By Brad Matsen
Pantheon. 296 pp. $22.44
What if the Wright brothers, after inaugurating powered flight, had gone on to fly the Atlantic instead of Lindbergh, written the books and movies that popularized aviation and warned the world of the threats from ozone depletion and global warming? They'd have then done for the sky what Jacques Cousteau did for the sea. And yet since the 1970s, when tens of millions of us sat rapt watching his "Undersea World" specials on TV, whole generations have grown up with little or no knowledge of who this amphibious (and often ambiguous) Frenchman -- with his Emmys and Oscars, air tanks, red-capped divers and white ship named Calypso -- really was. Longtime aquatic author Brad Matsen sets out to correct this slight to our water-covered planet with his new biography, offering us, if not total immersion, at least a fast and thrilling dive through Cousteau's aquatic life.
If you're a scuba diver or reader of marine history, you've probably heard some of the story before, though not in so concise and well paced a manner: the sick, reticent schoolboy who was not good at sports but found confidence in shooting from behind a camera and physical grace in the weightlessness of water; the gangly young naval officer, injured in a car accident, who gave up his dream of flying only to go with two buddies to the rocky shores of southern France, where he found his 17-year-old wife-to-be and a passion for underwater spear-fishing. There, Cousteau began tinkering with ways to keep cameras dry underwater, and he and his friends -- Frédéric Dumas and Philippe Talliez -- became known as Les Mousque
mers (the Sea Musketeers).
Frustrated with the limits of breath-holding and hard-hat diving (in which air is fed in from the surface), Cousteau collaborated with gas engineer Emile Gagnan in creating the "Aqua-Lung," a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA). This was during World War II, when the French Navy scuttled its ships. After receiving his nation's top military honor for smuggling photos of Italian maps during the confused military occupation of southern France, Cousteau spent most of the war with his friends, diving for fish and lobster to feed their families. "We were living in the middle of a war on pure fantasy and lots of beans," Talliez explained.
While Cousteau was willing to take risks for the Resistance, he was even more unflinching in his willingness to face death by testing his Aqua-Lung in rivers, underwater caves and the open sea. By the end of the war he was the world's leader in underwater exploration and filmmaking. With support from Irish brewery heir Loel Guinness he bought a boat (Calypso) and commissioned a bestselling book, "The Silent World," that became an Oscar-winning film. His explorations did not stop until he died in 1997, at the age of 87.
Like many visionaries, Cousteau was both charismatic and borderline obsessive, with a singular drive that impelled him to leave friends, collaborators and competitors in his wake like half-eaten chum when they no longer advanced his cause. As he aged, that cause turned increasingly from exploration to protection of the ocean he so loved.
After the death
of his son Philippe while piloting an amphibious aircraft in 1979, Cousteau's surviving son, Jean-Michel, took on greater responsibility for the family's media empire while Jacques retreated to Paris, where he lived with his much younger mistress, Francine. His estranged wife took refuge aboard the Calypso until her illness and death a decade later. Only then did Cousteau inform his first family that he was living with and had two children by Francine, whom he then married.
Matsen reports on the chaos that followed Cousteau's demise when his new wife took control of the empire and the ensuing court cases, but these disputes have been better told elsewhere. Matsen focuses more on the fate of the once white ship Calypso, now being restored in a French shipyard, a physical metaphor for Cousteau's legacy.
The upside to that troubled legacy may be that while he lived in a world where his documentaries were regularly seen on one of the (only) three U.S. television networks, fierce competition among his progeny has spread the Cousteau brand across the multi-media world. Between Jean-Michel, his children and his brother's children, you can now find newly minted Cousteau documentaries on CBS, PBS, BBC and Discovery, as well as in books and on the Internet. From the point of view of an endangered northern right whale or a tiny coral polyp, this is all good. The Cousteaus, for whatever reasons, are continuing Jacques's mission to open up the eyes and ears of the world to the threatened miracle of the sea, the crucible of life on our blue marble of a planet. After reading Brad Matsen's salty and engaging biography, I'm sure the Sea King would approve.
To find out more about our buddy Jacques and the Cousteau Society, click on the crane in the photo of his good ship "Calypso" below!
To purchase this book, click on Jacques' sleepy left eye in the photo above!
If you're interested in having a Cousteau Movie Night at the Sports Garden's Cafe in February, fire me an email so we can get this set up: COUSTEAU, BEER AND WINGS, OH MY!
Allows you to plan recreational SCUBA dives. It does this by using the same test data that the PADI/DSAT recreational dive planning tables are based on.
