by Brad Matsen
Over the vast coral reefs in crystalline water, Cousteau and Dumas shot color movie film underwater, and still photographer Ertaud took hundreds of pictures using Kodak Ektachrome transparency film. They used lights in waterproof housings powered by electrical cables from the surface for the deepwater work, and captured spectacular images of parrot fish, jacks, bonitos, sardines, triggerfish, and dam-selfish. Their pictures of corals, sponges, and other invertebrates were equally sensational, wild splashes of color that looked like organ pipes, deer antlers, and petrified plants, none of which had ever been seen by people other than pearl divers.
As Calypso steamed home through the Suez Canal, Cousteau and his crew enjoyed raucous, hours-long meals under the glowering portrait of Pierre Cambronne, confident that what had seemed like a pipe dream a month and a half earlier could become reality. With scientific grants and charters from oil companies and other commercial ventures, they would very likely be able to fulfill what for Cousteau was really their mission: to film the world underwater and show it to the world above.
When Cousteau got back to Toulon, he received a letter from James Dugan, the American writer who had broken the story on the first menfish two years earlier. For Dugan, the article was just the beginning. Now, he suggested that the photographs and logs from the Red Sea would make a great book. Cousteau was much more intent on eventually producing a full-length movie, but Dugan’s idea made sense. No one but Calypso and its divers had perfected the combination of the Aqua-Lung and underwater cameras. The results would surely captivate readers as well as theater audiences. In addition to publicizing the equipment Cousteau was testing, a book might even contribute to the bottom line of French Oceanographic Expeditions.
With a suitcase full of his Red Sea photographs, his notebooks, and an outline for an article he hoped to sell to National Geographic, Cousteau boarded an Air France Lockheed Constellation in Paris and flew to New York to meet Dugan and Perry Miller. While he was gone, his crew would resupply Calypso for its next expedition to the wreck of an ancient Greek freighter reported to be off the coast near Marseille. Sunken treasure also had the potential of turning a profit for Calypso, and the film of Aqua-Lung divers salvaging two-thousand-year-old artifacts would be sensational.
Cousteau and Dugan decided that their book should begin with the invention of the Aqua-Lung and end with the successful expedition to the Red Sea. It would be the story of the first human beings in history to swim free underwater. Dugan happily agreed to ghostwrite the book from the notebooks and logs of Cousteau and Dumas. Dumas would be a coauthor. Philippe Tailliez had also been with Cousteau from the beginning, but he would not share credit on the cover of the book. Cousteau was still deeply attached to the memory of their time together, but when Tailliez chose the navy over Calypso, Cousteau’s old friend became part of the past.
Leaving Dugan to prepare a proposal for selling the book to a publisher, Cousteau went to Washington, D.C., to see Gilbert Grosvenor, president, editor, and son of the founder of the National Geographic Society. Grosvenor jumped at the chance to publish the account of the expedition to the Red Sea with photographs. What else, he wanted to know, did Cousteau have planned? Cousteau was ready for the question. The society had been sponsoring expeditions since it awarded Robert Peary $1,000 for his quest to reach the North Pole, and had since funded William Beebe and Otis Barton’s bathysphere descents, Auguste Piccard’s balloon flights into the stratosphere, and countless other pioneering adventures.
Cousteau had no doubts that Calypso should fly the flag of the National Geographic Society as well as the French tricolor. He proposed an expedition to take stock of all the world’s oceans using not only Aqua-Lung divers but a pressurized submarine capable of reaching depths of 1,000 feet. With Calypso as the mother ship for the divers and the sub, he told Grosvenor, National Geographic would help him banish the world’s ignorance of the most vital, fascinating, and mysterious realm on the planet. Grosvenor did not sign a check on the spot, but he was clearly interested. What is your biggest problem? Grosvenor asked. Aside from money, that would be lights for deep-ocean photography, Cousteau said. As a first step, Grosvenor suggested that Cousteau immediately meet some other members of the society’s board, its staff, and a man who might help with lights. Harold E. Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had succeeded in freezing what the eye cannot see with strobe lights and shutter speeds of a millionth of a second, Grosvenor explained. He might be interested in helping solve the puzzles of underwater lighting.
On his way home to France, Cousteau passed through New York, where he met again with Perry Miller, who had more good news. The flood of technological innovation in cameras, film stock, and audio recording had thrown the movie business into a revolution that was bringing heightened reality and intimacy to films. One of Miller’s new jobs was to find new documentaries for CBS television. The producers of a ninety-minute weekly show called Omnibus wanted very much to see whatever Cousteau did next.
The future for French Oceanographic Expeditions looked promising, but until National Geographic made its decision to support Cousteau’s ambitious survey of the oceans or CBS signed a contract, he had to put Calypso to work to make some money. Dumas came up with what sounded like the perfect idea. A year before, one of the first independent Aqua-Lung divers, Gaston Christianini, had surfaced too quickly, got hit with a severe case of the bends, and was taken by ambulance to the Undersea Research Group’s recompression chamber in Toulon. Christianini lost his toes but survived, becoming friends with Dumas, who tended him in the chamber and afterward in the hospital. He had been scraping out a living salvaging scrap from the seafloor, but after his accident he said he was finished with diving forever. Out of gratitude, Christianini spent an afternoon before leaving the hospital telling Dumas what he had seen during his hundreds of hours underwater off the Riviera. He talked about enormous piles of military scrap from which the salvaged metal was endless, secret places where there were thousands of lobsters, rock piles on the coast where he always found giant groupers and other big fish. What had interested Dumas most, however, was Christianini’s recollection of piles of old jars a few hundred meters off the barren rock called Grand-Congloue, just 12 miles from Marseille.
Cousteau and Dumas knew from past experience that Christianini’s jars might be amphorae from a wrecked Roman ship. They remembered the immense satisfactions of their underwater archaeological expeditions aboard L’Elie Monnier, and decided to risk the little remaining cash in the French Oceanographic Expeditions’ treasury to retrieve at least a sample from the wreck. If it proved to be important enough for an all-out recovery job, Cousteau would approach the Borely Museum in Marseille and maybe even National Geographic to pay for it. With a job like that, French Oceanographic Expeditions could survive until Cousteau raised the money for his grand exploration of the world’s oceans.
In midsummer 1952, Calypso sailed with Cousteau, Dumas, and enough men for the day trip to Grand-Congloue. The director of antiquities of Provence, Fernand Benoît, was aboard to immediately determine the provenance of the jars when they brought one of them to the surface. Cousteau anchored Calypso well off the jagged white cliffs of the island, and left the ship in a launch with Benoît and Dumas, who would make the first dive. Dumas went over the side wearing triple tanks and surfaced twenty minutes later. He had found the underwater arch Christianini had described but no sign of amphorae, a shipwreck, or anything that looked remotely like a jar.
Noticing Benoît’s frustration at having taken a full day out of his schedule because a scrap diver had passed on a tale about sunken treasure, Cousteau said he would dive to take a look himself. Because of his trip to New York and chronic ear trouble, Cousteau hadn’t been in the water in three months, but he didn’t want to give up without searching a wider area in the same vicinity. Christianini had had no reason to make up the story.
Passing 50 feet, Cousteau felt good, no pain in his ears. At 170 feet, where he could clearly see the
bottom, he began to feel the onset of nitrogen narcosis. No amphorae. He forced himself to pay attention, knowing that at that depth breathing ordinary compressed air he had a maximum of ten minutes left before the rapture would force him to decompress and surface.
“My right hand means south,” Cousteau thought, struggling to remember how he had oriented himself during his descent. He looked south, toward the arch where Dumas had come up empty. Visibility was 100 feet. There was nothing but the gray talus and boulders of the sloping bottom.
“My left hand means north.” He moved off in that direction, knowing that Dumas and the others in the launch would simply follow his bubbles to keep up with him. Fatigue reminded him that he was out of shape, and he slowed his kick as he scanned the bottom. Nothing. Then he saw something, a long dark object rising from the bottom. He descended to investigate, felt himself swooning into the fog of narcosis, and checked his depth gauge. Two hundred and fifty feet. “Stupid,” Cousteau thought, kicking back up to 170 feet and encountering what he assumed to be the upward sloping edge of the island. He tripped his reserve valve to give himself an extra five minutes on the bottom.
And there it was. Looking like an object in a museum diorama of an ancient shipwreck, an amphora lay half buried on the slope in front of him. With the last measure of his strength, Cousteau pulled the amphora free of the bottom and stood it upright as a marker he or Dumas could easily find on their next dive. He ascended slowly up the slope he believed to be the rocky outcrop of the island. At a depth of 100 feet, Cousteau realized that he had been swimming over a huge mound of cargo and debris from a shipwreck. He hovered for his first decompression stop, reached into the wreckage through the fog of narcosis, and picked up what looked like three stone chalices. Ten feet from the surface, he stopped to breathe off the rest of his air, hoping it would be enough for complete decompression. His brain cleared, and he marveled at what he held in his hands.
“These cups are almost certainly Campanian ware,” Benoît said, while Cousteau lay exhausted on the deck of the launch. “It is enough evidence to assume that the wreck is as old as the second century before Christ.”
Dumas asked Benoît if it was worth an all-out salvage job.
“Absolutely,” the antiquarian said.
If Benoît was right about the provenance of the cups, the discovery would be among the most sensational of all time in the young field of underwater archaeology, which claimed only a handful of important shipwrecks. A week later, Cousteau had promises of funding from the museum, the city of Marseille, and National Geographic.
Salvaging artifacts on a scale as large as what apparently lay on the bottom off Grand-Congloue was not simply a matter of sending divers down to pick things up and bring them to the surface. In the great heap Cousteau had seen there would surely be many artifacts, requiring that divers remove hundreds of tons of rock, sediment, and debris to get at them. To invent methods and machines for the specialized job, Cousteau created his second nonprofit corporation. The French Office of Undersea Technology, based in Toulon, would promote development of underwater exploration tools, patent them, and manage the revenues they generated.
For the better part of a year—with cameras rolling on deck and underwater—Cousteau and his crew worked from Calypso and a base on shore to raise thousands of artifacts. The amphorae, Campanian pottery, and pieces of the wreckage were from not one but two Roman ships that sank more than two thousand years ago. To clear the sediment and debris without breaking the artifacts, they used a suction dredge powered by a gas-powered compressor onshore. It was a finicky contraption, but when it worked a diver blasted air into the debris pile, loosening shards, artifacts, rocks, and wood, which were sucked into a second larger hose by the pressure differential between the surface and the depth of 130 feet. Divers also used baskets lowered by a deck crane and air bags to raise amphorae and other large pieces to the surface.
Though the salvage job off Grand-Congloue barely paid for itself, it made headlines and newsreels all over Europe. In one film clip, Cousteau is shown taking a drink of 2,200-year-old wine from one of the amphorae. The expedition became a cause célèbre on the Mediterranean coast, drawing sailboats and launches full of curious spectators to the island. Because of the publicity, the job also attracted several new crew members to Calypso, young men for whom the adventure was more the reward than the salary. Among them were two sixteen-year-olds, Albert Falco and Raymond Coll, and the more seasoned divers André Laban, Henri Goiran, Raymond Kientzy, Yves Girault, and Jean-Pierre Servanti. Together with Dumas and the others who remained from the Red Sea expedition, they formed what Cousteau hoped would be the nucleus of Calypso’s crew for years to come. They were tireless, every man brought diving and one or more other essential skills to the expedition, and Cousteau simply could not ignore the fact that they were incredibly charismatic and photogenic. He had sensational scenes of his men working underwater, but the shots of them kidding around on deck and sitting down in Roman togas for a meal on Grand-Congloue added unique dimensions of charm and character to his film. Simone was rarely seen on camera, so life as a Calypso diver was a man’s fantasy world both above and below the surface. Cousteau was quick to recognize that Dumas, Falco, Laban, and the rest were natural movie stars.
The celebrated archaeological expedition took a tragic turn in November 1952. Because winter weather made it too dangerous to anchor Calypso so close to the rocky cliffs of Grand-Congloue, a team of six divers lived ashore in a base camp they called Port Calypso. On a routine supply run from Marseille, Cousteau arrived aboard Calypso to find that the mooring buoy to which he tied up the ship had been blown a half mile from its usual place by a storm the night before. Veteran diver Jean-Pierre Servanti volunteered to check out the situation. He discovered that the mooring chain between the anchor and the buoy had broken and the anchor was nowhere to be seen.
Other divers searched all day for the anchor with no luck. Finally, Servanti went back into the water to follow the furrow left in the bottom by the dragging chain. Though the sounder showed that the depth was 230 feet, Servanti thought he could make a quick dive and return to the surface without much decompression. Five minutes after he splashed into the water, his bubbles stopped. Falco, Ertaud, and Girault threw on tanks and were in the water in seconds, but they found Servanti lying dead on the bottom. All of France grieved with Calypso’s crew when accounts of the tragedy appeared in newspapers the following day.
The following spring, Cousteau tested the world’s first underwater television camera on the wreck at Grand-Congloue. It was in a clumsy housing that looked like half a 55-gallon oil barrel, and sent low-resolution images through a cumbersome cable to a monitor on Calypso, but it worked. With it, archaeologists who were not Aqua-Lung divers stood in the galley and saw for themselves what was going on 130 feet below. They could then brief divers on what to spend their time on and what to ignore.
The video camera gave Cousteau another idea for opening the underwater world to people who could not scuba dive. At lunch one afternoon, he was thinking out loud about a highly maneuverable submarine that could do what Piccard’s clumsy bathyscaphe could not do: real work underwater.
“The commandant took two saucers, placed one right side up on the table and the other upside down on top of it,” Albert Falco remembered. “‘There: our submarine.’” When Calypso returned to Toulon, Cousteau sketched out the design of his diving saucer at the Undersea Research Group workshop. He wanted a two-man submarine that could be launched from Calypso, reach a depth of at least 1,000 feet, and move as freely through the water as a scuba diver.
12
FAME
WHEN COUSTEAU COMMISSIONED James Dugan to write the story of the invention of the Aqua-Lung and the wonders of the undersea paradise he had opened to the world, he knew the book would be an important historical document. He had no idea that it would be wildly popular. In a little over a year, Dugan had written The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventur
e, by the First Men to Swim at Record Depths with the Freedom of Fish. A month after publication in February 1953, The Silent World was on the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained through the summer. The first half of the book is an account of the invention of the Aqua-Lung by Cousteau and Gagnan, followed by riveting tales of Les Mousquemers clearing mines, cave diving, shipwreck diving, and their encounters with fish, dolphins, seals, and sharks.
Rachel Carson reviewed The Silent World for the Times. Her own 1951 book, The Sea Around Us, proposed that the oceans were not indestructible but fragile natural treasures threatened by the growing human population. It had won the National Book Award and been on the best-seller list for eighty-six weeks. What Carson wrote in her review of The Silent World anointed Cousteau as her ally and a powerful force for transforming the human relationship with the sea:
Beyond its ability to stir our imagination and hold us fascinated, this is an important book. As Captain Cousteau points out, in the future we must look to the sea, more and more, for food, minerals, petroleum. The Aqua-Lung is one vital step in the development of means to explore and utilize the sea’s resources.
By the end of 1953, The Silent World had sold 486,000 copies and was being translated into French and twenty other languages. The success of the book improved Cousteau’s financial picture, but the royalties weren’t enough to finance an expedition to turn The Silent World into a movie. Every bit of his cash was going to meet payrolls and expenses for the venture at Grand-Congloue and his Office of Undersea Technology. He was expecting a grant from the French Ministry of Education but the collapse of the government forced him to start over with new bureaucrats in Paris. National Geographic continued to encourage him, but had not written any checks. In December 1953, just as Cousteau was beginning to think he might have to fold the research center and tie up Calypso, he got lucky.
