Jacques Cousteau Read online

  Les Mousquemers had seen sunken ships before, but never the view that greeted them as they stood on the top of the rotting stern of Dalton at 120 feet. They gazed down at the ship’s twin propellers, deformed by their death throes when they turned their last revolutions in the sand. Then they checked each other’s equipment, stepped off the stern, and settled the last 15 feet to the floor of the sea. Cousteau handed the camera to Dumas and swam around the ship with Tailliez. To sailors, shipwrecks are anathema, symbols of failure and bad luck that remind them of a fate that might overtake them at any moment on the sea. To Aqua-Lung divers, a shipwreck is a marvelous world alive with fish and mystery, through which they swim as if it were their natural home.

  At 135 feet, most color had vanished from the spectrum. The hulk was a stark smudge of brown against the luminous haze filtering down from the surface. Les Mousquemers were deeper than they had ever been, deeper than all but a few hard-hat divers had ever been. With hand signals, they broke their reverie to let one another know that they were tiring more easily than they did in shallower water. As the camera rolled, Cousteau pointed to the surface, kicked away from the remains of Dalton, and swam up to the light.

  Cousteau made his way underwater up the rocky slope along the side of the ship with no problems until he reached the bottom of the stone stairway leading into the sea from Planier lighthouse. At a depth of 10 feet, the scene beyond his mask blurred as his eyes refused to focus. Flashes of light blossomed like fireflies in front of him. Cousteau sat on the stairway until his sight returned, then left the water with no lingering effects. Dumas and Tailliez reported nothing like the symptoms Cousteau had experienced, which they assumed must be the result of congestion in his ears during decompression. Les Mousquemers had logged more than five hundred Aqua-Lung dives among them, but the incident reminded them that there were dangers in the depths that no one but they had ever encountered.

  Air is a mixture of 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and 1 percent trace gases including argon, carbon dioxide, methane, neon, helium, krypton, hydrogen, and xenon. To breathe, a body takes in air, consumes the oxygen, replaces some of it with carbon dioxide, but does nothing with all the nitrogen. At the surface pressure of one atmosphere, some nitrogen and oxygen dissolve in blood and tissues. As a diver descends, the pressure increases and more nitrogen and oxygen dissolve in your blood. Most of the oxygen gets consumed by a body’s tissues, but the nitrogen remains dissolved.

  Sixty years before Les Mousquemers were experimenting with the Aqua-Lung, another Frenchman, Paul Bert, discovered the effects of nitrogen under pressure on the bodies of air-breathing animals. Decompression sickness was known most commonly as caisson disease because bridge builders, tunnel diggers, and others who worked below sea level under pressure in sealed boxes called caissons were its earliest known victims. After working a ten-hour shift under pressure of more than 2 atmospheres, many men emerged from the caissons with crippling pains in their joints that sometimes proved fatal.

  Bert theorized that the pain of caisson disease—some called it the bends, because a victim was often unable to stand upright or straighten his limbs because of the pain—was caused by some kind of imbalance in the relationships of the various gases in air. He tested his hypothesis by subjecting twenty-four dogs to pressures of 10 atmospheres, equivalent to a depth of 297 feet below the surface, and brought them back to one atmosphere in one to four minutes. Twenty-one of the dogs died; one showed no symptoms at all; the other two were in pain but recovered.

  When Bert dissected the dogs afflicted with decompression sickness, he discovered that bubbles of nitrogen had formed in the tissues of their muscles and organs. In the dogs that had surfaced slowly, there were no bubbles. The nitrogen dissolved in body tissues as the pressure decreased gradually. When it decreased suddenly, nitrogen bubbles formed. The phenomenon was analogous to the absorption of carbon dioxide in champagne. With the cork in the bottle, the gas under pressure is dissolved in the liquid. When the cork is popped, the pressure is relieved and the carbon dioxide is released as tiny bubbles.

  The solution was obvious. Caisson workers—and later divers—had only to return to the surface gradually to allow the bubbles of nitrogen time to pass harmlessly into the blood, or spend less time under pressure. Bert subjected another group of dogs to the same pressure as the first group, but brought them to the surface slowly in one to two hours. They suffered no ill effects at all.

  Bert noted that once a caisson worker had been stricken with decompression sickness, the symptoms could be relieved by returning to the pressure at which the nitrogen had dissolved in his tissues. He tested this part of his hypothesis again with dogs, and discovered what would eventually become recompression treatment in hyperbaric pressure chambers for caisson workers and divers who had the bends. Bert also discovered that breathing a gas that contained no nitrogen—pure oxygen, for example—would also reduce the symptoms of the bends. The gas containing no nitrogen simply forced the nitrogen bubbles out of the worker’s tissues.

  After Bert’s pioneering work on decompression sickness, Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane followed in 1905 with mathematical models showing precisely how much gas under pressure was absorbed by the different kinds of organs and tissues in an air-breathing body. Haldane used goats instead of dogs for his experiments because goats were closer in size to humans. From his research he derived tables that specified the amount of time a diver had to spend at various depths during his ascent to rid his tissues of nitrogen. Haldane’s tables were published in 1908 in the Journal of Hygiene, adopted by navy divers in Europe and the United States, and two years later made available to the public. Cousteau had a copy.

  Les Mousquemers dove on Dalton for two weeks, venturing inside the wreck to salvage crockery, silverware, glasses covered with coral, ship’s lanterns, the oak steering wheel, and other loot. After a dive into what Cousteau reckoned was the captain’s cabin, he returned to the surface with a crystal vial of clear liquid. Later, Simone uncapped the vial, took a whiff, and said the contents were a very fine prewar perfume.

  Foreshadowing what would become generations of shipwreck divers who decorated their homes and garages with artifacts from their discoveries, Dumas’s hunger for treasure was insatiable. “On Dalton, Didi gathered a lot of curious loot,” Cousteau said. “He found stacks of crockery, silverware, glass bejeweled with corals, and a large crystal bowl. One day, he found a midden of ouzo bottles and thin Metaxas brandy bottles. He sawed off the oaken bridge wheel and dove repeatedly for dishes and silver. We suspected that he was collecting household gear for a wedding he had failed to mention.”

  For the rest of the summer, Cousteau and his band of divers filmed shipwrecks. During every minute underwater, they learned from experience. Near Marseille, the freighter Tozeur lay in 65 feet of water, the victim of a mistral that had blown it from its anchorage and onto a rock in the outer harbor. Tozeur taught them that the hull of a wreck could be coated with razor-edged clams that lacerated their bare flesh as they brushed against them. The cuts were painless under water, but on the surface they hurt like bad insect stings. They named the clams “dog’s teeth.” Tozeur also introduced them to scorpion fish, which were ugly as toads and could inject a crippling venom through the spines on their backs. Tailliez was the first victim, after which everyone kept a wary eye out for the almost invisibly camouflaged nightmare.

  Les Mousquemers tracked down wrecks with charts and firsthand accounts of sinking ships. In a cafe in the village of Cavalaire on the Côte d’Azur, a farmer told them the story of the Spanish freighter Ramon Membru, which had slammed into the rocks on an afternoon in 1925. The ship stuck firmly aground, a massive shape looming over the village, until a few days later, when a tug pulled it off and towed it to the harbor. That night, as Ramon Membru lay at anchor apparently safe and sound with its cargo of Spanish cigars, the ship caught fire, burned to the waterline, and sank. Cousteau, Dumas, and Tailliez found the remains of Ramon Membru a f
ew hundred yards from the town jetty, all but invisible in the weeds that covered the burned and sea-torn hull. They filmed the ghostly outlines of the ship but found nothing of interest aboard the wreck. The highlight of the dives to Ramon Membru, and the film they shot there, was a herd of fish called liches, each the size of a man, that patrolled the wreck.

  Off the coast near the village of Port-Clos they found a newly sunken fishing boat with nets and rigging still on its deck, which gave them the idea of filming a trawl net in action. Until then, fishermen had only been able to imagine what their nets were doing underwater. Cousteau hired a trawler captain and his boat, and set up with his camera on the bottom in 60 feet of water. The trawl slammed past Cousteau, destroying sea grass and bottom-dwelling creatures, while most of the fish leaped like rabbits to elude the gaping mouth of the net. The damage from a single pass of the trawl on the bottom devastated the near-shore areas of sea grass and other fish habitat. Dumas later hung, head down, on the tow rope to film what went into the net. The film from his camera revealed that a very small percentage of fish in front of the net were caught.

  They explored and filmed another form of coastal destruction in Toulon harbor, where the 150-foot deep-sea tug Polyphème was scuttled along with the rest of the French Mediterranean fleet. Polyphème’s last assignment had been to open and close the antisubmarine net at the entrance to the harbor. A year after it was scuttled, the old tug lay in 60 feet of exceptionally clear water with the tip of its mainmast only 4 feet beneath the surface. Polyphème looked just like a tugboat under way with a slight starboard list, but sailing on the rocks and sand of the bottom instead of the surface of the sea. Inside, Les Mousquemers found that Polyphème’s crew had stripped their ship clean before opening the sea cocks and sending it to the bottom.

  Nearby, according to a warning circle on the harbor chart, lay the wreck of the cargo ship Ferrando, which had gone down fifty years before. A local mariner told Cousteau that its location was marked by a buoy, probably placed there by a fisherman who had lost a net on the wreck. Dumas made the reconnaissance dive alone, descending 100 feet down the buoy line to explore Ferrando. The wreck had been plundered by hard-hat divers, who had cut a hole in its side that illuminated the cargo hold when he swam inside the hull. He found only a few china plates, and some lumps of coal that the minerals in seawater had turned from black to grayish green. The 300-foot-long wreck was festooned with nets and surrounded by the headstone-like upright black shells of giant mussels that sprouted from the sand on the bottom.

  Exploring around the stern, Dumas found a single Japanese porcelain sake bowl, which he added to the crockery in his salvage bag. He checked his watch, which told him he had to ascend immediately or face a long decompression stage. He took a last look at Ferrando, turned to scan the open plain around him, and saw a rule-straight pathway cut into the sand and pebbles of the bottom. The strange road ran as far as he could see in the dimness of the light at 100 feet, a puzzling apparition that dominated Didi’s report to Cousteau and Tailliez on the surface. They returned the next morning, but when they reached the approximate spot of the wreck the mooring buoy was gone. They dove all day but found no trace of Ferrando or the mysterious road on the bottom of the sea.

  “Didi put the sake bowl and the crackled dish in his new house in Sanary, and a visitor who asks about them receives an interrogation on what he might know about Roman roads on the bottom of the sea,” Cousteau said.

  When they weren’t exploring and filming shipwrecks, Les Mousquemers continued to test the limits of their Aqua-Lungs. In October 1943, after four months and hundreds of dives, Dumas talked Cousteau and Tailliez into letting him be the guinea pig for a rigorously controlled test to find out how deep their wonderful new device could take them. They had been to depths of 135 feet several times since their descent to the stern section of Dalton off Planier light, suffering only the ear squeeze that had disoriented Cousteau. They carefully decompressed from dives during which they stayed for more than a few minutes on the bottom below 60 feet, and so far, none of them had experienced the symptoms of the bends.

  On Maire Island off the coast near Marseille, Cousteau arranged for government witnesses from the local fishing village to verify the depth of Dumas’s descent as measured by a 300-foot length of knotted rope. Dumas would simply tie his weight belt to the rope at his deepest point, and ascend to the surface with no fear of the bends because of his short time at the maximum depth. The signatures of witnesses would strengthen the case Cousteau, Émile Gagnan, and Air Liquide wanted to make to the French navy and other customers for the Aqua-Lung.

  In the early evening, under threatening skies and with sea conditions at a whitecap chop and building, the test flotilla of two launches anchored off the island in 240 feet of water. They dropped the rope over the side, its end weighted by an anchor, and carefully tied the upper end to the rail of the boat. Cousteau descended first, stopping at the 100-foot knot from which point he would be able to reach Dumas quickly if he got into trouble. A minute later, Didi plunged past him, heavily weighted to speed his descent. Cousteau watched the bubbles from Dumas’s regulator flowing away in the strong current, and saw Didi fighting to stay near the rope, which was streaming from the vertical. Dumas was flailing, and the bubbles from his regulator increased—a sure sign that he was hyperventilating in distress. Just as Cousteau was letting go of the rope to swim to the rescue, he saw Didi kick furiously. Seconds later, Dumas rocketed past Cousteau on his way to the surface.

  Exhausted, Dumas told Cousteau and Tailliez what had happened. As he had passed the 120-foot knot, his vision had begun to blur and he started to obsess on the rope, the knots, its texture. Worrying about his eyes and the rope amused him rather than frightened him. He felt wonderful, counting knots as he went down, forgetting about Cousteau above him, the people in the launch, and the fact that he was diving to set a depth record. His ears were buzzing, he had a bitter taste in his mouth, and he felt so drowsy that he could barely keep his eyes open. He wanted to go to sleep, but had the vague feeling that he should stay awake. Dumas noticed the rope again, took off his weight belt, clipped it to a knot, and swam toward the light above.

  In wartime France, Les Mousquemers knew nothing of the recent work of an American navy officer on the phenomenon of nitrogen narcosis, calling what had happened to Dumas “rapture of the deep.” U.S. Navy captain A. R. Behnke studied the drunken euphoria that sometimes turned hard-hat divers giddy at depths of more than 100 feet and had killed many of them. He found out that nitrogen narcosis was caused by a combination of nitrogen saturation and excess carbon dioxide in nerve tissues, and could be alleviated by mixing helium into a diver’s air supply.

  When they pulled up the rope, Didi’s weight belt was tied onto the knot at 210 feet. It was a world record for a free-swimming Aqua-Lung diver, to which the witnesses attested with their signatures on a certificate Cousteau had prepared in advance.

  Back at home in Sanary-sur-Mer, the routine of the war years went on—scrounging for food, avoiding confrontations with occupying troops, and making the best of the worst of times. Cousteau and Les Mousquemers continued to shoot underwater and test the limits of the Aqua-Lung. They edited hundreds of feet of film into a movie called Épaves (Shipwrecks). It was under thirty minutes long, with no story line, but the moving picture of men swimming underwater around sunken ships enchanted everyone who saw it.

  Among the first audiences to see Épaves was a roomful of admirals in Toulon who were stunned by the obvious military potential of the Aqua-Lung. Georges Commeinhes, Cousteau’s closest competitor in the race to find a way to breathe safely underwater, was killed just days before the end of the war. During the liberation of Strasbourg, he was in command of a tank destroyed by a satchel charge thrown by a retreating German. Cousteau, Gagnan, and Air Liquide were then unopposed in their campaign to sell their Aqua-Lung to the French navy.

  7

  THE FOUNTAIN

  ÉPAVES WAS AN INSPIRE
D promotional tool, an example of Cousteau’s unique talent for forging ahead on instinct instead of detailed planning. He made the movie because he wanted to demonstrate that film of the exploration of a shipwreck could be thrilling and entertaining. That it also proved to be a captivating advertisement for the Aqua-Lung seemed like an unintended consequence, but that really was part of Cousteau’s goal all along, even if he could not articulate it. The admirals in charge of the French Mediterranean fleet placed an order for ten Aqua-Lungs, which was a financial victory for Cousteau and Air Liquide. More important, they recognized that Cousteau himself was more valuable to them than any single piece of equipment and made sure that he had what he needed to keep inventing new ways to explore and work underwater.

  Soon after victory in Europe in the spring of 1945, the French navy created the Undersea Research Group (Groupe de Recherches Sous-Marine). Tailliez, as the most senior officer, was its commander. Cousteau was the deputy commander. Tailliez and Cousteau made their first decision together to hire Dumas as a civilian adviser and chief diver. Three petty officers, Maurice Fargues, Jean Pinard, and Guy Morandière, completed the group, becoming Aqua-Lung divers after Dumas ran them through a crash course. Left largely to its own devices, the Undersea Research Group was housed in a single office on the ground floor of a warehouse on a pier in Toulon, then went to work scrounging supplies and material from navy surplus dumps. Tailliez commandeered a small launch, then a 78-foot landing craft. Cousteau talked the motor pool out of two trucks and a motorcycle, telling the officer in charge that they were for a newly created division of the powerful National Marine Institute.