family was living at the navy base in Brest, Philippe had won a goldfish in a glass bowl by spinning a prize wheel at a charity bazaar. On the way home, the rocking of the car sloshed the water around in its jar and Philippe watched the fish stabilize itself against the motion with subtle, perfect adjustments of its tail. The next time he went swimming, Philippe added a fishlike kick to his breaststroke and found that it increased his speed. He began to claim the ocean as part of his natural habitat. The cold, cloudy waters of the English Channel and the Atlantic were hospitable only to tentative underwater excursions, but when Philippe was posted to Toulon after completing his officer training at Brest, the clear, warm Mediterranean turned out to be paradise.

  With instructions from the commander of Condorcet, a skin-diving enthusiast named Captaine Louis de Corlieu, Tailliez made himself a pair of flippers by sandwiching pieces of metal saw blades between two slabs of rubber and strapping them to his feet with twine. The fins, about a foot long, more than doubled the power of his kicks. Tailliez also fashioned a mask from aviator glasses. Like eyes, which have evolved independently in many different kinds of animals, goggles for seeing underwater had appeared many times on many seashores all over the world. The earliest versions were double rubber or fabric cups with small glass panes, held in place by a head band. Like every skin diver, he continued to experiment.

  Tailliez figured out how to strap a few pounds of lead weights to his waist so he didn’t have to struggle against his own buoyancy. He also cut himself a two-foot length of garden hose tied with twine into the shape of a J, through which he could breathe on the surface while scanning the water below him for prey. To dive, he held his breath. When he surfaced, he blew the water out of the snorkel tube. His ultimate piece of equipment was four feet of solid brass curtain rod, one end sharpened into a point, the other taped to a loop of automobile inner tube. The diver could draw his spear back against the elasticity of the rubber band on his wrist, and fire it with enough force to pierce a fish or lobster a few feet away when he released the tension. Tailliez was eating well, but sometimes left his spear on the beach and just cruised the surface, marveling at the world beneath the sea, which seemed utterly private and his alone.

  In the autumn of 1936, Cousteau and Tailliez ended most days in the water at Le Mourillon Bay near Sanary-sur-Mer, Tailliez hunting while Cousteau exercised his sore arms with a gentle crawl stroke on the surface. When Tailliez was successful, which was more often than not, they would build a fire on the beach, roast one of the fish, and eat it while shivering over the embers as dusk fell. Usually, Tailliez killed enough fish to pass around in Sanary, where he was a bit of a hero because of his generosity. Soon, the two men had established the routine from which they strayed only when they were on duty or when the water was simply too cold.

  One afternoon, Tailliez was preparing for his hunt when he casually offered his mask, fins, and snorkel to Cousteau, who protested that he was a navy gunner interested only in perfecting his crawl style in case he had to abandon ship someday. The sea, he insisted, was merely a salty obstacle that burned his eyes or a way to travel from port to port. Tailliez coaxed. Cousteau gave in. The older man helped his friend into the gear and swam with him as they eased into the Mediterranean. Cousteau listened to the rasp of his own breath through the hose, paddled over the seascape in the brightly illuminated shallows, and saw it all clearly through his goggles. Minutes after entering the water with Tailliez’s mask, fins, and snorkel, Cousteau’s life changed forever. Below him through the crystalline water he saw rocks covered with green, brown, and silver forests of algae and brightly colored little fish he never knew existed. He stood up to breathe and glanced on shore, where he saw a trolley car, people, and electric-light poles. Another world entirely. He put his eyes under again and civilization vanished. Cousteau was in a jungle never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof of the sea. He remembered Mr. Boetz, horses, and the feeling of bliss that he had discovered in the silty brown water of a Vermont lake. Now, instead of groping blindly for branches in the murk, he could see clearly.

  Shepherded by Tailliez, Cousteau ventured into deeper water. He was startled to see that he could pick out details on the bottom more than 20 feet below. The fractured talus of the beach slid into underwater shoals of rock and sand alive with ochre fronds of kelp and patches of bright green sea grass. Bright constellations of red, orange, and lavender starfish decorated every surface to
which they could cling against the surge of the sea. In the crevices of rock piles and eroded boulders, he picked out the dark purple spines of urchins. Swarms of fish were weightless and agile, with repertoires of acrobatic stunts and bursts of speed Cousteau had never seen on land. Lumbering groupers hovered like dirigibles near the larger rocks, disappearing in a single heartbeat when he startled them. Schools of synchronized mackerel flashed in the sunlight as though commanded by an invisible choreographer. A codlike merou poked at the bottom, and a solitary palomata that looked as if it weighed 200 pounds lurked in the distance. Cousteau wondered about the size of the palomata and held his hand in front of his mask to determine the scale. He realized for the first time that the entire sea through glass was a magnifying lens. Cousteau held his breath, dove down 15 feet to a boulder, held on to it, and spotted Tailliez splashing above.

  “The reason I love the sea I cannot explain,” Cousteau said. “I only know that sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course. It happened to me on that summer’s day, when my eyes were opened on the sea.”

  Cousteau began spending hours in the library at the navy base reading about the sea and swimming underwater. “Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one part,” D. H. Lawrence had just written, “but there is a third thing that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.” Water covers 71 percent of the earth’s surface with 328 million cubic miles or 361,200,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. Water is essentially colorless, but its density and composition scatter the electromagnetic wave lengths of red, orange, yellow, and green light. It absorbs every color but blue, creating the dominant hue seen from a beach or from the moon. The phenomenon can be observed by a deep diver descending into the abyss as the light deteriorates in the order of the spectrum beginning with red until, at 600 feet, only the blue remains. At about 1,900 feet, the radiation emitted by the sun has been slowed enough by its passage through water that it has lost its power to penetrate the human retina. Beyond, the ocean is black. The average depth of the ocean is 2.5 miles, with abyssal chasms reaching 7 miles.

  Seawater is never just water. Oxygen and hydrogen combined into water molecules make up 96.5 percent of the ocean, but the other 3.5 percent consists of dissolved elements. Every cubic mile of the ocean contains 90 million tons of chlorine, 6 million tons of magnesium, 4 million tons of sulfur, almost 2 million tons each of calcium and potassium, 132,000 tons of carbon, 2,350 tons of nitrogen, 50 million tons of salt, and 38 pounds of gold. The weight of seawater varies depending upon how much salt and other elements it carries, but it averages about 8.35 pounds per gallon. The salt content of seawater is about 34.7 parts per thousand, roughly the same proportion as that found in human blood and amniotic fluid. In fact, the embryos of mammals, including human beings, pass through a developmental stage during which they have vestigial gills.

  The molecular structure of water is incredibly stable. Once two hydrogen atoms fuse with one oxygen atom, the bond is almost indestructible, whether the water is a liquid, a gas, or a solid. And unlike other molecules, which require applications of enormous amounts of energy to change their states, water demonstrates its versatility under ordinary temperatures and pressures. Water can exist in any of its three states under conditions that tolerate and even encourage plant and animal life.

  Though no one has come up with a definite explanation for the origin of the oceans, it is certain that life began in the saline soup of the sea. The first traces of life on the 4.5-billion-year-old earth are the fossils of cyanobacteria, which appeared about 3.5 billion years ago. Single-cell organisms called eukaryotes appeared 1.5 billion years ago, taking another step in the direction of complexity, with nuclei able to pass on genetic information to succeeding generations. About a billion years ago, multicellular animals and plants appear, but life did not leave the sea until just 400 million years ago. The process of creating life in the sea depends upon drawing energy from the sun to build carbon compounds from carbon dioxide and water in a process called photosynthesis. Life is also sustained in the darkness of the abyss far from sunlight by the production of organic molecules in a process called chemosynthesis, which depends upon the interaction of bacteria with sulfur, methane, and other chemicals. A by-product of both types of syntheses is oxygen.

  There are more detailed maps of the surfaces of the moon, Venus, and Mars than of the ocean floor, less than 5 percent of which has been glimpsed by human eyes. People have been gazing with awe and wonder at the ocean since consciousness evolved to allow such sensations, and at some point, a brave or foolish hominid stuck his head beneath the surface to see what was there. The obvious conclusion of that first excursion was that humans cannot breathe underwater, and that we can stay under only for as long as we can hold a breath of air in our lungs, about two minutes for an average person. For most of human history, the sea beneath the surface was a mysterious realm inhabited by creatures with frightening teeth, beaks, and tentacles. It was a tomb for unlucky mariners, a place hidden from us because we breathe air. Obviously, diving in the ocean to reach food or to work beyond the shallows meant holding one’s breath or finding a way to bring air from the surface.

  In one of the books he read, Cousteau came across a two-thousand-year-old sketch of a naval battle between the fleets of Greece and Syracuse that depicted saboteurs swimming underwater, breathing through reeds to drill holes in enemy ships. Another ancient image showed Alexander the Great on the seafloor in an overturned barrel, breathing the air trapped inside. At the end of the seventeenth century, Edmond Halley, better known for his discovery of the comet that bears his name, invented a weighted wooden box with a glass top in which he could descend for a few minutes to about sixty feet. He breathed air from skin bladders lowered to him on a rope. Jules Verne borrowed Halley’s air bag method in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The fictional diver from the submarine Nautilus walks around on the bottom of the ocean towing a balloon of air behind him. A hundred and fifty years after Halley, divers really were walking on the floor of the ocean, sustained by air fed through hoses from hand or powered pumps on the surface. Their depth was limited to 60 feet or so, and though they were able to work underwater as salvors and mechanics, their weighted boots, heavy copper helmets, and bulky suits made hunting difficult except for harvesting abalone, sponges, or other sessile prey.

  After that first day wearing Tailliez’s goggles, only his time with Simone was more important to Cousteau than skin diving. The next time he went to Le Mourillon, he brought his own mask, fins, weights, snorkel, and sling spear to hunt in the jungle below. For a man whose primitive instincts were paramount in his relationship with the world around him, he was entering paradise. He quickly learned to adjust his aim to compensate for the distortion of the water. His ability to react to movement in the periphery of his vision would reward him with a kill. He was acutely aware of his sense of direction and balance in the weightless world below the surface, and easily imagined himself to be a fish stalking prey.

  “Soon, I listened to gossip about heroes of the Mediterranean, with their Fernez goggles, Le Corlieu foot fins, and barbarous weapons to slay fish beneath the waves,” he wrote. “I was obsessed because hunting underwater suited me so well.” Cousteau quickly intuited that free diving to hunt was only the beginning of his life underwater.

  By the following summer, only the slightest twinges of pain remained in his arms. He and Simone had settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, six miles from the base at Toulon and three miles from the neighboring village of Bandol. Sanary was an officers’ enclave and, coincidentally, home to a community of expatriate German intellectuals that was growing steadily as Hitler imposed restrictions on academic freedom and expelled Jews from universities. To the west, in Spain, civil war ruptured any hope for continued peace there. To the southeast, Mussolini was barking about Albania, which he said rightfully belonged to Italy.

  In the autumn of 1937, JYC and Simon
e opened the doors of their cottage to Tailliez and other officers, enjoying the steady flow of people through their seaside home. PAC; his wife, Fernande; and their infant daughter, Françoise, visited from Paris. After PAC’s service in the demoralized, chaotic French army between the wars, he had craved order so much that he abandoned his leftist politics and embarked on a career as a fascist, anti-Semitic journalist. He was certain that only a rigidly controlled population could ever resurrect Europe from the dredges of constant warfare and economic domination by Jews. PAC risked alienation from his family by calling his father’s decision to let him quit high school to join the army an example of “deplorable liberalism.” PAC, however, didn’t make the mistake of insisting that his brother share his politics. JYC and Simone agreed with some of what PAC brought to their dinner table in Sanary but for the most part tried to steer the conversations to less flammable topics.

  Skin diving was at the top of the list. Most of all, the Cousteaus and their guests—whether the radicalized PAC, German expats, or other navy men—enjoyed the thrill of swimming and diving together in the sea. Tailliez remained a passionate hunter, but JYC turned most of his attention to designing and building a housing for an underwater camera. Through the winter, most of the Cousteau family circle treated JYC’s obsession with making moving pictures underwater as a fantasy. By the time the sea warmed up enough for diving the following spring, he was ready to test his first waterproof camera. At the shallow depths of breath-hold diving, his main problem was simply keeping the camera dry. He knew that if he went too deep, water pressure would become an issue, but for his first camera he ignored it. He bought a used 8 mm Beaulieu, braced it on a bracket he built inside a gallon fruit jar, and set its timer to trigger automatically to record thirty seconds of action. It was absurdly simple. The glass of the fruit jar was nowhere near lens quality, but the contraption worked. After his first dive with it to a depth of 20 feet, he huddled in his darkened bathroom, carefully wound the film onto the reel of a developing tank, and added the usual succession of chemicals. After what seemed like an eternal half hour of pouring, agitating, and draining, he held the dripping-wet film in front of a lightbulb. There, in a sequence of blurry images depicting motion, was Simone splashing on the surface against the glare of a sunny sky. He wasn’t sure whether anyone else on earth had ever shot a motion picture underwater, but he had proved to himself that it could be done.