Berne Jennifer - Manfish

by Jennifer Berne

illustrated by ric Puybaret

Bubbles rising
through the silence of the sea,
silvery beads of breath
from a man
deep, deep down
in a strange and shimmering ocean land
of swaying plants and fantastic creatures,
a manfish
swimming, diving
into the unknown,
exploring underwater worlds
no one had ever seen
and no one could ever have imagined.

Our story starts many years before, in France, with a little baby boy born under the summer sun.

His parents named him Jacques.

From the very beginning little Jacques loved waterthe way it felt on his hands, his face, his body. And water made him wonder. He wondered why ships floated. Why he floated. And why rocks sank.

One day Jacques read a story about a man who hid underwater by breathing through a long tube. Jacques tried it and discovered it was impossible.

He dreamed that someday he would be able to breathe underwater for real.

At night Jacques dreamed he could fly. With the birds, among the clouds, with his arms stretched out like wings.

Jacques spent his days playing, experimenting, and creating. He wrote little books that he illustrated with his own drawings. And he was fascinated by machines. He studied blueprints and built a model of a crane that was as tall as he was, and actually worked.

Movies fascinated Jacques, too. He wanted to know how they were made, how the cameras worked, and how chemicals made pictures appear on the film. Jacques saved his allowance, penny by penny, until he had enough to buy a small home-movie camera. The first thing he did was take it apart and put it back together.

Then he began to film everything around him. He put his brother, cousins, parents, and friends in his movies. He dressed up as a villain with a painted-on mustache, and made some very villainous films. Jacques was always the star, the director, the writer. And usually the cameraman.

When Jacques finished school he joined the French Navy. His ship sailed all around the world, and everywhere he went he filmed what he saw.

In China, he filmed men catching fish with their bare hands. They held their breath underwater for many minutes. Jacques wondered what that would be like.

One day, at a beach, a friend gave Jacques a pair of goggles with rubber frames and glass to look through. Jacques wore them into the ocean.

Beneath the water he was surrounded by silvery green forests of sea plants and fish he had never seen before. Everything was silent and shimmering. It was a whole new world.

When he came up he saw cars, people, buildings, and telephone poles. Once again he went below into the magical underwater world. At that moment Jacques knew his life was changed forever. His eyes had been opened to the wonders of the sea.

Jacques and his friends, Philippe and Didi, began to dive together. They experimented to see how long they could stay underwater and how deep they could go.

Jacques created a waterproof case for his camera, to film the amazing kingdom he and his friends were exploring beneath the surface.

They made rubber suits to keep themselves warm and flippers to help them kick better.

But Jacques wanted to stay down longer than just one breath at a time.

He realized he needed to take more air with him, enough air to explore the mysterious depths and vast expanses of the ocean. To swim through the sea as free as a fish.

He wanted to become a manfish.

And he began to work on just how to do it.

On a warm summer day, Jacques stepped into the blue Mediterranean Sea with his new invention. He called it the aqualungbecause aqua means water, and our lungs are the part of our body that holds the air we breathe.

Below the surface, Jacques swam and glided and dove. He did flips and somersaults.

He stood upside down on one finger, and laughed bubbles into the sea.

Jacques could breathe beneath the water!

Now he could swim across miles of ocean, his body feeling what only scales had felt, his eyes seeing what only fish had seen. The water made him feel like he was flying. Just like in his dreams.

Jacques had done it. He had become a manfish.

Jacques was ready to explore the oceans of the world. He needed a boat and found a big, old, wooden navy ship named Calypso. In a year he turned it from a warship into an explorers ship.

Jacques, Philippe, and Didi gathered a crew, their aqualungs, their hopes, and their dreams, and set off to explore the inside of the sea, to film a world that no one had ever seen before.

On their journeys, they dove deep into a seascape of plants.Green and purple prickly plants. Red branchy plants. Spongy plants. Wispy, feathery, swaying plants, slow-dancing to the rhythms of the sea.

They discovered plants that could feed you. Plants that could poison you. Plants that looked like fish... and fish that looked like plants.

They swam with giant whales, hitched rides on sea turtles, and made friends with porpoises with shining eyes and smiling faces.