JACQUES COUSTEAU
- AMAZING PIONEER -
G'day folks,
Welcome to one of my heroes.
Born in 1910 off of the French east
coast, the great blue expanses of the ocean which were at the backdrop of his
childhood remained a constant in the life of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The draw of
the ocean never relented its hold on Cousteau, and in 1930, he enrolled with
the French navy.
It was during this time, serving on a
French battleship, that Cousteau turned dream to action and started conducting
his first underwater experiments. It was during the tumultuous war that
Cousteau began filming prize-winning underwater documentaries, as well as
innovate diving technology in ground breaking ways. The Aqua-Lung, which he
helped design, was the first open-circuit, self-contained breathing apparatus
ever created.
Of course, films and underwater excursions weren’t the
only things that Cousteau did in those years, and as a member of the French
Resistance movement, he took part in several complicated operations to thwart
the Nazis and their axis powers, and help the allied armies.
Sadly, during that very same time, his brother
Pierre-Antoine was busying himself with far darker endeavors. Pierre-Antoine
Cousteau was a writer for the ominously-named "Je Suis Partout" (“I
am everywhere”), a fascist magazine with pro-Nazi leanings, which called for
the internment of all French Jews. He remained an unrepentant white supremacist
until his death of cancer in 1958.
The stark contrast between the two brothers only
serves to shine a light on the one-of-a-kind character of Jacques Cousteau.
After the war,
Cousteau helped clear the Mediterranean of mines, using his excursions as an
excuse to continue his sea explorations and filming, including the very first
unassisted underwater archaeology outing, exploring the wreckage of a Roman
vessel off the coast of Tunisia.
It wasn’t just the wrecks that littered the bottom
of the sea that caught Cousteau’s attention, as the creatures of the ocean
enthralled Cousteau even more, and he was actually the first man who correctly
predicted the presence of some kind of echolocation system in cetaceans, like
dolphins and porpoises.
But it was in the early 60's that he began advocacy
for environmentalism when the French Commission for Atomic Energy set in
motion a plan to dump radioactive waste into the Mediterranean. It was only due
to his activism that wide protest arose against the CAE’s plan and they
were forced to nix it.
His
growing fame as an author and film-maker earned him a slot in television with
the eye-opening program "The Undersea World of
Jacques Cousteau"(1966-1976), which brought Cousteau’s
underwater adventures to every living room.
His one of a kind documentaries were the first and
only ones to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, until 2004 when Michael Moore won
one for “Fahrenheit 9/11”.
It is
told that during filming in Cuba, Cousteau met with leader Fidel Castro and
befriending him, subsequently talking the dictator into releasing some 80
prisoners.
Perhaps most importantly in his efforts to protect
marine environments, in 1990, Cousteau got all major powers to sign a
petition banning oil drilling in Antarctica, and we can only shudder, imagining
what the condition of the ice shelves of the South Pole would have been like today
if it were not for this great pioneer of diving.
Clancy's comment: I've probably seen all of his documentaries. What a legend.
I'm ...
