Jacques Cousteau (11 page)

“I thought of the helmet diver arriving where I was on his ponderous boots and struggling to walk a few yards, obsessed with his umbilici and his head imprisoned in copper,” Cousteau remembered about that moment. “On skin dives I had seen a helmet diver leaning dangerously forward to make a step, clamped in heavier pressure at the ankles than the head, a cripple in an alien land. From that day forward, we would swim across miles of country no man had known, free and level, with our flesh feeling what the fish scales know.”

He looked again at the bream nosing curiously around him. They always return to the horizontal from a burst up or down, Cousteau concluded, because the horizontal must be the ideal attitude for moving in a medium eight hundred times more dense than air. Any other attitude required an expenditure of energy. Cousteau kicked and rolled through several revolutions on an axis from his head to his feet, turned a somersault, and did a barrel roll he remembered from flight school. He exhaled, sank headfirst to the bottom, balanced upside down on one finger, and laughed so hard he lost his mouthpiece. Taking a breath was slightly more difficult with his head straight down than in any other attitude, and Cousteau made a mental note to report that to Gagnan. He flipped upright, kicked hard, and soared upward through his own bubbles until he was just 10 feet below the surface. He swam out into deeper water and dove to 60 feet. Nothing he did changed the steady whistle, gurgle, and snap of his breathing. The regulator worked perfectly with his body in any attitude.

Three full tanks of air gave him sixty minutes at 60 feet. Cousteau had used up fifteen minutes. Despite the chill of the deeper water he was going to stay as long as he could. He swam over familiar limestone chasms that narrowed and turned into tunnels that had terrified him as a free diver afraid of being trapped inside with no air. Now he coasted fearlessly into one of them. The brilliant light from the surface dimmed as though it were being peeled away in layers, his tanks scraped against the rocks above him, and he felt the first twinge of claustrophobia. Cousteau’s instinct for self-preservation overcame his passion to explore. He’d done enough on his first test dive. Before heading for the surface he rolled on his back to take a look at the roof of the tunnel, and saw that it was alive with lobsters. Hundreds of them were backed into niches in the limestone, their eyes glowing like fireflies in the dim light, their antennae flailing as they tried to get a fix on the giant intruder. Cousteau thought about his family and friends in ill-fed France, grabbed a pair of lobsters, backed out of the tunnel, and kicked for the surface. Simone saw him rising, swam down to him, and took their catch the rest of the way to the beach. He made five more trips into the lobster bonanza, Simone shuttled their catch to shore, and Jacques Cousteau became the first meat diver with the enormous advantage of being able to breathe underwater and swim like a fish.

A little over a month later, on July 30, Georges Commeinhes dove to 160 feet off Marseille with his firefighting apparatus modified for use underwater. Cousteau heard about the dive, but he didn’t know whether Commeinhes had been able to solve the problems with the regulator that allowed him to swim free in any attitude with the Aqua-Lung.

DURING THE TWO WEEKS after Cousteau made his first dive, everyone at Villa Barry took a turn with the Aqua-Lung. Simone became the first woman scuba diver, and though the tanks were too heavy for the children to lift safely, they practiced breathing with their heads underwater in the shallows. The Aqua-Lung continued to work perfectly, though the fear kindled by memories of sudden catastrophes with the Fernez pipe and rebreathers lingered. Each uneventful dive added to the suspicion that such astonishing freedom beneath the sea had to come at a higher price. Tailliez requisitioned a compressor from the navy base and with an unlimited supply of air they were making several dives a day. The divers reported on the ease of stalking prey, the delivery of air by the regulator at any attitude, and the utter bliss of swimming free underwater. After Tailliez’s first dive, he led the household in a toast to escaping the world of the land and the abolition of gravity, after which everyone dug into heaping platters of fish and lobster.

“We were living in the middle of a war on pure fantasy and lots of beans,” Tailliez wrote later. “When we got the Aqua-Lung, it was a miracle. We experienced in three-dimensional space the intoxication of diving without a cable. Back on shore, we danced for joy.”

“Tailliez, Dumas, and I had come a long way together,” Cousteau remembered about that time. “We had been eight years in the sea as goggle divers. Our new key to the hidden world promised wonders.”

At the end of June, Cousteau sent word to Gagnan that their invention was working better than his wildest expectations. He asked him to file separate patents on the exhaust port and the air reserve valve immediately, and to send more Aqua-Lungs as soon as possible. With one Aqua-Lung, he could put meat on the table. But the
Kinamo underwater camera was in good shape, and he and Simone had stockpiled spliced reels of 35 mm film. Cousteau needed more than one scuba diver to make the movie he had been dreaming about for most of his life.

The poster for Cousteau’s first underwater film
(©
LAPI/ROGER-VIOLLET
)

While they waited for Gagnan to ship them another Aqua-Lung, Cousteau and the other divers of Villa Barry concentrated on putting food on the table. “Tailliez went to the country and returned with five hundred pounds of dried beans, which we stored in the coal bin and ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with an occasional maggot to break the monotony,” Cousteau wrote later. He and the others cautiously stalked fish to supplement their tedious diet, being careful to avoid expending too much energy underwater.

Two more Aqua-Lungs finally arrived at the end of July. The timing was just right. In midsummer the Mediterranean was as warm as a bath, and the occupation troops had fallen into languor because nothing of consequence was being contested on the sultry southern
coast of France. Cousteau continued his observations for the resistance, and started making occasional trips around Marseille, which he never explained to the rest of the household. On a visit in late July to gather information on mines and debris in the harbor, he came across a map on which the wreck of a British ship was pinpointed off Planier Island lighthouse.

The 5,000-ton steamer
Dalton
had left Marseille on a winter night in 1928 with a cargo of 1,500 tons of lead, sailed straight into the island, and piled up on the rocks. Lighthouse keepers rescued all hands—every one one of them drunk—and together they stood on the shore and watched
Dalton
’s stern settle into the sea, leaving the bow just below the surface to mark her tomb. She lay in clear water on a sloping bottom, unlike most sunken ships, which reposed in the murky, hard-used shallows of harbors, on surf-torn coasts, or in the unreachable darkness of the abyss.
Dalton
was perfect for filming a shipwreck.

Cousteau carried the identification card PAC had somehow procured that certified him as a marine biologist. “When I showed my
ordre de mission
, even the most brutal-looking Hitlerite was impressed,” Cousteau remembered. “The word
kulture
(which was on the card) had a magic effect on them and we could work without much bother.”

PAC’s magic documents provided plenty of cover for the expedition to Planier Island with Tailliez, Dumas, cinematographer Claude Houlbreque, and Roger Gary, a friend from Marseille who knew the local waters. In early August, they took the weekly supply boat to the island with three Aqua-Lungs, nine spare tanks, the compressor, gasoline, spears, film, and the Kinamo. Leon Veche and Cousteau had modified the camera with a valve through which they could pressurize the housing from a tank of compressed air. Increasing the pressure to 10 atmospheres inside the housing exerted the same outward force as the inward force of water at a depth of 150 feet, as deep as they would go on any filming dive. Leaking seals were a plague of the past. Veche also built a new brace for the camera with a pair of pistol grips, one of which also held the shutter release. The Aqua-Lungs were identical to the prototype Cousteau used in the first test dives, with the same rectangular Bakelite regulators.

The lighthouse crew on Planier Island were frazzled from hunger
and the anxiety of months of expecting an attack from the Germans or Italians. They welcomed the good-natured Frenchmen with their wild plan to dive beneath the sea to make a motion picture of their shipwreck. They were also delighted to share meals with their guests, who told them they would produce enough fish and lobsters to feed a bottomless pot of bouillabaisse.

For a free diver, swimming into a cave or the hull of a shipwreck was an invitation to disaster, but scuba divers with Aqua-Lungs could go anywhere. Still, when Cousteau, Dumas, and Tailliez swam into
Dalton’s
gaping hatch 50 feet beneath the surface, they looked down the dark tunnel of the hold and knew that their freedom could be dangerous. The ship had broken into two pieces. They swam at a gentle downward angle through the maw of torn steel at the fracture until they could see the stern lying on the bottom like half a ghost ship with its two masts still standing. They had no way to know their precise depth, but estimated that they were at 100 feet, about 30 feet above the tempting wreckage of the stern. They were breathing easily, but with hand signals and head shakes they held a mimes’ conversation in which they decided to surface instead of testing the limits of the Aqua-Lungs on that first dive.

Over their lunch of fish stew and bread, Cousteau, Tailliez, and Dumas reviewed their reconnaissance into
Dalton
. They were perfectly comfortable at 100 feet. The regulators clicked and gurgled with the same rhythm regardless of the depth. They felt fine after the dive, but they had talked to hard-hat salvage divers and knew that the pressure on the gases, fluids, and tissues in their bodies increased by one atmosphere for every 33 feet of depth. The risk of a painful or even fatal attack of the bends increased with every minute they spent at depths greater than 2 atmospheres.

That afternoon, they returned to the wreck with the camera. They wore enough weight so they began to sink as soon as they stopped kicking their fins. Cousteau hovered above to film Dumas and Tailliez as they descended along the wrinkled steel plates of the ship’s corroding flank. Looking as comfortable as a pair of giant groupers, the divers cruised through the aquamarine water with their trails of bubbles glistening like moonstones and popping and burbling toward the surface.

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.