Jacques Cousteau - Jacques Cousteau : The Sea King

A few weeks after I decided to write about Jacques Cousteau, I went to St.-Andr-de-Cubzac, France, where he was born and is buried. Its a typical market village on the fringe of Bordeaux with a busy highway running through the center and narrow streets off to each side that are deserted during the day because almost everyone works in the city. The second-floor bedroom in which Cousteau first drew breath is now part of an apartment over a pharmacy, across the street from the windowless stone abbey that anchors St.-Andr to the twelfth century and the Roman Catholic church. Two blocks west, I found a civic monument to Cousteau at the traffic circle on the approach from Bordeaux. Above a splash of carefully tended annuals in summer bloom, a twice-life-size wooden dolphin is mounted 10 feet off the ground on a steel pole. Rendered by the sculptor in the act of leaping from the sea, the dolphin holds in its mouth a red knit watch cap like the ones worn so famously by Cousteau and the crew of Calypso. On a separate pole, arrowed signs guide visitors to the local highlightsthe Philippe Cousteau Professional Academy, City Hall, and the Forty-fifth Parallel Ecological Observatory, one of several founded in the eighteenth century to study the earth precisely halfway between the equator and the North Pole.

Just past the traffic circle is the cemetery, two acres surrounded by limestone walls beyond which the ancient vineyards roll like ocean swells toward the Gironde Estuary and the Atlantic. On the late August afternoon I was there, the walls were so bright with reflected sun that it was hard to look directly at them. Inside, there were rows of tombs, some of them like blockhouses intended to protect their occupants, some like ornate temples decorated with stone flowers, angels, and portraits of the deceased. A sign at the gate pointed the way to Spulture Cdt. Cousteau.

Calypso, August 2005, La Rochelle, France (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

Cousteaus parents, Daniel and Elizabeth, lay together in a knee-high chamber of limestone bricks capped by a simple cross inscribed with a single word: COUSTEAU. A carpet of red flowers covered the center of the tomb, around which were conical, waist-high evergreens spaced like sentries. To the side, facing over the vineyards just then plump with the seasons crop, were three graves marked by wrought iron crosses. Over one of them was a foot-square piece of slate with weathered gold leaf lettering:

J Y Cousteau
Papa du Globe

I was alone at the tomb for only a few minutes before a man and woman I guessed to be in their midthirties arrived. They looked at me but didnt speak, so I moved away to give them the privacy they seemed to want. While the man stood silently with his hands clasped in front of him, the woman reached out and swept a few dry leaves from the top of the tomb. Then she picked up a handful of pebbles from the path at her feet and arranged them in the shape of a heart on the spot she had cleared. Around her heart were similar commemorations of pebblesan anchor, a ships hull, another heart, the letters JYC, a circle. When the woman turned to face her husband, I saw that her eyes were shiny with the beginnings of tears. She shrugged as though slightly embarrassed by her emotions and took his arm. They nodded at me as they started for the cemetery gate. Did you know him? I blurted in English. No, the woman said. But we loved him.

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70sthe middle decades of my lifeCousteau was the most internationally recognizable television star on earth. His success as a filmmaker had peaked with The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which aired four times a year for a decade before being canceled by ABC in 1976. After that, Cousteau never again reached television audiences of tens of millions, though he produced over a hundred more documentaries. Instead, he became a revered elder of the environmental movement, credited with kindling a new awareness of the need for stewardship of the worlds oceans and rivers. The man and woman in the cemetery were thirty years younger than I, members of the generation after mine. The woman arranging her pebbles on his tomb added a layer of complexity to a man I regarded as a brilliant showman who had coinvented the Aqua-Lung because he wanted to breathe underwater, had made movies to show the world what he found, and had used his celebrity to transform the human relationship with our planet. I had not understood that Cousteau was, simply and timelessly, beloved.

The next day, I took an afternoon train north along the Atlantic coast to the port city of La Rochelle to look for what was left of Cousteaus Calypso, the converted World War II minesweeper that had become the most famous research ship in history. At the dock of the Maritime Museum, I found a wreck that bore only a vague resemblance to the heroic white ship I remembered from many hours sitting in front of the television eating a cooling turkey TV dinner and watching Cousteau and his divers explore the underwater world.

The hulk was weeping rust streaks from corroded fittings on its sooty white flanks. Frayed dock lines seemed to be straining to keep it afloat. The name and hailing port had been covered over with off-shade paint that looked as if it had been applied in a rush to conceal its identity. The transom planks, darkened by rot, bulged ominously. In four places, flat canvas slings were wrapped tightly around the hull as though to contain its innards. On deck, a clutter of metal tubing, wire, gas canisters, and the remains of a crows nest in front of the pilothouse looked dangerously jagged and forlorn. The boarding gate was missing, leaving a hole in the gunwale through which I could see the ships docking ladder under a pile of crumpled sheet metal. On the side of the ladder I made out sun-bleached green letters in uneven Greek script with the letter a in the word Calypso replaced by the symbol of a fish: .

La Rochelle has been in continual use as a port since the tenth century, when it dealt mainly in red wine and salt. From the sea, ships have to navigate channels through treacherous, shifting sand flats at the confluent mouths of the Dordogne and Garonne rivers, but once inside the harbor, they are safe from all but the worst storms. As I looked at the wreck at the dock, I realized that this perfect harbor was very likely the last port of call for a ship known to more people than Jasons Argo, Jules Vernes