Jacques Cousteau (6 page)

In one of the books he read, Cousteau came across a two-thousand-year-old sketch of a naval battle between the fleets of Greece and Syracuse that depicted saboteurs swimming underwater, breathing through reeds to drill holes in enemy ships. Another ancient image showed Alexander the Great on the seafloor in an overturned barrel, breathing the air trapped inside. At the end of the seventeenth century, Edmond Halley, better known for his discovery of the comet that bears his name, invented a weighted wooden box with a glass top in which he could descend for a few minutes to about sixty feet. He breathed air
from skin bladders lowered to him on a rope. Jules Verne borrowed Halley’s air bag method in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. The fictional diver from the submarine
Nautilus
walks around on the bottom of the ocean towing a balloon of air behind him. A hundred and fifty years after Halley, divers really were walking on the floor of the ocean, sustained by air fed through hoses from hand or powered pumps on the surface. Their depth was limited to 60 feet or so, and though they were able to work underwater as salvors and mechanics, their weighted boots, heavy copper helmets, and bulky suits made hunting difficult except for harvesting abalone, sponges, or other sessile prey.

After that first day wearing Tailliez’s goggles, only his time with Simone was more important to Cousteau than skin diving. The next time he went to Le Mourillon, he brought his own mask, fins, weights, snorkel, and sling spear to hunt in the jungle below. For a man whose primitive instincts were paramount in his relationship with the world around him, he was entering paradise. He quickly learned to adjust his aim to compensate for the distortion of the water. His ability to react to movement in the periphery of his vision would reward him with a kill. He was acutely aware of his sense of direction and balance in the weightless world below the surface, and easily imagined himself to be a fish stalking prey.

“Soon, I listened to gossip about heroes of the Mediterranean, with their Fernez goggles, Le Corlieu foot fins, and barbarous weapons to slay fish beneath the waves,” he wrote. “I was obsessed because hunting underwater suited me so well.” Cousteau quickly intuited that free diving to hunt was only the beginning of his life underwater.

By the following summer, only the slightest twinges of pain remained in his arms. He and Simone had settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, six miles from the base at Toulon and three miles from the neighboring village of Bandol. Sanary was an officers’ enclave and, coincidentally, home to a community of expatriate German intellectuals that was growing steadily as Hitler imposed restrictions on academic freedom and expelled Jews from universities. To the west, in Spain, civil war ruptured any hope for continued peace there. To the southeast, Mussolini was barking about Albania, which he said rightfully belonged to Italy.

In the autumn of 1937, JYC and Simone opened the doors of their cottage to Tailliez and other officers, enjoying the steady flow of people through their seaside home. PAC; his wife, Fernande; and their infant daughter, Françoise, visited from Paris. After PAC’s service in the demoralized, chaotic French army between the wars, he had craved order so much that he abandoned his leftist politics and embarked on a career as a fascist, anti-Semitic journalist. He was certain that only a rigidly controlled population could ever resurrect Europe from the dredges of constant warfare and economic domination by Jews. PAC risked alienation from his family by calling his father’s decision to let him quit high school to join the army an example of “deplorable liberalism.” PAC, however, didn’t make the mistake of insisting that his brother share his politics. JYC and Simone agreed with some of what PAC brought to their dinner table in Sanary but for the most part tried to steer the conversations to less flammable topics.

Skin diving was at the top of the list. Most of all, the Cousteaus and their guests—whether the radicalized PAC, German expats, or other navy men—enjoyed the thrill of swimming and diving together in the sea. Tailliez remained a passionate hunter, but JYC turned most of his attention to designing and building a housing for an underwater camera. Through the winter, most of the Cousteau family circle treated JYC’s obsession with making moving pictures underwater as a fantasy. By the time the sea warmed up enough for diving the following spring, he was ready to test his first waterproof camera. At the shallow depths of breath-hold diving, his main problem was simply keeping the camera dry. He knew that if he went too deep, water pressure would become an issue, but for his first camera he ignored it. He bought a used 8 mm Beaulieu, braced it on a bracket he built inside a gallon fruit jar, and set its timer to trigger automatically to record thirty seconds of action. It was absurdly simple. The glass of the fruit jar was nowhere near lens quality, but the contraption worked. After his first dive with it to a depth of 20 feet, he huddled in his darkened bathroom, carefully wound the film onto the reel of a developing tank, and added the usual succession of chemicals. After what seemed like an eternal half hour of pouring, agitating, and draining, he held the dripping-wet film in front of a lightbulb. There, in a sequence of blurry images depicting motion, was Simone splashing on the surface against the glare of a sunny sky. He wasn’t sure
whether anyone else on earth had ever shot a motion picture underwater, but he had proved to himself that it could be done.

Cousteau’s second roll of underwater film produced a few jerky frames of a skin diver swimming directly at the camera, grinning like the happiest man alive. The diver was Frédéric Dumas, a twenty-five-year-old civilian, the son of a physicist, a champion swimmer, free diver, and spearfisher. Everyone on the Riviera knew him as Didi. He seemed to exist with no visible means of support, spending part of each year simply living on the beaches of Le Mourillon Bay. He insinuated himself into the Cousteau household in the early spring of 1938 after watching Tailliez hunting offshore.

“One day, I am out on the rocks,” Dumas told the Cousteaus on the first day they invited him to lunch, “and I see a man much further on in evolution than me. He never lifts his head to breathe, and after a surface dive water spouts out of a tube he has in his mouth. I am amazed to see rubber fins on his feet. I sit admiring his agility and wait until he gets cold and has to come in. His name is Lieutenant Philippe Tailliez. His undersea gun works on the same theory as mine. Tailliez’s goggles are bigger than mine. He tells me where to get goggles and fins and how to make a breathing pipe from a garden hose. We make a date for a hunting party. This day is a big episode in my life.”

From that day, Cousteau, Tailliez, and Didi were inseparable. They called themselves
Les Mousquemers
(The Sea Musketeers), spending every spare minute together in the water fiddling with JYC’s camera, figuring out new ways to dive deeper and stay longer, and frolicking like children transported to an amusing new planet. Their watery playground was not their natural habitat, and the three clever young men were also thrilled with sorting out new ways to survive in it. Except in the warmest months of summer, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea was chilly and simply staying in the water long enough to hunt effectively was a challenge.

Without ever declaring himself the leader of their underwater enterprises, Cousteau led his two willing friends into systematic research on preserving heat. First, they dismissed the widely held belief that coating one’s body with grease would insulate it from the cold. They found by trial, error, and talking with doctors at the navy base that grease quickly washes away, leaving a film of oil that actually increases the loss of heat. Cousteau’s solution was to begin experimenting
with a suit of vulcanized rubber, tailoring it like a set of overalls and patching it together with a heating iron. In the water he spent most of his time fighting its buoyancy and the irregular pockets of air that stood him on his head or flipped him on his back. He laughed at his comical failures and continued to believe that he or one of the others would figure out how to make it work.

Les Mousquemers
also began studying the vagaries and effects of water pressure on divers. Air-breathing animals evolved in an atmosphere of oxygen, nitrogen, and a few trace gases, a sliver of air held in place around the earth by gravity. The actual weight of the molecules of air in a column extending from one square inch of any surface at sea level up to the edge of the atmosphere at about 120,000 feet is 14.7 pounds per square inch. Breathing is an unconscious mechanical process regulated by a pressure of precisely 14.7 pounds per square inch on a muscular diaphragm that contracts when the volume of the lungs decreases, reducing that pressure and triggering a demand for more air. Ninety percent of air molecules are in the first 7,000 feet of the atmosphere, though, and above that altitude the weight of the molecule, and therefore the pressure of the air, has dropped enough to make breathing difficult. Above 12,000 feet most people can’t get enough oxygen and their bodies begin to fail.

Not only are air breathers unable to extract life-sustaining oxygen directly from water, but their bodies do not naturally adapt to the enormous increase in pressure caused by the weight of the water. While it takes roughly 120,000 feet of air to accumulate the weight of 14.7 pounds on one square inch of a surface at sea level, it takes only the weight of 33 feet of seawater on one square inch to equal 14.7 pounds, or one atmosphere. As a diver descends, any part of the body through which air circulates, including his lungs and sinuses, feels the effects of that air compressing under the pressure. Free divers rarely go below 60 feet, so the worst effect of 2 atmospheres is usually pain in their ears and sinuses. On the way down, he simply holds his nose and tries to breathe out; the air fills his ear canal, equalizing the pressure, and the pain disappears. A far more serious consequence of adding 2 atmospheres of pressure to the body of an air-breathing animal is an embolism. An embolism is a minute air bubble in the bloodstream that forms under pressure, travels to the brain or lungs, and expands when the diver surfaces, resulting in terrible pain or death.

Though
Les Mousquemers
were obsessed with experimenting with survival underwater, they never quit competing to see who could kill the most and the biggest fish. Didi usually came out on top. He would cruise on the surface breathing through his snorkel until he spotted a fish below, then execute what he called the
coup de reins
, which means “stroke of the loins.” Cousteau called it a lightning dive. It consisted of bending from the waist, pointing the head and torso down, and snapping the legs into the air. The body of the diver forms an arrow aimed at the prey below, and with strokes of the arms and then the flippers, he can be 15 or 20 feet down in two or three seconds. Part of the trick was clearing the pressure in the ears and sinuses without slowing the attack.
Les Mousquemers
learned to do it with a kind of gulping yawn instead of by holding their noses.

Once, Didi bragged that he could spear two hundred and twenty pounds of fish in two hours. He made five dives and wrestled up four groupers and a palomata totaling 280 pounds before his time ran out.
Les Mousquemers
became famous for their bravado and skill, but they also angered traditional fishermen. Undersea hunting became such a fad on the Riviera after
Les Mousquemers
and other pioneers refined their gear and technique that the larger fish were disappearing from near-shore waters. The simple sling spears that could kill a fish 5 feet away evolved into spring guns and underwater harpoons fired with compressed air cartridges with ranges of 20 feet or more. Eventually, the governments in coastal villages listened to the complaints of the fishermen and banned the air guns.

For ages, humans had been the most harmless, helpless animals underwater. With their masks, snorkels, fins, and spearguns they became apex predators. Cousteau noticed that the big fish remaining near shore had already learned to hover just beyond the range of his speargun, seeming to know that the new predators were limited to short assaults on their territory. The deepest a man could go on a single breath of air while swimming free was about 130 feet; the longest he could stay down was about two and a half minutes. The balance between predator and prey was about to change.

DESPITE THE GRIM CERTAINTY that war in Europe was imminent during the summer of 1939, one topic dominated the Cousteaus’ lively dinner table in Sanary-sur-Mer—figuring out a way to breathe underwater. Cousteau’s family now included a son, Jean-Michel, born in the spring of the previous year. Simone was pregnant with a second child, and she told Cousteau that whatever he did in the water better not kill him. Though she and her husband still celebrated their adventurous souls as their most primal connection, she had the instincts of a new mother for the practical realities of keeping her children safe. If the unthinkable happened and her husband died, she would have had no choice but to return to live with her mother and father in what for her would have been a domestic prison in Paris.

Much of the conversation, especially after one of Cousteau’s many forays into the technical library at the navy base, centered on other underwater pioneers who had failed. Their experiments meant that
Les Mousquemers
did not have to repeat them. In 1825, an inventor named William James had combined a copper helmet, a waterproof tunic sealed at the wrists and waist, and an iron reservoir surrounding his torso from which he manually pumped air through a hose to his mouth. The reservoir carried enough air for a seven-minute, untethered dive, but swimming was out of the question because of the weight of the equipment. A diver was limited to clomping around on the bottom in less than 30 feet of water.

Over the next three decades, other inventors came up with more efficient ways to carry air underwater. One of these, Tailliez reported, was close enough to real free swimming that the French navy actually
had the gear in its inventory. In 1860, Benoît Rouquayrol and French navy lieutenant Auguste Denayrouze had patented a compact rig that a diver could carry on his back with no other special equipment. It consisted of a horizontal tank made of cast iron strong enough to carry a few minutes of air at low pressure, which could be refilled through a hose from the surface. The beauty of it was that the tank could be briefly uncoupled from the air hose, which gave the diver a taste of freedom beneath the sea.