by Brad Matsen
Cousteau’s second roll of underwater film produced a few jerky frames of a skin diver swimming directly at the camera, grinning like the happiest man alive. The diver was Frédéric Dumas, a twenty-five-year-old civilian, the son of a physicist, a champion swimmer, free diver, and spearfisher. Everyone on the Riviera knew him as Didi. He seemed to exist with no visible means of support, spending part of each year simply living on the beaches of Le Mourillon Bay. He insinuated himself into the Cousteau household in the early spring of 1938 after watching Tailliez hunting offshore.
“One day, I am out on the rocks,” Dumas told the Cousteaus on the first day they invited him to lunch, “and I see a man much further on in evolution than me. He never lifts his head to breathe, and after a surface dive water spouts out of a tube he has in his mouth. I am amazed to see rubber fins on his feet. I sit admiring his agility and wait until he gets cold and has to come in. His name is Lieutenant Philippe Tailliez. His undersea gun works on the same theory as mine. Tailliez’s goggles are bigger than mine. He tells me where to get goggles and fins and how to make a breathing pipe from a garden hose. We make a date for a hunting party. This day is a big episode in my life.”
From that day, Cousteau, Tailliez, and Didi were inseparable. They called themselves Les Mousquemers (The Sea Musketeers), spending every spare minute together in the water fiddling with JYC’s camera, figuring out new ways to dive deeper and stay longer, and frolicking like children transported to an amusing new planet. Their watery playground was not their natural habitat, and the three clever young men were also thrilled with sorting out new ways to survive in it. Except in the warmest months of summer, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea was chilly and simply staying in the water long enough to hunt effectively was a challenge.
Without ever declaring himself the leader of their underwater enterprises, Cousteau led his two willing friends into systematic research on preserving heat. First, they dismissed the widely held belief that coating one’s body with grease would insulate it from the cold. They found by trial, error, and talking with doctors at the navy base that grease quickly washes away, leaving a film of oil that actually increases the loss of heat. Cousteau’s solution was to begin experimenting with a suit of vulcanized rubber, tailoring it like a set of overalls and patching it together with a heating iron. In the water he spent most of his time fighting its buoyancy and the irregular pockets of air that stood him on his head or flipped him on his back. He laughed at his comical failures and continued to believe that he or one of the others would figure out how to make it work.
Les Mousquemers also began studying the vagaries and effects of water pressure on divers. Air-breathing animals evolved in an atmosphere of oxygen, nitrogen, and a few trace gases, a sliver of air held in place around the earth by gravity. The actual weight of the molecules of air in a column extending from one square inch of any surface at sea level up to the edge of the atmosphere at about 120,000 feet is 14.7 pounds per square inch. Breathing is an unconscious mechanical process regulated by a pressure of precisely 14.7 pounds per square inch on a muscular diaphragm that contracts when the volume of the lungs decreases, reducing that pressure and triggering a demand for more air. Ninety percent of air molecules are in the first 7,000 feet of the atmosphere, though, and above that altitude the weight of the molecule, and therefore the pressure of the air, has dropped enough to make breathing difficult. Above 12,000 feet most people can’t get enough oxygen and their bodies begin to fail.
Not only are air breathers unable to extract life-sustaining oxygen directly from water, but their bodies do not naturally adapt to the enormous increase in pressure caused by the weight of the water. While it takes roughly 120,000 feet of air to accumulate the weight of 14.7 pounds on one square inch of a surface at sea level, it takes only the weight of 33 feet of seawater on one square inch to equal 14.7 pounds, or one atmosphere. As a diver descends, any part of the body through which air circulates, including his lungs and sinuses, feels the effects of that air compressing under the pressure. Free divers rarely go below 60 feet, so the worst effect of 2 atmospheres is usually pain in their ears and sinuses. On the way down, he simply holds his nose and tries to breathe out; the air fills his ear canal, equalizing the pressure, and the pain disappears. A far more serious consequence of adding 2 atmospheres of pressure to the body of an air-breathing animal is an embolism. An embolism is a minute air bubble in the bloodstream that forms under pressure, travels to the brain or lungs, and expands when the diver surfaces, resulting in terrible pain or death.
Though Les Mousquemers were obsessed with experimenting with survival underwater, they never quit competing to see who could kill the most and the biggest fish. Didi usually came out on top. He would cruise on the surface breathing through his snorkel until he spotted a fish below, then execute what he called the coup de reins, which means “stroke of the loins.” Cousteau called it a lightning dive. It consisted of bending from the waist, pointing the head and torso down, and snapping the legs into the air. The body of the diver forms an arrow aimed at the prey below, and with strokes of the arms and then the flippers, he can be 15 or 20 feet down in two or three seconds. Part of the trick was clearing the pressure in the ears and sinuses without slowing the attack. Les Mousquemers learned to do it with a kind of gulping yawn instead of by holding their noses.
Once, Didi bragged that he could spear two hundred and twenty pounds of fish in two hours. He made five dives and wrestled up four groupers and a palomata totaling 280 pounds before his time ran out. Les Mousquemers became famous for their bravado and skill, but they also angered traditional fishermen. Undersea hunting became such a fad on the Riviera after Les Mousquemers and other pioneers refined their gear and technique that the larger fish were disappearing from near-shore waters. The simple sling spears that could kill a fish 5 feet away evolved into spring guns and underwater harpoons fired with compressed air cartridges with ranges of 20 feet or more. Eventually, the governments in coastal villages listened to the complaints of the fishermen and banned the air guns.
For ages, humans had been the most harmless, helpless animals underwater. With their masks, snorkels, fins, and spearguns they became apex predators. Cousteau noticed that the big fish remaining near shore had already learned to hover just beyond the range of his speargun, seeming to know that the new predators were limited to short assaults on their territory. The deepest a man could go on a single breath of air while swimming free was about 130 feet; the longest he could stay down was about two and a half minutes. The balance between predator and prey was about to change.
3
BREATHING UNDERWATER
When testing devices in which one’s life is at stake … accidents induce zeal for improvement.
Jacques Cousteau
DESPITE THE GRIM CERTAINTY that war in Europe was imminent during the summer of 1939, one topic dominated the Cousteaus’ lively dinner table in Sanary-sur-Mer—figuring out a way to breathe underwater. Cousteau’s family now included a son, Jean-Michel, born in the spring of the previous year. Simone was pregnant with a second child, and she told Cousteau that whatever he did in the water better not kill him. Though she and her husband still celebrated their adventurous souls as their most primal connection, she had the instincts of a new mother for the practical realities of keeping her children safe. If the unthinkable happened and her husband died, she would have had no choice but to return to live with her mother and father in what for her would have been a domestic prison in Paris.
Much of the conversation, especially after one of Cousteau’s many forays into the technical library at the navy base, centered on other underwater pioneers who had failed. Their experiments meant that Les Mousquemers did not have to repeat them. In 1825, an inventor named William James had combined a copper helmet, a waterproof tunic sealed at the wrists and waist, and an iron reservoir surrounding his torso from which he manually pumped air through a hose to his mouth. The reservoir carried enough air for a seven-minute, untether
ed dive, but swimming was out of the question because of the weight of the equipment. A diver was limited to clomping around on the bottom in less than 30 feet of water.
Over the next three decades, other inventors came up with more efficient ways to carry air underwater. One of these, Tailliez reported, was close enough to real free swimming that the French navy actually had the gear in its inventory. In 1860, Benoît Rouquayrol and French navy lieutenant Auguste Denayrouze had patented a compact rig that a diver could carry on his back with no other special equipment. It consisted of a horizontal tank made of cast iron strong enough to carry a few minutes of air at low pressure, which could be refilled through a hose from the surface. The beauty of it was that the tank could be briefly uncoupled from the air hose, which gave the diver a taste of freedom beneath the sea.
Jean-Pierre, Jean-Michel, Jacques, Simone, and Philippe (PRIVATE COLLECTION)
After trying unsuccessfully to find one of the forty-year-old Rouquayrol-Denayrouze rigs, Les Mousquemers discovered that in 1870, novelist Jules Verne had equipped the divers of the submarine Nautilus with a fictionally enhanced version that allowed them to walk underwater for hours instead of just a few minutes. In 1878, an Englishman, Henry Fleuss, had come up with the idea of replacing oxygen from a reservoir through a manual valve and absorbing carbon dioxide with caustic soda, freeing a diver from any sort of connection to the surface. Fleuss fitted a standard metal diving helmet with double walls, and charged the space between them with oxygen at 16 atmospheres, or about 235 pounds per square inch. The diver wore a modified diving dress into which were sewn two bladders, front and back, containing pieces of sponge rubber soaked in a solution of soda lime. The diver wore a mask that covered his nose and mouth inside the helmet. He inhaled through his nose from inlet valves on both sides of the mask and exhaled through a flexible mouth tube. The pressure of exhalation pushed air laden with carbon dioxide through the two soda lime bladders, and finally out into the helmet, where it could be inhaled again.
The problem, everyone agreed, was deciding when to turn the control valve to release oxygen from the reservoir in the double wall of the helmet into the inside to enrich depleted air. A mistake could be fatal. Too much oxygen under pressure delivered to the lungs and blood of an air-breathing animal would cause convulsions and even death. Too little oxygen and the diver simply suffocated unless he surfaced immediately.
In 1934, a French navy officer, Yves Le Prieur, had combined a tank of compressed air instead of oxygen, a hand-controlled regulator, and a full face mask into a different kind of self-contained breathing apparatus. Advances in materials technology allowed foundries to cast stronger tanks to hold the air at higher pressures, which meant more time underwater. With the improved Le Prieur apparatus, an untethered diver could swim free for twenty minutes at 20 feet or fifteen minutes at 40 feet, manually releasing air from the tank on his chest whenever he needed a breath. But breathing underwater was far from perfected.
In August 1939, Leon Veche, a gunsmith aboard the cruiser Suffern, to which Cousteau was then assigned, showed up for dinner at the house in Sanary. Cousteau introduced him, telling the others that Veche had a fully equipped machine shop in which they were going to build a real self-contained breathing apparatus. Cousteau was convinced that it was only a matter of improving on the designs that had been around for seventy-five years.
A week later, Tailliez had requisitioned one of the Le Prieur rigs at the navy base, and Les Mousquemers and the rest of the household, including Simone, trooped to the beach to give it a try. Tailliez went first. Two minutes after submerging, he surfaced gasping and sputtering. The air flowed from the tank in powerful bursts when he opened the valve, he reported. Dumas and Cousteau each took a turn, with the same results. Because the valve was not calibrated to the depths at which the air was released, it was impossible to keep it from free-flowing and overwhelming a diver. In more tests, they got better at controlling the bursts of air and reached 50 feet, but all agreed that what they wanted was not brief dives to a single depth but longer dives at many depths. Le Prieur had given Les Mousquemers their first delicious sample of swimming free and breathing underwater, but they were far too busy wrestling with the air supply to hunt or run a movie camera.
Cousteau went back to Veche and his machine shop. They assembled a gas mask canister of soda lime, a small oxygen bottle with a bleed valve, and a length of motorcycle inner tube into a compact, self-contained system. With it, a diver would have to enrich his air supply with oxygen only every few minutes, which would give him plenty of time to get something done underwater.
In November, a month before Simone was due to give birth to their second child, Cousteau tested the device he called a rebreather. He left Suffern in an officer’s gig with two sailors, motored a mile out of Toulon harbor near Porquerolles Island, jumped in the water, and submerged. For a few minutes Cousteau was in heaven. He exhaled, inhaled, opened his oxygen valve when the air tasted stale, and marveled at the view through the clear water of the offshore Mediterranean. Using the porpoise kick with his legs together that Tailliez had taught him, he imagined himself, finally, to be a creature of the sea. Visibility was 100 feet, the bottom 50 feet below. Cousteau gave himself another squirt of oxygen and instantly noticed the improvement in the air quality.
Breathing through the closed loop into the scrubbing canister, he could be as stealthy as a fish. Five minutes into his dive, he sneaked up on a school of several hundred chrome-bright giltheads with their distinctive red patches over their gills, getting to within 4 feet of the school before the fish spooked and disappeared into the distance. Cruising at about 30 feet, he saw a silver-blue bream hovering 15 feet below him. He circled around and in a maneuver similar to the wingovers he had learned in flight school, he dove down to see how close he could get to it. Cousteau was at 45 feet when, with no warning, his reverie was shattered by excruciating pain in his chest, back, and neck. His lips trembled uncontrollably. He lost his mouthpiece, gagged on a breath of salty water, and felt himself blacking out. In a final desperate move, Cousteau clawed at the buckle on his weight belt and released it. Seconds later, he bobbed to the surface a few feet from the boat, where his guardian sailors pulled him from the sea.
For a month afterward, Cousteau lived with sore muscles and Simone’s indignation, while rebuilding his rebreather for another try. Cousteau incorrectly assumed that he had been poisoned by a buildup of carbon dioxide, so he refined that part of his rebreather. He went back to Porquerolles Island, this time with Dumas and Tailliez, and descended straight down to 45 feet to see if his changes to the CO2 scrubber made any difference. This time, he convulsed so violently that he did not remember jettisoning his weight belt. He was limp, a dead weight, when Dumas and Tailliez hoisted him from the sea. The first thing he said when he regained consciousness was “It is the end of my interest in oxygen.”
What Cousteau didn’t know was that oxygen under pressure can be deadly to an animal that has evolved to breathe air containing precisely 20.947 percent oxygen at a sea-level pressure of one atmosphere, or 14.7 pounds per square inch. Because he brought his oxygen with him from the surface, his body had received more than one and a half times the amount it was designed to accept. Cousteau also had a particularly low tolerance for pure oxygen, and at the relatively shallow depth of 45 feet, his nervous system sounded the alarm that he was about to die by triggering the convulsions as the overrich gas moved through his lungs and into his bloodstream.
Stymied by the vagaries of breathing oxygen under pressure and the limitations of a hose to the surface, Les Mousquemers returned to breath holding. In September 1939, they were snatched from the pleasures of hunting and playing in the Mediterranean when one and a half million Germans crossed the Polish frontier. Two months later, Poland surrendered. The peacetime routine in Sanary-sur-Mer ended abruptly, as though a curtain had dropped. It seemed unlikely that the Germans would stop in Poland, so France prepared to defend itself. Cousteau was at Toulo
n or at sea on maneuvers every day, leaving Simone and the children alone in Sanary with instructions to begin stockpiling food. In April 1940, the Germans bombed airfields in northern France, and two months later took Paris. Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, who was stationed in northern France, became one of more than one hundred thousand prisoners of war.
After France surrendered, PAC spent a year in a hastily constructed camp near Sens, 140 miles east of Paris, enduring hunger, dysentery, and humiliation. Living outdoors in fenced cages, some of the men survived on food thrown over the fences by relatives, but thousands died. When PAC was released from the internment camp, he found his wife Fernande, their two children, and his mother alive but near starvation in a freezing apartment in Paris. His father, he learned, was waiting out the war at the Imperial Hotel in Torquay, England, still looking after eighty-seven-year-old Eugene Higgins.
