Jacques Cousteau (13 page)

ÉPAVES
WAS AN INSPIRED promotional tool, an example of Cousteau’s unique talent for forging ahead on instinct instead of detailed planning. He made the movie because he wanted to demonstrate that film of the exploration of a shipwreck could be thrilling and entertaining. That it also proved to be a captivating advertisement for the Aqua-Lung seemed like an unintended consequence, but that really was part of Cousteau’s goal all along, even if he could not articulate it. The admirals in charge of the French Mediterranean fleet placed an order for ten Aqua-Lungs, which was a financial victory for Cousteau and Air Liquide. More important, they recognized that Cousteau himself was more valuable to them than any single piece of equipment and made sure that he had what he needed to keep inventing new ways to explore and work underwater.

Soon after victory in Europe in the spring of 1945, the French navy created the Undersea Research Group (Groupe de Recherches Sous-Marine). Tailliez, as the most senior officer, was its commander. Cousteau was the deputy commander. Tailliez and Cousteau made their first decision together to hire Dumas as a civilian adviser and chief diver. Three petty officers, Maurice Fargues, Jean Pinard, and Guy Morandière, completed the group, becoming Aqua-Lung divers after Dumas ran them through a crash course. Left largely to its own devices, the Undersea Research Group was housed in a single office on the ground floor of a warehouse on a pier in Toulon, then went to work scrounging supplies and material from navy surplus dumps. Tailliez commandeered a small launch, then a 78-foot landing craft. Cousteau talked the motor pool out of two trucks and a motorcycle, telling the officer in charge that they were for a newly created division of the powerful National Marine Institute.

Cousteau’s family in Sanary after the war. (Left to right) Simone, Philippe, Jacques, nephew Jean-Pierre, Jean-Michel, sister-in-law Fernande, niece Françoise, and Cousteau’s mother, Elizabeth
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PRIVATE COLLECTION
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Though Cousteau, Tailliez, and Dumas would much rather have been training divers to thoroughly explore the Mediterranean with Aqua-Lungs, the first assignment of the group was clearing French harbors that were littered with mines, shipwrecks, and unexploded munitions. For a year, they investigated wrecks and cleared the sea lanes. It quickly became obvious that a diver with an Aqua-Lung could accomplish far more than a hard-hat diver in a given time, simply because he could find the mines faster. They invented an underwater sled that could carry a diver and be towed at 6 knots behind their boat. With it, they cleared the harbor at Sète of mines in a little over a month, a job that would have taken conventional divers four or five times longer.

When demolitions work tapered off, Cousteau led an inland diving expedition to the village of Vaucluse near Avignon, where a legendary spring emerges from the base of a 600-foot limestone cliff. The Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, memorialized in the fourteenth century by the poet Petrarch and more recently by the Bard of Provence, Frédéric Mistral, was one of the world’s great hydrological mysteries. No one had been able to explain why a calm watery cavern turned
into a gushing torrent spewing millions of gallons of water into the Sorgue River for five weeks every spring. Hard-hat divers had tried and failed to find the source of the celebrated fountain, which one puzzled scientist called “the most exasperating enigma of subterranean hydraulics.” Cousteau knew that good publicity about divers using the revolutionary Aqua-Lung made the acquisition of equipment, boats, and supplies from the navy much easier. If he, Tailliez, and Dumas could solve the thousands-year-old mystery of the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, their discovery would make sensational news and the navy would become even more supportive of the Undersea Research Group.

Before asking the navy for permission to go to Vaucluse,
Les Mousquemers
carefully evaluated the risk of a dive into a dark, underground river. Tailliez drew up a list of seven specific dangers:

“I despise danger,” Cousteau said. “I am not a thrill seeker but an explorer who intends to return myself and my men safely from every dive I make.”

Before dawn on August 27, they left Toulon in one of their trucks carrying the new rubber diving suits with which they had been experimenting, four Aqua-Lungs loaded the night before with air from a new compressor, masks, fins, cameras, and coils of mountaineering rope. Using the reports from the earlier hard-hat attempts, which had reached a depth of 120 feet, they planned their dive as though they would be climbing a mountain instead of descending down a sloping tunnel filled with water.

A crowd of villagers, caving experts, and Simone Cousteau looked on from the rocky lip of the crater. Simone appeared none too happy about the dive into a dark cave, standing with her arms folded across
her chest glaring at her husband as he lowered the weighted end of a 400-foot guide rope from a canoe. The weight stopped at the 50-foot mark. One of the group’s newly trained petty officer divers plunged into the water wearing an Aqua-Lung but not a diving suit and freed the weight, which had snagged on a triangular rock that almost completely blocked the tunnel. He returned to the surface shivering uncontrollably. The guide rope had stuck again at 90 feet.

Cousteau and Dumas, dressed in heavy woolen underwear, squirmed into their new diving suits. Even during the warmest months,
Les Mousquemers
returned from long dives at depths over 60 feet in the early stages of hypothermia. They tried coating themselves with grease, which turned out to be worse than nothing at all. Most of the grease quickly washed away, leaving a thin coating of oil that increased the loss of body heat. If they could have injected the grease under their skin it would have worked fine, but otherwise, they needed a second skin. They sewed sheets of vulcanized rubber into a full-body suit, but discovered that the air trapped inside it produced uncontrollable buoyancy as the pressure changed during a descent or ascent. They spent most of their time underwater fighting the buoyancy or hanging upside down when all the air rushed to the legs of their suits. Just before the dive into the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, they figured out how to maintain a constant volume of air inside their suits with escape valves at their neck, wrists, and ankles. They could replace lost air with exhalation of breath under the edges of a mask that vented into the suit.

Cousteau and Dumas roped up like mountain climbers, with a 30-foot length between them, and checked each other’s air valves and equipment. Standing on the lip of the crater, they were loaded down like pack animals, each with three air cylinders, foot fins, dagger, and two large waterproof flashlights. Dumas wore a red-colored face mask, Cousteau blue, so their surface team could quickly identify each man. Cousteau carried 300 feet of line, coiled in three pieces. When they reached the end of the weighted guide rope, he would pay out his coils as they entered what they assumed would be another chamber of the cave. Dumas carried a small cylinder and regulator as an emergency air supply, and an alpinist’s ice ax.

They went over the code they had worked out for signaling Maurice Fargues, who was in charge of tending the rope on the surface. One tug on the rope meant tighten the rope to clear a snag. Three
tugs meant pay out more line. Six tugs meant pull us up as quickly as possible. Underwater, Cousteau wore a mouthpiece he had invented through which he could shout brief commands to Dumas, who wore a regular mouthpiece but could only respond with nods of his head and hand signals.

Cousteau and Dumas struggled into the water under their heavy equipment, and felt the now familiar relief as buoyancy made them weightless. They bobbed on the surface for a minute, made final checks of their regulator valves, and eyed the crowd on the lip of the crater above them, which had swollen to more than a hundred curious people. In the front rank stood a young, black-clad priest, whom Dumas and Cousteau assumed had arrived to oversee their departures if the worst happened.

The key to understanding the annual gusher from the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, hydrologists had told them, was finding an inner chamber of air in which pressure could build up to discharge the gusher explosively in the spring. The goal of the first descent was to find the point at which the tunnel hit bottom and began rising to an inner air chamber. Cousteau and Dumas dropped into a narrowing tunnel about 16 feet in diameter, traveling along a rock face sloping downward at a 30-degree angle. Fifty feet down, they found the boulder on which the guide rope had snagged, and slipped past it through an opening barely big enough to accommodate a man wearing an Aqua-Lung.

Cousteau and Dumas had not imagined the frightening darkness into which they descended as they passed the boulder. The faint green blip of the entrance to the tunnel disappeared entirely. The water contained no diatoms or plankton, which in the ocean reflect the beams of flashlights; here in the cave their lights illuminated only coin-size patches of the wall down which they crawled. Cousteau glanced above him and saw that Dumas was braking his own descent with his feet to maintain his distance on the rope, but in doing so he was kicking big chunks of limestone downward.

At 90 feet, Cousteau breathed easier when he found the pig-iron weight of the guide rope resting on a ledge, right where it was supposed to be. He had learned he was more susceptible to the rapture of the deep than heavier, less leanly muscled men, and instantly recognized the beginning of its fuzzy embrace. Cousteau fought through
the narcosis, remembered that he was supposed to do something with the pig-iron weight, and kicked it off the ledge with his heel. He did not know he had lost the coils of ropes on his arm, didn’t know that he had failed to tug the line three times to ask for slack to allow the guide rope to sink deeper, and had forgotten even that Dumas was 30 feet up, which would have explained the irritating rocks pelting him from above.

Cousteau had a blinding headache, but he continued to descend. A minute later, he landed standing up on what seemed to be the floor of the cave. Rocks, dirt, and some debris that looked man-made surrounded his feet. He checked his depth. One hundred and fifty feet, but the gauge was full of water. That had to be wrong, Cousteau thought. They were at least 200 feet beneath the surface, and 300 feet from the mouth of the slanting tunnel. Cousteau followed his bubbles streaming upward but not into the shaft through which they had just descended. He was apparently at an elbow in the tunnel. Still in the tunnel, Dumas struggled with his suit, which had ruptured and was filling with water. He looked like a partially inflated balloon.

Cousteau’s rapture suddenly filled him with the urgency to explore the upward shaft, which might lead to the solution of the mystery of the fountain. He shouted through his vocalizer mouthpiece, telling Dumas to stay at the rope while he swam away and up to look for the shaft. Dumas was woozy, deep into narcosis. He thought Cousteau was shouting at him because he needed air from the emergency Aqua-Lung, and lunged down into the darkness after him. Now both divers had left the guide rope, their only hope for getting to the surface because they could no longer follow their bubbles to the surface in the terrifying darkness of the cave.

Cousteau snapped back to sanity for a moment. He saw the faint light from a flashlight, swam toward it, and crashed into Dumas, who was limp and barely conscious. Cousteau looked into Didi’s mask and saw his eyes rolled back into his head. Dumas woke, seized Cousteau by the wrist, and pulled him into a bear hug. Cousteau twisted free, and frantically swept the beam of his flashlight over the floor of the cavern. There was no current, so they had remained near the pig-iron anchor of the guide rope, and there it was. Cousteau reached into the darkness, grabbed Dumas, and saw with horror that Didi’s jaw was slack. His mouthpiece had slipped from his mouth. Cousteau jammed
the mouthpiece back in, grabbed the rope that still tied the two of them together, and started clawing his way upward, towing Dumas in his heavy, waterlogged suit behind him. He started climbing up the rope hand over hand, but on the surface, Fargues interpreted the first three tugs as a call for more slack on the guide rope. To Cousteau’s horror, he felt the rope fall. When it stopped falling, he tried to climb again. More slack came down. Cousteau scrambled up the steep slope of the tunnel wall, thinking it was his only hope. Only then did he remember that six tugs on the rope meant pull everything up. Cousteau tugged six times, felt tension on the rope, then slack. Its 400-foot length was snagged by friction on the tunnel walls. The emergency signal was not getting through to Fargues. He looked down at Dumas hanging like a bloated sack beneath him, and pulled out his knife to cut himself free of his best friend, who was certainly dead. As his knife touched the rope tying him to Didi, Cousteau was yanked firmly upward by the guide rope. He put his dagger away and hung on for the sixty seconds it took to return to the world of light.