Cousteau has made the sea his own

Press, 3 May 1977, Page 17

Cousteau has made the sea his own

The world beneath the sea — earth’s last frontier — is the familiar domain of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. For more than 30 years Cousteau has dedicated his life to the exploration of inner space and, through his films and writing, the world-famed oceanographer has shared exciting secrets of the ocean deeps with a landbound world.

In January, 1967, Captain Cousteau began one of the most ambitious projects of his colourful career — a five-year world voyage during which he would film hourlong specials. The initial specials in “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” series resulted in glowing praise from critics and educators and enthusiastic response from the public. Cousteau, co-inventor of the aqualung, was the first to experiment with underwater television; he pioneered submarine colour photography. He has made significant contributions to the science of oceanography and to man’s own awareness of the world around him. His five books, “The Silent World,” “The Living Sea,” “World Without Sun,” “The Shark: Splendid SaVage of the Sea,” and “Life and Death in a Coral Sea,” communicate the mystery, fascination and beauty of the world under water.

His films recording his adventures have won the grand prix in film competitions at Venice, Cannes and Paris, as well as three academy awards. The world-acclaimed oceanographer and expert in marine biology, botany and ecology has made numerous dives for sunken vessels and aircraft. In 1947, during an archaeological expeditioa, he recovered ancient art treasures from a Roman galley believed to have sunk off the coast of Tunisia in 80 B.C. Known as “the man who made Jules Verne’s imagination come true.” Cousteau was born June 11, 1910, at St Andre-de-Cubzac, France.

A sickly child forbidden to engage in strenuous games, he became an expert swimmer and developed an exceptional adeptness for things mechanical and inventive. He was educated at the Naval Academy of Brest and then entered the French Navy, later serving as a gunnery officer on

the cruiser Dupleix and other vessels. He holds the rank of Capitaine de Corvette. With certificates as master, navigator, gunner and aerial observer, he is qualified to command any ship in the French fleet. Cousteau’s enchantment with the sea began in 1936, when he donned goggles and looked under the sea’s coverlet into a world as yet undisclosed and unexplored. The first real advance into that world came with Cousteau’s design of the aqualung, an apparatus unburdened by cables and hoses, which would allow man to penetrate 300 ft below the ocean’s surface.

The aqualung’s first satisfactory test was made in the waters off the French Riviera in 1943, when France was under German occupation. Cousteau conducted his diving experiments while working for the French underground, an activity that France later honoured by bestowing upon him the Legion of Honour, Officer Class, and the Croix de Guerre. After the war, Cousteau continued his work for the French government by establishing the Group for Undersea Research, one of its objectives being the clearing of German mines from the French harbours of Toulon, Sete, and the Gulf of Lyons in the Mediterranean. In addition to oceanographic voyages to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, Cousteau also experimented — often using himself as a guinea pig — with the effect of explosives on the human body.

Turning from the aftermath of war to peaceful research, Cousteau experimented with underwater photography. He built numerous gadgets, including equipment for Auguste Piccard’s bathyscaphe. He conceived a floating laboratory, workshop and diving platform with which to widen the aqualung’s usefulness by making it available to oceanographers and marine biologists.

In 1950 this became practical with the purchase in Malta of an old American mine sweeper.

Funds were provided bv friends and the French Naw to refit the new ship (christened the Calypso! as a revolutionary type of research vessels

He was to say later: “I have many houses, but Calypso is my real home.”

In 1957 Cousteau retired from the Navy with the rank of captain and in the following year was made director of the Oceanographic Museum and head of France’s Underwater Research Centre. In 1963 he returned to the Red Sea which he had explored in 1952, this time with his now famous twoman submarine, the Diving Saucer, which could descend to more than 1000 ft. Convinced that man would one day “walk on the sea as we now walk on the boulevards,” Cousteau began to create means of establishing communities of human beings beneath the sea. In September, 1962, two men lived for one week beneath the sea in his iron house called Diogenes. The following April, during an experiment in which he filmed “World Without Sun,” Cousteau established two houses at different depths: a garage workshop for the Diving Saucer and a garage for underwater scooters. Five men lived for one month in the big house and two men spent a week at great depth in the smaller house. Cousteau’s own wife became the world’s first woman oceanaut when she spent five days under the sea. In September and October, 1965, “Conshelf III” housed six men for three weeks in 330 ft of depth; these men worked daily for several hours in a depth of 375 ft.

In a lifetime with many hazardous moments, Cousteau’s closest brush with death came in 1946, when he attempted to solve the mystery of the Fountain of Vaucluse, a pool near Avignon that erupts each year and floods the river Sorgue. He lost consciousness at a depth of 200 ft, but revived in time.

Not only his wife Simone. but also their two sons, Jean-Michel and Philippe, became expert divers. Philippe was the chief cameraman on “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” series.

Madame Cousteau has served as supply officer and unofficial nurse and mother to the divers under Cousteau’s command.

In this book, “The Living Sea,” Cousteau described the time be had

first succeeded in putting two men at the bottom of the sea to live, and had gone down and met the men “going home” to underwater house. They looked at him but did not seem to see him. He wrote:

"I hung forsaken in the night, full of thoughts. The gist of my life work had been to free man from the bondage of the surface, permit him to escape beyond natural boundaries, breathe in an irrespirable medium and resist pressures of ever-increasing intensities. And not only to put man there but to help him adapt, explore, subsist, survive and learn. “Now man is beginning to live in the ocean, of the ocean, and for the ocean in the persons of these two possessed men who are calmly ignoring me. I had a pang of envy for them.

“A new kind of man was begining to evolve and I was not one of them.” — Television One Information Service.