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French writer Albert Camus once wrote, “I know this with sure and certain knowledge: a man’s work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
For those of us who were children in the 1970’s and 1980’s, one of the great and simple images in whose presence our hearts first opened was that of an elegant, mythical-looking man in a red wooly cap traversing the world’s oceans in his ship the Calypso. He and his team of charismatic adventurers called on foreign ports that we could not visit ourselves, explored ancient sites that we knew only from dreams, and lived life in a limitless way that few of us will ever experience. Our hearts didn’t just open in the presence of those enduring images, our hearts were transformed and grew bigger, and we learned early on what it means to yearn for life and adventure and for experiences as rich as Captain Cousteau’s.
Much time has passed since The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau or The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey television series graced our screens, but the images live on in our hearts, timeless and iconic. We think of them often. We think of rusty medieval war canons being lifted onto the Calypso’s deck, of Cousteau sniffing Roman amphorae for ancient wine, of chief diver Falco resurrecting bronze statuettes from watery Aegean graves, of dolphins playfully flanking Calypso’s hull as she glides through pristine Caribbean waters. And then there’s the lasting image of the explorers gathered on deck, sharing a laugh or a cigarette or marveling at Venetian coins retrieved from the wreck below. Their camaraderie, their unmatched collection of shared adventures, evoked the tales of Homer and they not only took us along on their modern Odyssey, they provided us with a soundtrack and a poetic narrative that made the voyage more than an adventure, it made it art.
We knew even then that above all, Cousteau was an artist, a gifted and passionate cinematographer. “I’m not interested in achievements,” he was once quoted as saying, “I’m interested in having an interesting life and sharing it with the public on television.” And that he did, in almost a hundred films, two T.V. series, and eighty books that we compulsively collected. Yet, he still found time to co-invent the aqualung, father the science of undersea archaeology, advance underwater filming techniques, and later co-invent the Turbosail. As the inscription on his National Geographic Society Gold Medal reads, “To earthbound man, he gave the key to the silent world.”
If Cousteau and his men deserve criticism for anything, it’s for setting an impossible precedent for adventure. How many of us, after all, will ever experience the freedom, danger, joy, and pioneering thrill of the Calypso crew? Modern commercial jet travel, crowded airports, contrived vacation resorts, they do nothing to satisfy the adventurous spirit. In that sense, most of us don’t care about the extent of Cousteau’s scientific credentials, or about his private family affairs, or whether he failed twice for every success. What we care about is what Jacques Cousteau represents to us: freedom, art, adventure, the joy of being the first and best at what you do, living by the motto “Il faut aller voir” (“We must go and see for ourselves”). Whether he erred often or greatly makes little difference to those of us who grew up dreaming about donning a red cap and sailing the world. “We are not documentary,” Cousteau once said, “we are adventure films.” And it was the adventure that mattered to us. Not the science.
One of the great lessons that we learned from the Captain’s life is that is doesn’t take advanced educational degrees, wealth, or connections in high places to achieve success. It takes only creativity, desire, and an instinct for innovation. Cousteau evolved from a sickly child into a self-proclaimed misfit, then into a naval officer, later into an inventor and master cinematographer, and finally into the world’s greatest explorer and father of the modern environmental movement. None of it was planned, or handed to him, or laid out in advance. “Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed,” Cousteau said about his first experience using goggles underwater. He took the seeds of chance and nurtured them into forests of experience, relying only on a visceral drive to create and discover new things.
The details of Jacques Cousteau’s life are fuzzy now for most of us, but it’s those early images that still dominate our thoughts: Cousteau emerging from his diving saucer after a 1,000ft-dive in the dark depths of the Atlantic, his son Philippe hovering over the pristine glaciers of Antarctica in a multi-colored air balloon, the inflatable Zodiac launching wildly out into rough waters to retrieve a lost buoy, the team’s helicopter circling a Greek island in search of Atlantis, the PBY Catalina seaplane roaring out of the sky one minute and then bobbing silently on the crystal waters of the Bermuda Triangle the next.
“I have accepted death not only as inevitable but also as constructive,” Cousteau once said. “If we didn’t die, we would not appreciate life as we do.” We were young when Cousteau uttered those words, and knew nothing of death, but we appreciated life because he appreciated it, and because he showed us how. He was not only captain of the Calypso, he was captain of our imaginations, and clearly one of the great men of the 20th century. Our only question now is, where is the successor to the charming and charismatic man who skippered the dreams of our youth?
It has been said that true happiness lies in the fulfillment of childhood dreams. If there is any truth to that statement, then happiness for many of us means donning a red wooly cap, climbing aboard an affectionately named ship, pointing to the horizon, and announcing to a small group of bold adventurers, “We must go and see for ourselves.”
