Inspecting the bottom of the lagoon
on Clipperton Island
Inspecting the bottom of the lagoon
on Clipperton Island
Surfacing after a dive in the lagoon
Birds flocking around Cousteau
on Clipperton
Sunset at Clipperton
The captain with his son Philippe
Cousteau in his trademark red woolly
hat
Clipperton DVD
Crab on Clipperton Island
Jacques Cousteau odyssey
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Critics have said that the Jacques Cousteau film productions of the mid-Seventies and early Eighties lacked focus and drama, yet these documentaries stand up surprisingly well today. In fact, the re-issue of ten key films from this period on DVD, gives today's generation of divers an opportunity to see the diverse work of the man whose influence still looms large over the world of underwater exploration.
The box set includes many show-stealing Cousteau moments - the first-ever dives on the wreck of the Brittanic, explorations of the Nile and Easter Island - but the most extraordinary come in Clipperton: The Island Time Forgot, in which Cousteau and the rest of the Calypso team travel to an isolated atoll in the Eastern Pacific. Clipperton is one of the loneliest dots you will find on any map, located 670 miles off Mexico and named after John Clipperton, an English sailor found guilty of mutiny and left on the islet with a barrel of water. Even today, the atoll is visited only occasionally by scientific expeditions.
As with many of the tropical Eastern Pacific's far-flung reefs, the waters are patrolled by large numbers of sharks, and fish are found in great numbers. Cousteau, however, was less interested in the bounty of the reef, and instead concentrated his underwater explorations on the island's freshwater lagoon, an eerie expanse of water poisoned by decaying plants.
Stick-thin and by then in his early Seventies, Cousteau decided to join his underwater team on an exploratory dive to collect samples from a deep pit in the middle of the lagoon, thought to be the vent of an extinct volcano. Wearing a Poseidon Unisuit (one of the first modern drysuits), with a full-face mask, the cameras follow him as he descends through layers of near-opaque water, reaching a membrane of dead matter and passing beneath it to explore the deepest reaches of the pit.
As the divers descend, the American voiceover is replaced by Cousteau's hypnotic tones as he recounts his impressions of the dive. 'As we pass through the floating layer around us, great blobs of matter float by, strange constellations drifting through a space in which all familiar landmarks have ceased to exist. We seem to have entered a world of dream, ghostly and insubstantial, in which the cable has become the only thread connecting us to reality.' Venturing deeper, the divers feel as if their hands are burning under their gloves. At 35m, they pass through a second suspended mat of detritus and enter total darkness, in which the divers' powerful lights create only a vague orange glow. They only realise they have reached the bottom when they feel it with their fins.
Speaking in perfect English, Cousteau describes the hellish environment and the effect it is having on him and his team. The heat that the divers felt in their hands was actually the burning of hydrogen sulphide, the toxic product of vegetation rotting when all the oxygen has been consumed. 'We have penetrated the zone of death,' he says, 'a region where no living thing can long survive.' With the team now in tears as the toxic water invades their masks, Cousteau signals the ascent. The divers show admirable restraint as they slowly move up towards the diving platform with its tiny, beckoning rectangle of light. For Cousteau, the platform's moon pool is
not simply a window between worlds - it is deliverance.
As they surface, the divers are clearly blinded and in distress. Cousteau rips off his mask and shrugs off his kit, and it is at this point that we can see why this diminutive man was and remains such an enigmatic figure. The voiceover says that Cousteau too is in distress, but he actually appears to be no more than nonplussed, despite the seriousness of the situation. He then proceeds to hoist himself (aged 70, lest we forget) out of the water, drysuit, weight belt and all, then begins to describe the dive. Within moments, he is laughing it all off as he shows his topside cameraman the discoloured weights on his belt, blackened by the sulphide. He glances back at the cable and the diving pool with a glimmer of cool, Gallic disdain.
Almost a decade before Cousteau landed at Clipperton, his son Philippe had visited the atoll and filmed the varied marine life of the open seas around it. Cousteau used some of this footage, but edited it to tell a different story in which death and suffering were the overriding themes. Cousteau dwells on the story of a group of Mexicans living on the island in the early 20th century, of how the lighthouse keeper went mad and terrorised the women until they murdered him.
Death is the overriding theme of the film, especially Clipperton's violent history and the fearful relationship between predator and prey on the reef. It seems strangely downbeat for the great ambassador of the sea, but it makes more sense when you consider this film in the context of what was happening in the Captain's own life during this period. In June 1979, a year before Cousteau flew to Clipperton, Philippe had died while testing the seaplane, Flying Calypso, in Portugal. Philippe had been groomed as the one to take over the Cousteau Society, and his loss was a major blow to the whole Cousteau empire.
At the time, Cousteau issued a statement that appeared unemotional, stating his determination to keep moving forward, but the loss of his son affected him deeply. For months, he retreated from his beloved world of expeditions and appearances, and could not bear to go diving as it brought back such painful memories. Perhaps it is understandable, then, that he should choose such a grim, punishing dive to publicly reacquaint himself with the underwater world.
Unable to bring himself to film a tribute to his son, he confronted his demons by producing the darkest of his filmed work, reflecting the depth of his despair. The other films in this set remind us of the Captain's drive, his charm and his poetry, but in Clipperton we see his complexity and his obsession with death, a product of the diverse imagination that gave the diving world its most famous standard-bearer.
• The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey is released on DVD through Delta Music, (
www.deltamusic.co.uk) on 19 June and includes 624 minutes of films on three discs for £29.99.
