Authors: Brad Matsen
The harpoon cannon they built was controlled by wires through similar fittings, but it was far more bizarre and ingenious than the grappling claw. Each of seven tubes in the cannon carried a .25 caliber three-foot-long harpoon propelled by the immense pressure that would build up in a chamber at the base of the cannon as the bathyscaphe descended. At a depth of 3,000 feet, the harpoons could pierce three-inch-thick oak planks; on the surface, they were harmless. The harpoons were designed for taking specimens of abyssal creatures—the giant squid being the grand prize—so each was tipped with a strychnine reservoir that would burst on impact. If that wasn’t enough to make the kill, the bathyscaphe hunters cold trigger an electrical discharge to further immobilize their prey. At the base of the cannon were seven reels with lines attached to the harpoons for reeling in the speared specimens.
Cousteau loved the claw and cannon, which reminded him of the wondrous technology of Captain Nemo’s fictional submarine
Nautilus
in the films of Georges Méliès and the Williamson brothers. The action in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
had featured battles with sea monsters that dominated the imaginations of everyone who saw the films. If there really were giant, deadly creatures down there, Cousteau would be ready for them.
On October 1, 1948, Cousteau took
L’Elie Monnier
out of Toulon. He set a course past Gibraltar and south to the coast of Dakar to rendezvous
with the Belgian freighter
Scaldis
carrying Piccard, the bathyscaphe, a half-dozen scientists, and a troop of journalists. Tailliez, Dumas, and everyone in the Undersea Research Group not absolutely needed to stand duty at their headquarters were aboard
L’Elie Monnier
, along with the grappling claw and harpoon gun. Théodore Monod, director of the Institute for Black Africa, and oceanographer Claude-Francis Boeuf sailed with them as scientific observers for the French government. The navy sent two frigates and a reconnaissance plane to accompany the mission that would enhance the image of France as a power in ocean exploration around the world.
As soon as
L’Elie Monnier
was at anchor off the coast of West Africa, Cousteau, Tailliez, and Dumas went over to
Scaldis
to inspect the bathyscaphe, which they had not seen until then. The strange craft looked enormous resting in its special cradle in the midships cargo hold on the freighter. Cousteau was startled to see that it looked even more like a dirigible than it had in the blueprints. The top was a diamond-shaped metal balloon 30 feet long and 15 feet high, under which was suspended a steel sphere about 6 feet in diameter to carry two passengers. In each of two hatches on the side of the sphere was a glass porthole. Cousteau knew from the plans he had studied that the balloon held six steel tanks that could carry a total of 2,500 gallons of gasoline for buoyancy. Coiled under the sphere was a cable, at the end of which was a huge weight shaped like the blade of an ice skate. The bathyscaphe also carried more than a ton of iron-shot ballast that could be released. Descending and ascending were theoretically simple: The lead and iron weights took the bathyscaphe down when some of the gasoline was pumped out of its tanks. When some or all of the weight was released, the craft either hovered in midwater or rose to the surface from the buoyancy of the remaining gasoline.
“My trust in the bathyscaphe was reinforced when I saw it,” Cousteau said. “I knew the principles by heart from the blueprints, and now I touched the real thing.”
When the moment came to select a member of the Undersea Research Group for the first test dive, Cousteau, as
L’Elie Monnier’s
captain, typically insisted that he and his men draw straws for the honor. Even if he lost the drawing, he was confident that he would be able to make one of the all-up test dives into the abyss to test the grappling arm and harpoon cannon. Théodore Monod, the director
of the Institute for Black Africa, won. On the afternoon of November 26, Piccard and Monod were sealed in the sphere. The freighter’s cargo crane lowered the bathyscaphe into the water for the dangerous business of pumping 2,500 gallons of gas into the tanks. The ship’s crane was not powerful enough to lift the gassed-up and ballasted sphere, and in case something went wrong, an explosion in the water would do less damage than an explosion on the ship. With Cousteau hobbled in his plaster cast standing on deck, Tailliez and Dumas led a team of safety divers to check on Piccard and Monod in the suspended sphere. Tailliez surfaced, flipped up his mask, and yelled to Cousteau, “Everything is okay. They’re playing chess.”
After nightfall, the bathyscaphe finally slipped beneath the sea, surrounded by a glowing corona from its lights that dimmed to a bright haze as it descended to only 200 feet for the first test dive. Sixteen minutes later, Cousteau watched as the sea brightened and the top of the balloon broke the surface. On the ship, cheers erupted but the celebration didn’t last long. For five long hours, with Piccard and Monod sealed inside the sphere,
L’Elie Monnier
’s divers pumped gasoline into the sea. Finally, the crane could lift the bathyscaphe. On deck, with movie cameras rolling under floodlights, the crew opened the hatches to free the exhausted men inside. Cousteau never forgot what he saw.
“A high leather boot came out, followed by a bare shank, another boot and leg, bathing trunks, a naked belly, and the bespectacled wild-haired pinnacle of Professor Auguste Piccard,” Cousteau wrote later. “His hand was extended, clutching a patented health drink with the label squarely presented to the cameras. Professor Piccard ceremoniously drank the product of one of his sponsors. The bathyscaphe was back from the deep.”
Cousteau’s delight at watching the world’s greatest science showman perform at the end of a grueling dive was replaced two days later by abject disappointment. During the next test, an unmanned descent to 4,600 feet over an undersea canyon, the thin metal balloon holding the gasoline chambers was bent and crumpled beyond repair. After struggling through the night to release ballast and pump off gas, divers finally lightened the bathyscaphe enough to bring it out of the water, but there would be no more diving on that expedition.
Cousteau was crestfallen that he would not make a dive to test his
grappling claw and harpoon cannon, but he also knew that Piccard was not going to stop working on the bathyscaphe. It was only a matter of time before he and his engineers made one that worked. He turned
L’Elie Monnier
homeward for Toulon also knowing that joining Piccard on his first expedition to explore the abyss signaled his acceptance into the top rank of ocean exploration.
After the publicity from the bathyscaphe expedition and the rest of the attention Cousteau was getting from the press, he hired his father as a full-time business agent. Eugene Higgins had died leaving Daniel without a job, so he was happy to divide his time between Sanary-sur-Mer, Paris, and Torquay. After his first trip to Sanary, he was known simply as Daddy because of his command of English, his relationship with JYC, and the genial, fatherly presence he brought to every situation. He had an agent’s soul, with great intuition for who was worth his son’s time and who was not. He gracefully deflected those he decided were not part of the way forward, aware that one never knew if they would be of use to his son’s career later on.
One of the first introductions Daddy brokered for JYC was with a young woman named Perry Miller, a United Nations cultural attaché scouting in Europe for new films to feed the energetic postwar documentary boom in the United States. Miller was pretty, adventurous in the style of a Hemingway heroine, and independent at a time when magazine ads were celebrating housewives in bouncy petticoats.
When Miller met Cousteau during a visit to Paris, she instantly recognized an animal spirit in him, a magnetism that she and almost every other woman he had ever known would find impossible to resist. She knew that not every attractive woman JYC charmed would become his lover, but there was no question that in the first two minutes after meeting him most would decide, at least theoretically, that they would. Smitten by Cousteau and convinced that he radiated the unmistakable scent of stardom, Miller went back to New York determined to help Americans fall in love with this brave, charismatic Frenchman. Daddy gave her prints of
Par dix-huit mètres de fond, Épaves
, and two other short films, one from the Tunisian expedition, the other a navy training film about escaping from a sunken submarine using a breathing lung. At a gala evening in New York in early 1950, Miller premiered Cousteau’s
films, along with several others from her European trip. The next day, a
Life
magazine editor who had been at the screening called to ask if he could take another look at the ones of the French fellow who breathes underwater.
In November 1950,
Life
ran a seven-page spread of photographs. Most had accompanied Dugan’s
Science Illustrated
story, but in
Life
they were printed many times larger and seen by many more people. Under the headline “Underwater Wonders,” Dumas wrestled an octopus, the Undersea Research Group team swam downward from the light above and into the depths, and shipwrecks once thought lost forever came alive again. In an inset photograph on the first page, Cousteau and his underwater movie camera evoked a scene straight out of Jules Verne. The article ended with five increasingly large close-ups of a menacing shark. The final caption, under an image of a shark’s gaping mouth filling the frame, was “Cousteau bumped the shark’s head with his camera and got this frightening nose-to-nose close-up. The shark retreated, and divers rose as quickly as possible.” Cousteau was quoted as saying he had seen forty-three sharks in a single month of diving. None of them showed the slightest inclination to attack him, probably, he said, because he carried cupric acetate as a shark repellant.
The rest of the
Life
issue, which had a paid circulation of more than ten million and a readership estimated at five times that number, featured the UCLA homecoming queen Allyn Smith on the cover, news reports on a plane crash in the Alps that orphaned nineteen children in a single Canadian family, a U.S. jet fighter pilot shooting down the first Russian Mig over the Yalu River that divides China and Korea, the assassination of Venezuelan dictator Delgado Chalbaud, and the murder of five family members by an estranged husband in New Jersey. The photo essay on Cousteau and his divers led the features section, followed by articles on the annual celebration of the Marine Corps birthday; a new discovery about the cause of high blood pressure; hair dyes that could be used safely at home; and the mysterious British billionaire, Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, his art collection, and his control of the oil exploration in Arabia.
Niblets Sweet Corn bought the ad on the back cover of the issue, and I.W. Harper Kentucky bourbon the inside back cover. On the inside front cover, the Forstmann Woolen Company ran a full-page illustration
of an elegantly wool-clad model against backgrounds of yellow, purple, and red fabric. Other products touted in the issue included General Motors airplane engines, Lucky Strike cigarettes, Schlitz and Budweiser beer, Playtex Fab-Lined girdles, Revere movie cameras and projectors, and television sets by Zenith, Spartan Town and Country, General Electric, Truetone, and the Capehart-Farnsworth Corporation. On television, Americans were watching
What’s My Line?, Your Show of Shows, Hawkins Falls, Truth or Consequences, The Jack Benny Show
, and
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
.
The day after the issue of
Life
hit the newsstands, Perry Miller got a call from someone who said he was from Universal Pictures in Hollywood. Who did he have to talk to about rights to the underwater movies he had read about in
Life?
Miller referred him to Daniel Cousteau. A week later, Jacques Cousteau accepted Universal’s offer of $11,000 for exclusive U.S. rights to his first four documentaries.
AFTER FOUR YEARS OF expeditions aboard
L’Elie Monnier
, Cousteau wanted a new ship. He remained grateful for the converted German patrol boat that had been his first command but it was just too small and poorly equipped to take him into the future.
L’Elie Monnier
had nowhere near enough stowage, a single engine that made it clumsy in close quarters, and limited deck space, which made launching and recovering teams of divers a nightmare. He wanted a bigger boat, with twin engines, a shallow draft for working around reefs, and accommodations, fuel, water, and cargo capacity for months instead of weeks.
At a meeting with the admiral in charge of the Undersea Research Group, Cousteau stood at attention and delivered the precisely worded request that he, Simone, Tailliez, and Dumas had written out the night before after dinner in Sanary-sur-Mer.
“Our team is ahead of everybody in putting a man in the sea,” Cousteau said. “The national interest is to keep us in the lead with a new type of undersea research vessel built to the special needs of Aqua-Lung divers.”
With a trace of sympathy for what he apparently took to be a naive and grandiose plan, the admiral turned Cousteau down flat. “As a lieutenant commander, you have no chance of getting a vessel. My advice is to return to routine duty. Work for advancement,” the admiral told him. “Become an admiral. Then you might get your ship.”
The following day, Cousteau went to another admiral who was even less sympathetic than the first. Not only was giving him his own ship out of the question, but since Cousteau had served seventeen of his eighteen years in the navy assigned to sea duty, it was time he did some staff time ashore.
Cousteau snapped to attention in front of the second admiral’s desk. “With your permission, sir,” Cousteau said. “From now on, I have one goal—to give my country an undersea exploring vessel. I request three months’ furlough to look after personal affairs.”
The admiral shook his head. Cousteau, he said, you are almost forty years old, no longer a young man. You have a solid career in the navy. This will ruin you, but I will grant you the furlough as I would to any other officer seeking to begin a business in civilian life.