by Brad Matsen
Though Cousteau betrayed nothing, he was slightly uncomfortable approaching Turner. He was a seventy-one-year-old filmmaker who was $5 million in debt, and he was not at all convinced that cable television was the way forward. Turner immediately set Cousteau at ease with a gracious acknowledgment of Cousteau’s contributions to humanity’s relationship to the environment, his skill as a filmmaker, and his value as a guide to the beauty of the natural world. In person, Turner was soft-spoken and thoughtful, nothing like the raucous sailor he appeared to be during the America’s Cup races. He quickly convinced Cousteau that in the same way that broadcast television had been a better means of reaching audiences than theatrical films, cable television, with much clearer pictures paid for by individual subscribers instead of advertisements, was the future.
With the preliminaries out of the way, Turner asked Cousteau what he wanted. Cousteau was brief and to the point. The great rivers of the world upon which the oceans and all life depend for survival were becoming toxic sewers. He wanted to continue what he and Philippe had started on the Nile and make a six-month voyage on the Amazon, from which he would produce four hour-long television specials. How much money do you need? Turner asked. Six million, Cousteau said. Turner stuck out his hand to shake. You’ve got it, he said.
While Cousteau and Turner worked out the details of the contract, Jean-Michel negotiated with the superstation programming staff. The Amazon shows would not be ready for broadcast for at least three years, but the Cousteau Society had retained ownership rights to all twelve episodes that had aired on PBS from 1978 to 1980. The next day, after consulting with Turner, WTBS bought the exclusive rights to The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey series for $5 million, payable over the next five years. In New York and Norfolk, the fog of financial desperation that had settled over the Cousteau Society and the Cousteau family began to lift.
The exploration of the Amazon was Cousteau’s most complex and expensive expedition. For fifteen months, while he negotiated with the governments of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Guyana, Surinam, and Ecuador for rights of passage, Jean-Michel managed a team of fifty men and women preparing for the voyage. Albert Falco and Raymond Coll, the last of the original Calypso divers, organized underwater camera teams, trained new divers, and supervised the building of their equipment inventory in Norfolk. Jean-Michel’s wife, Anne-Marie, was the expedition’s still photographer. Susan Schiefelbein went to work on the telescripts. Cousteau Society staffer Paula DiPerna set up an office in Manaus, Brazil, as the logistical ringmaster in charge of hotel rooms, plane tickets, boat charters, medical contingencies, and equipment shipments.
Because Calypso was going to be far from a shipyard for at least two years, she had to be in perfect condition when she left Norfolk. Through the spring and summer of 1981, Falco, Coll, and their crew worked with a handful of professional shipwrights to replank the ice-gouged bow, repaint and recaulk the rest of the hull, and rebuild the rudders, propellers, and shafts to original condition. Chief engineer Jean-Marie France directed the complete overhaul of both main engines and the removal of the twin auxiliaries that powered the electrical and hydraulic systems. He replaced the old auxiliary engines with a pair of brand-new model 6-71 diesels that were a gift to the society from the employees of the Detroit Diesel Allison factory that built them. On one of the new engines, the factory workers had fastened a plaque honoring the environmental contributions of Cousteau and his ship.
The mission of the expedition was straightforward. Jean-Michel would travel overland and on smaller tributaries from the Amazon headwaters, and rendezvous with Calypso working its way upriver from the east. Both teams would concentrate on finding out how the human presence was affecting the Amazon and its surrounding watersheds. During Cousteau’s negotiations in South America, he had gotten permission to enter the waters and territory of the host countries by promising that scientists from those nations would accompany his expedition. Cousteau told them that his films would clearly tie the watersheds of the world to the oceans, making a monumental ecological statement. More than three-quarters of the earth’s population live within 10 miles of a coast or a major river. If the waters on which their lives depended were being polluted, they had to understand the relationship of the rivers and ocean to their survival in order to reverse course and avert disaster.
The Amazon was the perfect river with which to make his point. From the headwaters of its most distant tributary in the Andes Mountains of Peru, the Amazon and its countless branches collect more than 20 percent of the freshwater on earth and carry it to the Atlantic, 4,000 miles east. From the Amazon’s 200-mile-wide mouth, the muddy plume of the river is visible from space, penetrating 300 miles into the ocean and filling the sea to a depth of 6,000 feet. During the dry season, 100,000 square miles in the river basin are covered with water; during the wet season, 300,000 square miles are submerged. More than a third of the planet’s trees form the rain forest of the Amazon basin, which has the most diverse ecosystem of plants and animals on earth. More kinds of fish live in the Amazon than in the entire Atlantic Ocean. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the human population was limited to a few thousand widely separated bands living apart from one another and the rest of the world. In just fifty years, however, timber harvesting, large-scale agribusiness, and the resulting urban migration had thrown the once perfectly tuned ecosystem off kilter. No one other than scientists, a few hardy tourists, and the people of the Amazon themselves knew what was happening to the Brazilian rain forest.
Cousteau’s expedition left Norfolk aboard Calypso, followed by a freighter headed for Lima and airliners bound for Quito, Ecuador, and Manaus, Brazil, which were the logistical centers supporting a half-dozen separate film crews. By the time the expedition returned to Norfolk a year and a half later, everyone had had enough of the Amazon. Falco had almost been stung to death by a swarm of bees. Jean-Michel, Anne-Marie, and ten others had gotten malaria. Cousteau had been severely bitten by fire ants on both arms, and they had been threatened by Colombian terrorists who believed that Calypso, equipped with a satellite dome and bristling with antennas, was a spy ship working for the CIA. But their film and videotape would produce seven of the finest hours of television to carry the Cousteau name and illuminate the plight of a river suffering under the burdens of a booming human population, ignorance, and abuse.
Under direction from Cousteau, who was rarely aboard Calypso or in the field with his camera crews, the river teams focused on collecting samples to gauge pollution and photographing fish and other wildlife. Jean-Michel and his crews, however, gravitated toward recording the lives of the people they encountered. Jean-Michel’s selection of material was radically different from his father’s—he believed that their films had to carry hard-hitting investigative journalism as well as beautiful shots of animals. He stopped for ten days to film the frenzy of forty thousand men in an open-pit gold mine at the base of the Andes. The 200-foot excavation was producing tons of gold but was also spewing tailings into streams and mercury vapor from its refineries into the air, where it mingled with water droplets that fell as rain hundreds of miles downriver. He found and filmed remnants of once isolated bands of people. Jean-Michel and his camera crews, who arrived by a float plane, were the first outsiders they had ever seen. Convinced that the cocaine trade on the Bolivian border was part of what his father called “the internal pollution of man” and contributed to the deterioration in the health of the Amazon watershed, Jean-Michel chewed coca leaves with farmers to sample the power of the drug, photographed vast coca plantations, and filmed the torment of a cocaine addict’s withdrawal in a hospital in Lima.
As an unintended consequence of Jean-Michel’s forays into social inquiry and human interest, in Peru he fell under the influence of a Jivaro Achuara Indian, who became the only mentor he had ever had other than his father. One of Jean-Michel’s advance teams, led by an anthropologist who had lived among the Jivaros, introduced him to their charismatic leader, a short man in his late fift
ies known only as Kukus. Like many explorers before him who had encountered profound wisdom in a person regarded as primitive by the rest of the world, Jean-Michel found a deep connection with this man in the Amazon jungle. Kukus wore Western clothes, had seven wives, and had emerged as a powerful opponent of outside timber, fishing, and petroleum interests. They killed his people directly by bringing diseases for which they had no immunity, Kukus told Jean-Michel. They were also killing children who had not yet been born by taking away the forest and the river. For three weeks, Jean-Michel followed Kukus around, filming him as he planted trees, worked on a fish farm in a lake, and built a canoe. “I learned more about leadership from this one man than I have learned in my forty-six years of life elsewhere,” Jean-Michel said. “From him I learned about the connectedness of everything.”
Ted Turner was delighted when Cousteau and Jean-Michel brought back enough film for seven hour-long Amazon specials. He watched reels of raw footage and listened to tales of harrowing adventure, great beauty, and profound ecological insights during story conferences with Cousteau, Jean-Michel, and their writers. Editing the shows in Paris was going to take at least two years, so the first of them wouldn’t air until 1985. In the meantime, Cousteau told Turner that he wanted to keep Calypso and his camera crews moving at full speed. Turner said fine. He had acquired exclusive television rights to the work of a man he considered to be an international treasure. Cousteau was one of his heroes and an expensive property but worth the money even if he was only breaking even on the deal. In the summer of 1983, Turner wrote a check for $2 million for an expedition to a less difficult but equally magical river, the Mississippi.
Calypso was in surprisingly good shape when she tied up in Norfolk after the Amazon expedition, so Cousteau was able to sail for New Orleans a month later. Jean-Michel, in charge of the day-to-day operations, was confident that if anything major went wrong on the river there were plenty of shipyards that would make room for Calypso on short notice. The plan was simply to spend a year sailing up the 2,300 miles of the navigable Mississippi, travel overland to film the headwaters in northern Minnesota’s Itasca State Park, and detour into its major tributary, the Missouri River, for another thousand miles.
As always, Cousteau claimed that he would perform a scientific mission on the voyage, announcing that the society’s science director, marine ecologist Richard Murphy, would take samples to measure pollution along the entire length of the river. The Mississippi was already the most studied major river on earth, so there was really no pressure to add to the enormous mass of data. Murphy spent just three days with his drogues and sampling tubes collecting less than a dozen samples.
Because the whole river system lived up to its nickname, Big Muddy, there wasn’t much opportunity for underwater photography, either. Jean-Michel, with his father’s permission, focused on the lives of the river’s human inhabitants, as he had on the Amazon. More than anything, Calypso’s voyage up and down the Mississippi was a grand public relations tour orchestrated by the Cousteau Society and Ted Turner to return Cousteau to prominence with a new generation of television viewers. New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, and Minneapolis threw huge parties to greet Calypso. Cousteau sailed only a few miles of the trip on his ship but flew in for his celebrations and shooting scenes. Carefully distributed press releases alerted smaller towns along the way to Calypso’s passage. Crowds of people lined the banks and levies as it steamed by, some of them with bands playing “Aye Calypso.” In Hannibal, Missouri, Cousteau played Mark Twain’s organ. At one of Lewis and Clark’s campsites on the Missouri, he entertained locals and the cameras with his bandonion squeeze box. In Minnesota, Jean-Michel cuddled black bear cubs at a research station, and one of the divers tried and hilariously failed to master logrolling at a lumberjack festival.
“The Mississippi River is not dead,” Cousteau declared in his coda to the two-part television series. “Rather, it is vital, in all the senses of that word, reflecting the power and diversity of the culture along its banks.”
Generalizations like this one did nothing for Cousteau’s reputation among scientists, but at that point in his life, it only mattered that he made them. What Jacques Cousteau said on television was important to the world mostly because it was Jacques Cousteau saying it, and the truth was that oversimplifications and generalities were about as much as the average American could handle about ecology.
As he passed into his seventies, Cousteau had entered a realm of celebrity granted usually to beloved kings, presidents, and occasionally to athletes and movie stars. His name appeared on lists of the top ten most recognizable people on earth. He received thousands of requests every year to lecture, accept an award, or participate in a top-level international environmental gathering. France had made him a Grand Officier de l’Ordre National du Mérite and Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur, and awarded him every possible honor the nation could bestow. Monaco had inducted him into l’Ordre de Saint-Charles and made him a Commandeur ten years later. Belgium made him a member of l’Ordre de Leopold II, and Italy gave him its Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. He had been given gold medals and prizes by universities and exploration societies in ten countries, including the Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society, the United Nations International Environmental Prize, and membership in the American Academy of Sciences. Harvard, the University of California, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Ghent had granted him honorary doctorates. When Cousteau was seated on the stage at the commencement ceremonies at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the graduating seniors detoured from the prescribed path after the president awarded him his baccalaureate degree to ask Cousteau to autograph his diploma.
While Jean-Michel was keeping tabs on the society and the Mississippi expedition, Cousteau spent most of his time in Paris or La Rochelle, where his second Turbosail ship was taking shape. Pechiney and the French government maintained their support after the Moulin à Vent disaster because Cousteau convinced them that the real problem with the ill-fated catamaran was that it had not been built from the keel up as a windship. With some of the money from his deals with Ted Turner for the Odyssey reruns and the shows on the Amazon and Mississippi, he had just enough to finish his second windship. In the summer of 1985, Cousteau was ready to make good on his promise to demonstrate the revolutionary propulsion concept by sailing it across the Atlantic and making a dramatic entrance into New York Harbor.
Cousteau named his new ship Alcyone after the daughter of Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds. It was built of aluminum, almost twice the size of Moulin à Vent, 103 feet long with the wide beam of an offshore racing sailboat and a monohull bow that fared back into a catamaran stern for stability. Two 33-foot-high Turbosails, mounted on the foredeck and amidships, propelled the ship at 10 to 12 knots in a steady 25-knot crosswind. In calmer conditions, a computer-controlled diesel took over automatically to maintain speed, using only 60 to 70 percent of the fuel normally burned by a ship of Alcyone’s size on an Atlantic crossing.
The crossing of the Atlantic this time was without incident, though the crew quickly realized that Alcyone was a very uncomfortable ride because it was built so stiffly. Even in a light chop, it lurched and bucked; every one of its twelve-member crew got seasick. Its entrance into New York Harbor on June 17, 1985, was a well-choreographed celebration laid on by the Cousteau Society, Ted Turner, and the city of New York. With fireworks bursting overhead and camera crews in helicopters circling, Alcyone and Calypso sailed past the Statue of Liberty. Cousteau had boarded Alcyone from the pilot boat as the windship cleared Sandy Hook. Simone was aboard Calypso. Two reporters from Turner’s new international news network, CNN, fed live reports from the two ships. Every other news organization in America covered the arrival. Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York was on the dock to greet Cousteau and issue an official proclamation promoting him from captain to admiral. Koch then turned the microphone over to Admiral Cousteau.
“You will u
nderstand how moved I am to be received here in such a way with my old faithful ship Calypso and my new blond baby Alcyone,” he told a crowd estimated at more than ten thousand. He told them of the challenges he had encountered in building a windship and sailing it across the ocean. “Ships are like women,” he said. “Difficult to understand, but when you succeed it’s worthwhile.”
After two days of revelry and fund-raising in New York, Cousteau, Simone, Falco, Raymond Coll, and a select crew of current and former old hands sailed Calypso south to Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. At the White House, President Ronald Reagan presented Cousteau with the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian decoration, for having done more than any other human being to reveal the mysteries of the oceans. Among the other recipients of the medal that year were Mother Teresa, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, and the first man to fly faster than sound, Chuck Yeager.
The following day, across the river in Mount Vernon with eight hundred guests under an enormous white tent, Cousteau celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday a few days late. Three crews patrolled the tent with handheld video cameras, mics, and lights. Standing in front of Cousteau, who was seated in a comfortable wicker chair, John Denver sang a sweet rendition of “Aye Calypso,” never breaking eye contact with the man he considered to be the greatest environmental hero in history. Ted Turner, looking like he’d arrived directly from a yacht club party in a casual summer suit, toasted Cousteau. “Happy birthday,” Turner said. “God bless you, Captain Cousteau.”
