Jacques Cousteau (22 page)

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 petroleum 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 don’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.

Four hundred miles off the coast of Kenya, a day from Assumption Island,
Calypso
steamed into a pod of sperm whales. Several adults with young swam in random patterns around the ship, loping through the water as though in no great hurry to get where they were going. Cousteau throttled back, but not before
Calypso
’s bow slammed into one of the whales. It was seriously wounded, with blood streaming in its wake. Cousteau and his crew stood in stunned silence as two other whales swam to the injured whale and supported its body with their own. In minutes, all the other whales had converged on the scene of the accident, swimming slowly in a defensive perimeter around the wounded member of the pod. With
Calypso
barely moving to keep steerage, Cousteau felt one of his propellers hit something. Seconds later, a 15-foot-long infant whale broke the surface next to the ship with deep, bleeding gashes clearly visible on its back.

As though by a single command, the pod and the first wounded whale slowed and fell behind
Calypso
, vanishing completely just as the first sharks began tearing at the crippled infant. Dumas ran to the weapons locker on the navigation bridge, grabbed a rifle, and killed the little whale with a single shot. While he was administering the coup de grâce, Cousteau, Laban, and Malle rigged the shark cage to the crane. In minutes, they were in the water capturing a terrifying feeding frenzy never before seen on film. Malle was shaking so badly he had to struggle to hold the camera steady as he watched 12-foot blue sharks methodically rip chunks of flesh from the whale, then follow the skeleton into the depths to scavenge the last morsels.

Afterward, as always, Cousteau’s evening included updating the ship’s log, in which he recorded his amazement over the behavior of the sperm whales as much more profound than the horror of the sharks’ feeding frenzy. During the encounter, he had listened to the sounds of the whales with
Calypso
’s echo sounder, hearing the unmistakable cries of distress from the whale wounded by
Calypso
’s bow. Cousteau told everyone that he believed the whales had spoken to one another, both during the collision and just before the shark attack, when the entire pod vanished, as if on command. He had never seen or heard anything like it, and knew that his film from that afternoon
would change the way the world thought about whales and sharks. The shark frenzy had disturbed the bucolic rhythms of life aboard
Calypso
. Before going back to work, Cousteau gave his crew a week to unwind in Victoria, Mahè, the northernmost port in the Seychelles.

When they finally reached Assumption Island, a tiny chunk of upthrust limestone fringed with a pristine coral reef north of Madagascar, even the most seasoned divers were stunned by the colorful natural masterpiece below. As always, Dumas and Falco made the first reconnaissance dive on the reef. They had seen more beneath the sea than any two men alive, but both returned to the surface sputtering through their mouthpieces,
“Extraordinaire.”
At dinner that night, Cousteau announced that
Calypso
would stay at Assumption Island until the monsoons arrived in about a month. The coral reef and its creatures, Cousteau thought, were the most marvelous movie set he could imagine.