Jacques Cousteau (15 page)

As Cousteau directed the preparations for departure, he was very aware that he was developing a model for the self-contained diving expedition that, until then, had not existed. He planned for a fourteen-day voyage, constructing detailed lists of supplies and equipment, including food, wine, water, cigarettes, sidearms, rifles, and flare guns; Aqua-Lung regulators with spares for every part; air tanks; compressors; a one-man recompression chamber; still and movie cameras; pressurized camera housings; film, including some experimental color movie film; medical kits; the towed sled they had developed for minesweeping; cables, ropes, and baskets for hauling up artifacts; and hoses to carry compressed air to the bottom, with which Cousteau thought he might be able to scour sediment from the wreck. Cousteau’s biggest challenge was stowing the mountain of equipment while leaving enough room for accommodations for his crew of thirty.
L’Elie Monnier
had a large, tugboatlike deckhouse but not much hold space, so he and his crew spent weeks building bins, racks, and compartments on deck to hold their diving gear.

The wreck of the Roman ship they set out to explore had been first discovered, coincidentally, in 1907 by Simone Cousteau’s grandfather, Admiral Jean Baehme, after a Greek sponge diver told him he had seen giant cannons half-buried in the sand about 130 feet down.
Baehme had sent navy helmet divers down to investigate. The cannons turned out to be Athenian marble pillars typical of the first century b.c
.,
one of which the divers hoisted to the surface with a crane on their tender. Baehme had called in an archaeologist who told him that the wreck was probably the remains of a ship that had been carrying an entire Greek temple or villa, most likely plunder from a Roman raid. The French navy turned the wreck over to a museum in Tunis, which salvaged enough to fill five of its rooms with the most sensational underwater artifacts ever found. In another coincidence, James Hazen Hyde, who was then employing Daniel Cousteau as his traveling companion, had contributed $20,000 to the five-year operation. It had been enough to salvage less than half the precious cargo. The rest was still there.

Cousteau’s first stop in Tunisia was the archaeological museum, where he found sketches that pinpointed the wreck by triangulating landmarks on shore: a castle, some odd vegetation in the sand dunes, and a windmill. The next day, as
L’Elie Monnier
cruised a few hundred yards off the coast in the vicinity of the wreck, Cousteau peered through binoculars and discovered that thirty-five years of wind, erosion, and shifting sands had spared only the castle. One landmark was worthless, but Cousteau still had two solid facts. He had seen the depth-sounding records from 1907 and knew that the wreck was at 127 feet, and he knew from rough positioning notes on the chart that it was somewhere nearby.

At the center of the estimated position of the wreck, divers laid out a steel wire grid covering 100,000 square feet, then systematically searched every inch of it. According to the decompression tables, a diver could stay at 130 feet for fifteen minutes and surface without stopping. To mark time during the dives, a rifleman on the surface fired a shot into the sea every five minutes, and two shots at fifteen minutes. After each shot, the divers instinctively looked up and watched the rifle bullets sink harmlessly to the bottom through crystal clear water, with the hulking shadow of
L’Elie Monnier
above them. They dove all day in shifts of two divers, each man making no more than three dives, but found nothing but sand, gravel, and occasional debris that slowed their search and proved to be meaningless. The next day, they towed divers on the sled in ever increasing concentric circles around the estimated position at a depth of 100 feet, from which they
could see the bottom but remain in the water for almost a half hour without decompressing. Still nothing.

On the fifth day, as Cousteau and his divers grappled with the demoralizing possibility that their expedition would be a failure, Tailliez volunteered to be towed behind their auxiliary launch without the sled to take a wild stab at getting lucky. Tailliez made his offer to break the tension by taking all the responsibility for success or failure on his own shoulders as the group’s commanding officer. Every other diver also volunteered. The following morning they began a series of twenty-minute shifts that went on fruitlessly until late in the day. Tailliez went down for the last of his three dives at about four thirty in the afternoon, searching in an arc about 700 yards off the headland that was a half mile from where they had expected to find the wreck. Ten minutes into the dive, Tailliez glided over what was unmistakably a marble column, then another, and another. They were splayed like jackstraws around the clearly discernable outlines of a ship’s hull.

After finding the wreck, they had just a week to explore it before their navy orders required them to be back in Toulon for another assignment. Cousteau’s scouring air hoses worked beautifully. Though they sent a plume of muck, bubbles, and rocks toward the surface, forcing the divers using them to lie flat on the bottom beneath the debris, the hoses accomplished in minutes what would otherwise have taken hours. The wreck, which only vaguely resembled a ship, was 130 feet long by 40 feet wide—twice the size of
L’Elie Monnier
—lying on a plain of sand and mud, swarming with fish whose numbers increased as the hoses tore organic debris from the bottom. Before the first dive, Cousteau and the others had agreed they would not spear any of the fish, chiefly to keep down the possibility that sharks might be attracted to the blood. After a single day of diving on the wreck, the fish had become so comfortable with the giant but harmless invaders that they swam a few feet away from the divers to snatch the first morsels of food stirred up by the hoses.

For six days, rotating in two-man teams, the group worked from sunup to sundown, controlled by the “rifle clock” from above. Only Dumas, who could not resist three extra minutes on the bottom after he spotted something shiny on the wreck at the end of his third dive of the day, got bent. He seemed fine until he sat down to dinner complaining of a slight pain in his shoulder. Cousteau and two other men jumped up and pulled the grumbling Dumas onto the deck and into
the recompression chamber. They set the depth to 4 atmospheres—132 feet—and locked the door. The chamber was equipped with a telephone connected to a loudspeaker in the galley, through which Dumas kept up a steady banter, accusing his fellow divers of starving him as a prank. All of them knew, though, that they could not take even the slightest chance with the bends.

Conditions were perfect for testing some new color film Cousteau had gotten from the French Film Institute. In the dim blue light at 130 feet, he shot the faint yellow sunlight winking off the divers’ chrome regulators, with their bubbles streaming behind them like capes of shimmering jewels. The divers themselves, swimming only in brief bathing suits, were putty-colored and ghostly. The bright sand bottom reflected enough light to illuminate the fluted marble columns, capitals, and bases as the divers attached cables and maneuvered them into position for their return to the surface after two millennia on the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Cousteau and his men were delighted with the efficiency of the world’s first industrial salvage operation using the Aqua-Lung, and awestruck by ancient artifacts from the wreck. Iron nails corroded to the thickness of needles, bronze nails worn down to wires, and still-varnished ribs of Lebanon cedar revealed the ship to them. They recovered a millstone used by the ship’s crew to grind grain stored for the voyage in the amphorae they found intact in the center of the wreck where a hold might have been. They found and raised two 1,500-pound iron anchors. With ropes and cables, they brought four 3-ton columns to the surface, scrubbed them off, and marveled at the white marble that emerged from the slime. The stone clearly showed the chisel marks made by a carver more than two thousand years before, when the Mediterranean was the center of the known world. Except for a few artifacts kept by the divers as souvenirs—including an Ionic capital that Cousteau took home with him to Sanary-sur-Mer—everything recovered by the first international archaeological expedition of the Undersea Research Group remained at the museum in Tunisia.

“The finest treasures in the world are waiting in the Mediterranean, now within range of the lung,” Cousteau boasted in an interview after the Tunisian adventure. “She is the mother of civilization, the sea girt with the oldest cultures, a museum in sun and spray.”

In the most frequently published newspaper photograph from the
expedition to Tunisia, Guy Morandière is shown guiding a spectacularly detailed Ionic capital slung in a rope cradle from a crane that is out of the frame. Sunken treasure had always been sensational fare for writers and reporters. The possibility that archaeological stories from the ancient past could now be told by divers who could breathe and swim free underwater sent a minor shock wave through postwar Europe, hungry for reassurances that humanity was back on the right track.

Among those who noticed the tremor was an American reporter for
Yank
magazine, James Dugan, who had met Cousteau shortly after VE day, when Cousteau was in London trying to interest the British and American navies in his Aqua-Lung. Dugan had never wanted to be anything but a writer. He was born to middle-class parents in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1912, and took advantage of the peaceful years between the world wars to graduate from high school and become a member of the class of 1935 at Penn State. It was an era in America during which—thanks to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Walter Winchell—becoming a writer, reporter, or radio announcer could make a young man popular and attractive. Dugan parlayed a little talent into the editor’s chair of the college literary magazine, then went to New York to write articles for
Holiday, The Saturday Evening Post
, and the flood of magazines that made newsstands the center of the information world.

After serving for two years as an enlisted man teaching language classes to soldiers while the United States sat out the beginning of World War II, Dugan shipped out to England as a combat correspondent with the Army Air Corps. He flew missions over the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, wrote good stories, and later found a job as a reporter for
Yank
magazine. In early 1945, with the Allies closing in on victory, Dugan was in London, where he saw a short film of men swimming around a shipwreck wearing tanks of air on their backs. He was fascinated and so sure his friends and editors would not believe what he had seen that he went back to the newsreel theater with a still camera and clicked off a couple of frames. Dugan noted that the credits of the film,
Épaves
, listed Jacques-Yves Cousteau as director and cameraman and knew that he had to find this brave or foolhardy Frenchman who had figured out a way to swim underwater like a seal.

The following spring, Dugan heard that Cousteau was in London, prowling the hallways at the admiralty with photographs and sketches
of his underwater breathing apparatus, and tracked him down for an interview. They met for breakfast and talked through lunch and dinner. Dugan was charmed by the Frenchman’s enthusiasm and sense of purpose. Cousteau was not a man who would waste much time with anyone who did not fit into his plans. After dinner, Dugan spent what remained of the night typing out his notes, which became a long magazine article, “The First of the Menfish,” betraying the writer’s enthusiasm for his scoop and his instant attachment to Cousteau:

In ten thousand words, Dugan methodically traced the evolution of the new aquatic species: the invention of the Cousteau-Gagnan valve, which delivered a measured breath of air regardless of the diver’s depth or attitude in the water; the pioneering Aqua-Lung divers’ flirtations with death as they tested the limits of their invention and experienced the dangers of breathing gas under pressure; Cousteau’s obsession with making movies underwater.

“The entire motive of the fifteen years of work Cousteau has put into his lung was to make films under water. He has the movie bug bad,” Dugan wrote. “Lieutenant de Vaisseau (gunnery officer) Cousteau is 37, a lean, bronzed man with a bold Mediterranean profile and eyes of ocean blue. He bought his first movie camera when he was 13 …”

After Cousteau finished a couple of years of scientific work, Dugan wrote, he planned to make a romantic feature film under the ocean. As fantastic as it might sound, Cousteau said he would have his diving technique worked out by this time so that the stars would be able to swim around 50 feet down without face masks or air bottles.

“I will show you a beautiful mermaid swimming around with the ghost of a drowned pirate for fifteen minutes without masks,” he
promised. “No studio tanks, no fake optical printing. I will film it in the sea.”

Dugan sent his story to editors in London, New York, and Paris. All of them rejected it.

Within three years, the exploits of Cousteau and his band of Aqua-Lung explorers had begun to creep into newspapers and newsreels. Dugan sold his story in early 1948 to
Scientific Illustrated
, a small magazine edited by a friend from his days as a war correspondent. A selection of black-and-white photographs, printed from frames of 35 mm movie film, appeared with the story. One shows Dumas playing with an octopus and chasing a giant manta ray along a reef. Another shows four Undersea Research Group divers descending into an underwater cavern, looking like shadows against the light from above them. Tailliez, armed with his speargun, takes aim at a target just to the right of the camera’s position in another shot, and a final frame shows the ghostly remains of the ship’s wheel on
Dalton
, surrounded by a halo of fish, clearly oblivious to the intruder taking their picture.