by Brad Matsen
Jacques Cousteau (in wet suit), Louis Malle (right), and an unidentified man on Calypso with underwater television apparatus (COURTESY MIT MUSEUM)
On a wet afternoon, while Cousteau was ashore in Marseille, a man decked out in a banker’s suit appeared at Calypso’s gangway and asked permission to come aboard. Simone showed him into the galley, offered him a whiskey, and asked him what brought him to the waterfront on so dreary a winter day. He said he represented the D’Arcy Exploration Company, a subsidiary of British Petroleum, and he had a proposition. Simone said she knew of British Petroleum since her cousin, Basil Jackson, was president of it. The man said the chief of D’Arcy Exploration had read The Silent World and thought that Aqua-Lung divers might help his company prospect for oil. Would Captain Cousteau consider a four-month charter of Calypso and its divers in the Persian Gulf? An hour later, Cousteau returned and agreed to a fee that was nowhere near the cost of an ocean oil exploration rig but was more than enough to save him. The D’Arcy Exploration had no objections to having a film crew aboard.
By the spring of 1954, everyone in France seemed to know about the bold and handsome Aqua-Lung divers who were retrieving stunning artifacts from ancient Roman wrecks and making underwater motion pictures of their adventures. Cousteau received a steady stream of letters and inquiries from men and women who wanted to join in the adventure, regardless of the danger, the long voyages away from home, and the meager pay. He was looking for sailors, engineers, and divers. He also wanted moviemakers. To scout for talent, Cousteau went to a film festival at the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris. There, he met Louis Malle, a compact, sharp-featured young Frenchman born to wealth, who was a recent graduate of the institute. Malle was looking for a job.
Louis Malle was the fifth of seven children of Pierre Malle and Françoise Beghin, the heir to a sugar beet fortune built by her ancestors during the Napoleonic Wars. His mother went to mass every day of her life, and insisted that her son’s education be steered by the Catholic church, first at French boarding schools and then with the Jesuits in England. The family summered in Ireland, where Louis mastered English and settled into himself as a citizen not only of Europe but of a wider world revealed to him in theaters. The flowering of French cinema threw blossom after magnificent blossom in front of him. Jacques Tati, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson were directing dazzling films on the aftermath of the war, love, revenge, and the rest of the human condition. Malle could not resist making a wholehearted attempt to join them. His parents had plotted a far more conservative course for their fifth child, which would have taken him into the management of their sugar beet empire, but they continued to support him after he turned his back on business in favor of cinema.
Cousteau could see himself in Malle. He recalled that his own young life had been a similarly uneven quilt of absent parents, new surroundings, a succession of different schools, and the irresistible lure of moviemaking: Daniel Cousteau’s constant traveling with his American employers; the sojourn to the United States, where Jacques had become comfortable with the English-speaking world; boarding school after the rock-throwing incident; and then his fascination with movie cameras, which saved him during adolescence.
Like Cousteau, Louis Malle had stories to tell. In 1944, with the Allies advancing on occupied Paris, his father had predicted a bloody battle for the city and sent Louis to a monastery near Fontainebleau, where he would be safer. The Carmelite monks, whose role in the resistance would become legendary, were sheltering as many Jewish children as they could feed until they were betrayed by a kitchen worker. With twelve-year-old Louis Malle watching in horror, retreating Germans seized the Jewish boys, none of whom would survive the war. Years later, Malle would make two films on the participation of the French collaborators in the horror of the Third Reich, branding himself as a controversial filmmaker. After coming of age in occupied France, Malle knew that evil and good were present in every human being. Only the passion of the moment really mattered. On the evening he met Cousteau in Paris, Malle could not have expressed his cinematic vision so clearly, but later he was to say, “Each movie is a piece of life, a different adventure. It expresses my interest of the moment, somewhat like a love.”
On their first meeting, Cousteau asked Malle what kind of films he wanted to make. Malle said he believed that both documentaries and dramatic features revealed human events and passion, so he was willing to try anything. He had seen Cousteau’s film Épaves several times and thought that underwater films were somehow between fact and fiction because they revealed so alien a world. Cousteau made his offer. He had just published a book about the invention of the Aqua-Lung that was selling well in the United States and wanted to make a movie from the same material and additional film from a two-year expedition back to the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean. Cousteau told Malle that he had very little money, so he could pay almost nothing. Malle said the money wasn’t important.
Cousteau used part of the advance payment from British Petroleum to buy a 60-foot fishing boat to finish the job at Grand-Congloue, freeing Calypso to move on to another adventure. The day after Christmas 1954, he called Louis Malle in Paris and told him to catch the next train to Marseille. A week after New Year’s, with the Cousteaus, Dumas, Malle, Laban, Falco, twelve other crewmen, and a Portuguese water dog named Bonnard aboard, Calypso sailed again for the Suez Canal. After nine months of repetitive industrial diving on the Roman shipwrecks, everyone was overjoyed by the prospect of a few months on the open ocean.
In the Red Sea, Louis Malle became a qualified Aqua-Lung diver and proved to be an inspired choice as head cameraman. He immediately began improving the cameras, lights, and housings, and, best of all, he shared the enthusiasm of everyone else for the wonders he saw below the surface. Underwater, Malle, Cousteau, and Dumas anticipated each other’s moves as if they had been diving together for years. On deck, Malle moved easily among the crew with an instinct for the quirks, humor, and personality that might charm an audience. Malle was completely comfortable in the cramped little observation chamber on Calypso’s bow and filmed an enormous school of dolphins from it off the coast of Yemen.
Cousteau took a month rounding the Arabian Peninsula into the Persian Gulf. In Elphinstone Inlet, a narrow fjord between limestone cliffs in the Strait of Hormuz that is reputed to be the hottest place on earth, they found delicious oysters that no one knew existed. Farther up in the gulf, Malle filmed the remains of the once-legendary pearl diving industry that had been displaced by cultured pearls from Japan. The pearl divers were all old men who dove with no goggles, fins, or snorkels, reminding Cousteau and Dumas of their earliest days together as free divers on the Riviera. On the bottom, at 60 feet, Malle’s camera captured them groping like blind men but somehow coming up with full baskets of oysters.
As Cousteau and Calypso turned north into the Persian Gulf, the petroleum geologists briefed the crew on the history of oil. Since the first wells began pumping oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, petroleum exploration had spread around the world, first to banish the night with kerosene lamps, then to power the machines and automobiles on which the modern world depended. In 1922, after Royal Dutch Shell had been drilling successfully in the basin surrounding Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela for ten years, Standard Oil of New Jersey took the risk of drilling wells beneath the surface of the lake. Some Standard Oil executives thought their venture was folly, joking that they would be better off going into the fishing business, but the Lake Maracaibo field turned out to be one of the most productive in history. In 1932, a British-American joint venture had struck oil on the little island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. It was 20 miles off the Arabian Peninsula and made of rocks that were geologically identical to those on the already proven oil fields on the mainland.
With absolutely no restrictions on subsea oil exploration or production, the rush was on. Afterward, the constantly improving technology of offshore drilling opened the continental shelves of the oceans to petroleu
m production. Hard-hat divers could explore the bottom looking for rocks and sediment that might indicate the presence of subsurface oil, plant the legs of drilling rigs, and cap producing wells with pumps. But they moved painfully slowly, and they were limited to depths under 200 feet. The Aqua-Lung, British Petroleum suspected, could change everything.
During the next three months, Calypso made four hundred stops to prospect for oil. At each of them, they swung a large bell-shaped machine called a gravimeter over the side with the crane mounted on the aft deck. On the bottom, the gravimeter measured fluctuations in the force of gravity, certain types of which indicated there was oil-bearing rock and sediment below. Calypso divers then descended to retrieve samples from the bottom, which in the beginning seemed impossible because of the hardness of the rock almost everywhere in the gulf. The petroleum geologists, who had come aboard at Aden on the trip around the Arabian Peninsula, were well aware of the density of the Persian Gulf seafloor because they had dulled or broken countless drilling bits during the past decade. When Dumas and Falco made the first dives, they tried to extract rock samples with chisels and sledgehammers. They got their samples, but swinging the hammers through the dense water exhausted them and drastically cut their bottom time because of hyperventilation. Dumas thought one of the ship’s paint chippers powered by an air compressor on the surface might work better, but when he tried it, each burst of the chipper comically bounced him ten feet off the bottom. They went back to the hammer and chisel. What had begun as a high-spirited adventure became a tedious series of challenges every bit as difficult as the salvage job off Grand-Congloue.
When Calypso anchored overnight off a desert island just after entering the gulf, Cousteau, Dumas, and several others had gone ashore, where they found a single man living in an air-conditioned hut and tending a navigational radio transmitter. The long-haired hermit who answered the door gasped, pointed at Dumas, and said, “You’re Frédéric Dumas!” By sheer coincidence, he had been reading The Silent World when the Calypso divers arrived at his desolate outpost. That was cause for celebration, so they took the man, who introduced himself as Tony Mould, back to Calypso for a good meal. Before dinner, Laban gave him a haircut while everyone took turns quizzing Mould about the snakes and sharks they had heard infested the Persian Gulf. Mould told them that he never went into the water himself, but the local pearl divers had been burying their dead on his island for years. There were twenty-two graves, Mould told them. Two dead from sharks, the rest from sea snakes.
The twin scourges of the Persian Gulf presented Cousteau and his crew with an impossible trade-off, which became the subject of spirited discussions at every meal. Calypso carried a steel cage to which the divers could retreat from menacing sharks, but once inside they would have little maneuvering room to dodge the snakes, which seemed to appear in swarms. All the divers had seen sharks underwater—never so many and never so aggressive a species as the blue sharks that infested the gulf, but at least they were familiar creatures. The sea snakes were something else. Called golden snakes by Calypso divers, they have venom that attacks the nervous system, like the venom of the krait, a deadly southern Asian snake. Death from respiratory collapse or heart attack comes within minutes of a bite. There was no known antidote. Supposedly, even a 6-foot snake has a mouth so small that it can bite only a small fold of skin, such as the tendon between the thumb and forefinger, but that was little comfort to the divers.
During three months in the Persian Gulf, Calypso divers took twice as many samples from the bottom as their contract required. The oil geologists marked the locations of promising sites on their charts, triangulated by radio signals from navigational transmitters like the one run by Tony Mould. D’Arcy Exploration and British Petroleum were so happy with the work of Cousteau and his divers that they promised much more for the future and named the 12,000 square miles they had explored the Calypso Grounds.
With the petroleum geologists off the ship, and three months of exhausting industrial diving behind them, Calypso and its crew sailed for home, planning to take a month to explore and film whatever caught their attention. When they stopped at Doha, Qatar, on their way south out of the gulf, Cousteau received a telegram from Daddy Daniel. The French Ministry of National Education had finally awarded a grant to French Oceanographic Expeditions. In exchange for two-thirds of FOE’s annual budget, Calypso would carry scientists to be named by the National Center for Scientific Research on missions to coincide with Cousteau’s own plans for exploration and filming. Calypso had become the official French national oceanographic research ship. The first scientists, Daddy wrote, would be a three-man team of marine biologists who would join Calypso in Doha the following day for the voyage back to Marseille.
With James Dugan, who had flown south to do research, and the three biologists aboard, Cousteau sailed south through the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, and into the Indian Ocean, where he took a detour for a week along the coast of Africa. The scientific mission was vague, but the biologists seemed pleased with whatever happened each day. Everyone was relieved to be free of the grueling diving schedule of oil exploration, and much of what they encountered they were seeing for the first time: flying fish, sea turtles, a scarlet raft of eggs that stretched as far as they could see. The scientists dissected and jugged what the divers brought back, Louis Malle was always in the right place at the right time, and Cousteau reveled in the future while at the same time being riveted in the present.
Calypso, its crew exhausted after six months at sea, returned to Marseille for repairs. Nothing major had gone wrong with the ship, but Cousteau’s next expedition, financed by the new grant from the government, was going to last more than a year. He overhauled both engines and caulked seams in the hull that had sprung during a storm in the Mediterranean, during which the ship’s dog, Bonnard, had been lost overboard.
When Cousteau returned to France, he learned that his brother, Pierre-Antoine, had been granted a mercy parole from prison because he had terminal cancer. Soon after PAC’s release, his wife, Fernande, died, also from cancer. Their daughter, Françoise, was old enough to be living on her own, but though Jacques and PAC were still on the chilliest of personal terms, PAC’s son, Jean-Pierre, spent summers and vacations in Sanary-sur-Mer with Daddy Daniel or aboard Calypso if the ship wasn’t too far away. The rest of the year, he attended boarding school in Normandy with the Cousteaus’ sons, Philippe and Jean-Michel.
“I didn’t much care for the schools my mother and father sent us to,” Jean-Michel said. “What I lived for was our time on Calypso with them. We ate dinner together every night. We were together all day. We dove, worked on equipment, and saw parts of the world most boys only dream about. It was an intense, wonderful time, what they call quality time nowadays.”
In the workshop at the Office of Undersea Technology, Cousteau, Dumas, and Malle rebuilt their cameras with new lenses, drives, and housings that had been developed while they were at sea. They were adaptations of standard Bell and Howell 35 mm movie cameras, which they called Sous Marine (Underwater) or SM One, Two, and Three. They also improved on their still cameras, adding strobes and floodlights similar to those they used with the movie cameras.
On the Persian Gulf expedition, Cousteau, Dumas, and Malle had learned that their biggest problem in filming in deeper water was bringing enough light with them. The year before, while Calypso was between supply trips to Grand-Congloue, Harold Edgerton spent a month on the Riviera testing remotely controlled lights and cameras for photographing in depths down to 1,000 feet. Edgerton was a loquacious, endlessly curious man who had broken free of the restrictions of academic life with his work on stroboscopic lighting, which famously allowed him to photograph the impact of a drop of milk and a bullet piercing a playing card. Edgerton was also a pioneer in the development of the side-scan sonar, which was part of Calypso’s electronic inventory. At MIT he was a beloved character whose philosophy of teaching, he said, was “to teach people in such a way that they d
on’t realize they are learning until it is too late.” When Edgerton and Cousteau had met for the first time in New York two years earlier, they had agreed that the key to education lay in fascination. Edgerton was happy to help Cousteau light his underwater movies, and became a regular visitor to Calypso, where the crew dubbed him Papa Flash. His son Robert, who came to France as his assistant, was Petit Flash.
Calypso, bright white with a new coat of paint, sailed from Marseille in early March 1955 on a four-month expedition to explore the ocean from the Red Sea to the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, and down to the northern tip of Madagascar off the coast of Africa. Biologists and geologists from the National Center for Scientific Research joined the ship at various points on its voyage, but the overarching mission of the expedition was to shoot enough film to assemble the movie version of The Silent World. With Cousteau in command, Simone—La Bergère—tended the details of life aboard ship. Dumas was in charge of diving. Louis Malle was chief cameraman with Papa Flash’s lights. No one among the crew of twenty-five had the slightest doubt that they would succeed. At the last minute, National Geographic came through with a grant in return for exclusive rights to an illustrated story on the expedition under Cousteau’s byline, the star power of which increased steadily as sales of The Silent World soared over a million copies. The Geographic also sent photographer Luis Marden, who was willing to learn to dive with an Aqua-Lung as well as record the expedition topside.
The now familiar trip south on the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal was one long celebration. Calypso was a more genial ship than ever—constant hand shaking, basking in the sun on deck, card playing, and the loud, endless meals. With twenty-five people and Simone’s dachshund, Bulle, aboard, quarters were tight, but there wasn’t a ripple of irritation, even in heavy seas. Cousteau put into Port Said on the Mediterranean, then Port Sudan on the Red Sea for fuel, water, and supplies, but except for three days investigating the wreck of a British ship sunk by German planes during the war, he kept moving. He had plenty of footage of the Red Sea from two previous expeditions, and he had high hopes for what he would find in the pristine, unexplored coral reefs off Assumption Island in the Seychelles.
