Man into Fish
CAPTAIN COUSTEAU is a pioneer who may perhaps prove as important as the Wright brothers or Anthony van Leeuwenhoek. His tech- nique of free diving, as independently as a fish, in which the body is kept in equilibrium with the water it displaces, is as great an advance on that of the old helmeted diver as the aeroplane was on the balloon ; and it has opened up a world as strange as that which was revealed by van Leeuwenhoek's microscope. In France in 1943 Cousteau conceived, and Emile Gagnan designed, an ingenious apparatus which enables a diver to carry his own air supply and to swim where he will. This scaphandre autonome (" self- governing diving-gear ") has no name in English, and Cousteau is obliged to use the ugly and misleading American term, " aqualung." His growing team of divers were then able to explore wrecks, browse among sponges and coral, and examine fish that had not yet learnt to fear man. But they also had a more serious duty to perform. They had to find out the exact capabilities of the aqualung—br rather of the human body using it. The first enemy was cold, for even in summer there is an icy layer in the Mediterranean about twenty fathoms down. They devised foam-rubber suits of armour ; and now it is possible for a well- dressed diver to swim under arctic ice-floes. The "bends," that best- known malady of divers, proved to be easily avoidable, but below about thirty fathoms they encountered a new enemy, the " rapture of the deep." The concentration of nitrogen in the highly com- pressed air acts like laughing-gas, and intox,cates the diver with .an illusory feeling of, beatitude. Gradually he loses the will to survive. Cousteau, his henchman Dumas, and several of his most experienced men spent a long time flirting with this insidious intoxication, and did not admit defeat until Fargues was drowned nearly 400 feet down. They tried to explore the siphon at Vaucluse, a strange spring that wells out of the earth and erupts in gushers once a year. Certainly no diver has ever enjoyed dropping into these frigid chimneys of Hell. This was no exception ; they were nearly killed, not by the cold, but because their air-supply happened to be polluted with carbon monoxide. After the War Cousteau's Undersea Research Group was attached to the Navy. It kept them busy, locating minefields, filming mines and torpedoes, and (retrieving drowned airmen. They were even called upon to find out how close to an under-water explosion a man could stay and still survive, and they were bruised in every muscle for their pains. Later they were able to pursue more general researches. They salved the remaining cargo of marble columns from the wreck of a Roman galley at Mandia. It was once full of looted Greek works of art but had been clumsily ransacked by earlier divers. They also excavated the remains of a shipload of Roman wine-jars that the Club Alpin Sous-Marin had discovered at Antheor. But Cousteauis a diver, not an archaeologist, and soon he was off filming fish and getting to know the so-called monsters of the deep. Octopuses amuse him, and he finds them mild and tractable com- panions. North-east of the Porquerolles he came upon a city of hundreds of them, each with its own dwelling, a cromlech of three stones. In North Africa he and Dumas entered a large net with a shoal of tuna, and filmed the terrified fish charging to and fro as the net was slowly hauled in. On a beach in West Africa they found a colony of supposedly extinct monk seals, and played with them in the water, while " the seals enjoyed ducking under and tickling the divers with their whiskers." He met sharks in the Atlantic and the Red Sea, and soon knew them well, but he never learnt to under- stand why they did not press home their attack. And the sight of them at work on a dead porpoise—they " spooned away the solid flesh like warm butter, without interrupting their speed "=did nothing to reassure a defenceless diver. Cousteau's narrative is cool and vivid ; written by a Frenchman in English, it is the less hackneyed because it adopts the unexpected but effective choice of words of a most intelligent and witty mind using a language that it has not come to take for granted. There are many excellent black and white photographs, including some remarkable close-ups of sharks. But the colour photographs are disappointing ; they are not so good as Rebikoff's in Exploration Sons-Marine and elsewhere, and the first of them. was far better reproduced in Paris-Match of August, 1951. 1 am much more thrilled by the frontispiece of the Cousteau family at home : father, mother and two happy and excited boys of twelve and thirteen enjoying their usual Sunday-afternoon dive. The silent world is open to all ; and those who cross its threshold must be humbly grateful to Captain Cousteau for having unlocked the door. RICHARD GARNETT. "
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