Captain Jacques Cousteau’s Dangerous Quest to Live Underwater

I am finishing an enjoyable meal with my wife Simone and a tableful of good companions in a snug lodge we have built in a remote and primitive part of the world

No one has lived in such a place before. In a corner of our bright, pentagonal salon there is a large electronic console that looks like a spaceship control center. Four rooms radiate from ours in a design suggesting the name of our lodge—Starfish House.

One arm contains the kitchen and laboratory, from which the chef is passing us fruit, cheese, and coffee. I light one of my reeking Tuscan cigars and look out the windows at a black, virgin wilderness where moving phantasms barely suggest themselves, and where lights that are not lights softly gleam.

"Commandant, regardez," says the man at the console. He turns off the inside lights, then flicks on powerful lamps outside. In a magical transformation, our windows turn into treasure chests lined in zenith blue—the blue of the undersea world. Jewel trays drift slowly past in a half-knot current. There are tiny crustaceans, larval jellyfish, swimming worms, and many-faceted hatchetfish that have migrated from the abyss to dazzle our eyes. Beyond is a somber, shifting tapestry of big pelagic fish, the far-riding predators. They strike singly into the little ones, snap them up, and speed back to the shadows.

A thick school of sardinellas prances into view. We watch, spellbound, as they execute in unison a dance as precise as that of the Rockettes, then vanish as if the stage had fallen in.

We are in Continental Shelf Station Number Two—Conshelf Two—located on a coral ledge 36 feet beneath the surface of the Red Sea. The ledge is part of Sha'ab Rūmi, or "Roman Reef," 25 miles northeast of Port Sudan. Simone and I are visiting five of my men who are attempting to live and work here for a month without coming to the surface.

Conshelf Two consists of four prefabricated steel structures, several fish pens, and some antishark cages. Above us rides our utility ship Rosaldo, which supplies the undersea hamlet with compressed air, electricity, fresh water, food, and medical care—in short, with life. Above us also is our research vessel Calypso, serving as liaison ship.

(5 ways Jacques Cousteau pushed to protect the planet.)

This is the second Conshelf experiment we have conducted. In Conshelf One, a pilot project in the Mediterranean Sea in 1962, two men lived and worked for a week in much smaller quarters—a 17-by-8-foot chamber anchored at a depth of 33 feet off an island near Marseille. Now we have launched a much more ambitious expedition, with more men, more elaborate equipment, and at a far more remote site.

The control panel in the corner is actually the command center of the entire Conshelf Two expedition. Its operator has a three-camera closed television circuit, intercom, ultrasonic underwater wireless, and telephone. He issues instructions not only to the station but to the ships overhead. Forty-five men, above and below, follow these directions.

The controller also communicates with a strange building near Starfish House, an onion-shaped dome on stilts. It is the hangar of our two-man hydro-jet submarine, the diving saucer DS-2, which voyages a thousand feet down from its submerged shelter the first submarine vessel to operate from a base on the ocean floor.

The underside of DS-2's hangar is open to the water so that the saucer pops up into the air inside, to be hoisted into the dry by an electric winch, discharge her crew, and receive maintenance and battery recharges. Like Starfish House, the hangar is filled by a hose from Rosaldo with air compressed to 30 pounds per square inch, slightly more than double atmospheric pressure, to equal that of the surrounding water.

Simone and I get up from the table and have a look at the console. The gas-analysis indicators show that our air is pure. So is the atmosphere of helium and air in our Deep Cabin, a rocket-shaped underwater chamber 90 feet down on the reef below, where two men will presently attempt to live and work for a week without surfacing. We check meters showing direction and velocity of the current outside. The temperature in Starfish House reads 27° centigrade (80.6° F.), and the humidity is 85 percent.

Undersea Scientists Go for a "Stroll"

The 38-year-old director of the undersea station, Prof. Raymond Vaissière, chief of the biological division of the Oceanographic Museum at Monaco, asks us, "Care to join our evening promenade?"

The men go to one of the branching wings of Starfish House to don their gear.

When the professor is dressed for his "stroll"—part of the scientific program that requires our oceanauts to spend several hours a day in the open water outside the station— he pauses at the console and starts a clock next to his name on the personnel roster. Each name has a clock that records the time a man spends outside in the water.

The next man to clock out is a sprightly 30-year-old, Claude Wesly, chief diver of Conshelf Two. He is called "l'ancien," the veteran, because he was one of the two occupants of Conshelf One.

André Folco, 33, starts his clock. He is a slender, handsome industrial designer with a calm, restrained personality, which is helpful in unprecedented living conditions like these. The fourth man in the night-diving party is Pierre Vannoni, 31, a former customs inspector with literary tastes.

Simone, only a temporary visitor like myself, comes out of a bedroom in her foam-rubber diving tunic, designed as a gift for her by a fashionable Paris couturier. She shoulders her lady-sized Aqua-Lung.

"Coming?" she asks.

"Later," I reply. "I am going to join Falco in the hangar." Albert Falco, not to be confused with André Folco, is the saucer's pilot.

Handouts Win Chef a Devoted Friend

There is no door in the foyer from which the diving party is to depart. Wesly steps over to a circular blue section of the deck—and descends into it. It is open water, the sea itself, held down by internal air pressure. One by one the divers disappear through the open sea hatch.

The fifth man in the permanent underwater party stays inside with me and clears the table. He is our bearded chef, Pierre "Pierrot" Guilbert, 43. Pierrot is veritably the morale officer of this village beneath the sea. His cuisine bolsters the others, and he inspires himself with a grand collection of photos of his wife, two children, parents, relatives, and friends tacked over his bunk.

Pierrot taps on the window with his signet ring. A large triggerfish appears in the window, eyes him, and disappears. Pierrot moves to the sea hatch and holds some food scraps above the water. The triggerfish sticks its head up and grabs the offering.

Pierrot made friends with the fish when he first arrived. The trigger lives 100 feet away in a recess of the reef. It quickly recognized Pierrot as the dispenser of free lunch and associated only with him. Let another man rap on the window, the fish will come, but, recognizing an impostor, will at once go back home. When Pierrot is out swimming with three or four other men dressed in identical head-to-foot suits, their features completely hidden by masks, helmets, and mouth-pieces, the triggerfish will unerringly come to the cook.

I go to the console and call, on the intercom: "Starfish to Saucer Hangar. Over." Falco answers, "Davso and I are checking the batteries on the diving saucer." Armand Davso, the saucer's chief mechanic, has dived from Calypso to join Falco.

(The man who taught humans to breathe like fish.)

I reply, "I'm coming over." I shoulder an Aqua-Lung and go down the ladder into water that feels like warm silk. Starfish House stands seven feet above the coral sand on five stilts. Steel bars that surround the ladder protect us against sneak shark attack when entering or departing.

I swim toward the lighted ports in the yellow onion dome. Down the reef I see the flashlights of the professor and the night prowlers.

Man Who Works Magic in the Depths

I swim under the tripod legs of the diving saucer hangar and play my flashlight up into the big hatch. My distorted reflection ripples in a mirrorlike effect on the tissue of air and water above. It looks exactly like an inverted swimming pool into which I am diving upside down in slow motion. My mask breaks through to the air. The saucer is above me, and Falco and Davso are standing on the walkway, sweating over the battery boxes.

Sturdy, quiet Albert Falco, 35, besides being the pilot of the diving saucer, is diving chief of Calypso Oceanographic Expeditions—and an underwater magician. Time after time in this hazardous business of establishing an undersea village and making it work, it is a decisive act by Falco that saves the day. Without seeking power, he has become the indispensable man of Conshelf Two.

Falco's 20 years as a free diver and his week below with Wesly in Conshelf One are ancestral lore to people in Starfish House; his more than a hundred depth cruises in DS-2 make him the most experienced scientific submariner in the world. Yet Falco is wholly unambitious. He is content with plain, hard living, and is never so happy as when he is roaming around the bottom studying things with no particular object in mind.

My own job in Conshelf Two is as over-all supervisor of the expedition, with Commandant Jean Alinat as my alternate. Our ship operations are conducted by Capt. Christian Perrien, marine superintendent of our five-vessel research flotilla. And my old comrade Frédéric Dumas is topside with me as expert adviser. Prof. Jacques Chouteau heads the medical staff of the effort.

What is the purpose of the Continental Shelf Station? To begin with, I have long felt that undersea exploration is not an end in itself. It must lead to scientific research, to prospecting for wealth, and to greater utilization of the oceans. Finally, it must lead to human occupation of the sea floor—not only for the brief moments man has known before, but for days, weeks, even months at a time. Life is short: I wanted to hasten these processes of exploration, of prospecting and occupation, push them together, and establish a working, manned undersea station in the richest and most accessible region of the ocean—the continental shelf.

Coastal Shelves Equal Area of Africa

The continental shelf is the submerged portion of the land mass before it assumes oceanic characteristics in the continental slope and the abyss. Most nations consider the offshore contour line where the depth is 600 feet to be the boundary of the continental shelf, and many nations have proclaimed their submerged littoral as sovereign territory. The total area of the world's continental shelves is equal to that of all Africa.

There are many economic reasons for colonizing the continental shelf. The shoal waters of the world are rapidly acquiring offshore wells of oil, natural gas, and liquid sulphur. Troves of fine gem diamonds are being dredged from the South African continental shelf. Manganese nodules in almost pure state litter some ocean bottoms. Undersea fish farms, analogous to stock ranches on land, are now challenging man's imagination.

Theories for sea-bottom stations have existed for half a century. Prof. John Scott Haldane and the British Admiralty Deep-water Diving Committee established in 1907 that man can live in twice the density of the atmosphere for a long period and be decompressed rapidly without danger. Recently, Capt. George F. Bond, a United States Navy surgeon, drew up detailed plans.

In fact, pressure has no direct effect on human tissue short of a hundred atmospheres, such as occurs at depths of more than 3,000 feet in the sea. The only known handicap in extreme pressure would be respiratory fatigue. In 1962 we demonstrated in Conshelf One that lung fatigue was hardly a factor for two men living for a week in two atmospheres of pressure.

(This sunken trove of ceramics ushered in a new era for archaeology.)

Conshelf Two was not only planned to deploy more men for a longer stay in two atmospheres of pressure, but to leap forward by placing two men for a whole week in a Deep Cabin at a depth of 90 feet. To alleviate the strain on their lungs by air compressed to nearly four atmospheres, we planned to furnish them with a mixture of air and the second lightest gas, helium.

It is theoretically possible to push the working station down to 660 feet by using a mixture of the lightest gas, hydrogen, with a smaller amount of oxygen. Our long-range Conshelf plan is to do exactly that.

These manned stations exist only to permit men to work in the open water much longer and deeper than they can in surface-to-surface dives. Indeed, the shelf station does away with tedious and time-wasting decompression. It they live underwater, divers no longer need to decompress; they simply finish their work and return directly to the undersea billet. Only when they leave the undersea world altogether must they decompress.

We chose to plant Conshelf Two in the inhospitable Red Sea because it was far away, hot, and hard to supply. If we could build and maintain a sea-bottom station there, we could do it almost anyplace in the world.

To select the site, Albert Falco made launch cruises out of Port Sudan, diving for nearly a month on the reefs along an 80-mile front. He searched for fairly level ledges at the proper depths for the main station and the Deep Cabin on the landward, more sheltered side of the reefs, with good anchorage for the floating base, Rosaldo, and a reasonable distance from port for Calypso's supply runs.

Falco selected Sha'ab Rūmi, a reef 25 miles northeast of Port Sudan. It was actually a spindle-shaped coral lagoon lying outside the two main reef chains in the western Red Sea. Why it had been named the "Roman Reef," nobody in Port Sudan could tell us.

The four structures in our undersea hamlet were prefabricated of steel in Nice by the Perona metal works and taken out to Port Sudan in Rosaldo. We assembled them on the waterfront with the aid of Sudanese workers.

Three of the submersible buildings—Starfish House, the Deep Cabin, and the Saucer Hangar—were designed by Jean Alinat to stand on telescopic legs. The legs could be adjusted to give us dead-level openings for the bottom hatches that would remain open to the water. Only the "wet" tool shed—a chamber open to the sea where we stored fish traps and other equipment—had no telescopic legs. We brought along 200 tons of lead pigs to sink the village.

On the blistering waterfront at Port Sudan we struggled to float the buildings and ballast them for the 25-mile tow to Sha'ab Rūmi.

Building an undersea village may sound romantic, but the job itself was anything but glamorous. To begin with, we had to clear off humps of compacted sand and coral knobs to level the site for Starfish House and the Saucer Hangar. It was like breaking ground for a housing development ashore. We improvised a sort of plow, drawn by a rope which passed through a block made fast to the reef and ran up to a winch on Calypso's afterdeck. It took two days to level the lot.

Mooring Sea Blimps in a Gale

Placing the houses in the hamlet with a half-knot current running was somewhat like trying to tie down so many blimps in a gale. Our big steel bubbles were defiantly buoyant. They had to be sunk on an even keel to avoid flooding inside installations. This meant juggling tons of lead ballast.

In addition, one of our critical calculations for Starfish House was wrong. It needed 100 tons of lead, but the available ballast space under the floor would take only 80 tons. We had to build a 10-foot-wide rack on Starfish to hold the 20 extra tons of lead. We groaned and sweated through a day of suspense while sinking the main house, until finally it rested triumphantly on its telescopic stilts.

Then we lowered the hangar for DS-2. There was a crunching and a boil of bubbles as one of the legs gave way. The dome tilted over, and all three legs collapsed. It took four days of unremitting labor to unload ballast, take off legs, repair them, and restore the hangar to even keel.

During the whole expedition we all lost weight. My share was almost 20 pounds. Occasionally a man would faint at his job, for there was no air conditioning on either Calypso or Rosaldo; we were dedicating our only air conditioner to Starfish House.

Accidents seemed almost part of the daily routine. Many were so nearly fatal, I wonder what dispensation we had. For example, take the accidents to the Deep Cabin. At its proper depth—90 feet—the only feasible perch on the reef was about a yard square, not large enough for its tripod legs. We had to anchor it and reinforce it with a mooring cable to a section of the reef above it to ensure the cabin against sinking. When this difficult lash-up was finished, the mooring pulled out and the cabin sank. We fished it up from 140 feet, with marvelous work by Bosun Maurice Léandri on Calypso's hydraulic crane. The cabin sank several more times. Let me tell about just one of the sinkings.

Whenever the cabin took off, it ripped out electrical, television, phone, and instrument cables. It would have taken weeks to hoist the rocket out of the water each time and repair it.

After one such misfortune our electricians, Jacques Roux and Pierre Servelo, volunteered to do the job underwater. Servelo was diving for the second time in his life. The uppermost of the cabin's two compartments was still dry, and they could work there. A highly experienced diver, Raymond Coll, went down with them to do some outside repairs.

Roux and Servelo crawled up to the "nose room" and reconnected the phone to Starfish House. Just then Deep Cabin began to rock. It rumbled. With a snarl of bubbles, it began sliding down the steep slope of the reef, with two men trapped in the nose and Coll outside, entangled in a storage rack.

Servelo yelled over the wire to Starfish House: "What is happening?"

The controller relayed the distress call to Calypso. Commandant Alinat said, "I'm coming down." Then the phone line ripped out.

During the sinking, Roux scuttled down to the bottom hatch, thinking that Servelo was following. He dived clear, watching with horror as the cabin thudded on down the reef with one of his messmates inside and the other carried along, struggling, on the outside. The reef face fell off for 1,000 feet. Luckily, the Deep Cabin struck a ledge 140 feet down and came to a stop, leaning against the reef.

Men Escape From Near Death

Coll was pinned outside. Inside, Servelo felt the chamber settle and composed himself. Water had flooded up through the lower room, but the upper room was only a quarter filled. He had a pocket of air, he still had his Aqua-Lung, and he reposed a world of confidence in the last words he had heard on the phone, Alinat's "I'm coming down."

Servelo heard banging and scuffling outside; Coll's Aqua-Lung was clamped to the reef by the steel cabin. He was cutting away his diving harness.

Coll could not work one of his flippers loose, so he pulled his foot out of it. He took a last lungful of air, abandoned his Aqua-Lung, and started a free ascent of 140 feet. Alinat and Falco came stroking down toward the sunken cabin and passed a nonchalant character with no breathing gear and one fin who was rising slowly with distended cheeks, blowing a bead of bubbles from his pursed lips. Coll was gradually lowering the pressure in his lungs as he passed through progressively lower water pressure. To have retained more pressure inside than that outside would have fatally ruptured his lungs.

Coll arrived on the surface unhurt but tired. Alinat and Falco went on to the cabin and conducted young Servelo up to safety.

Divers Hold Off Army of Sharks

In previous expeditions to the Red Sea we had gained considerable respect for its sharks, and this time came prepared to coexist with them. Coexistence began even before we arrived at the Roman Reef. In the Gulf of Aden we stopped to dive on Arab Shoal, an interesting rock reef near the Gulf of Tadjoura off French Somaliland.

We launched the two-man diving saucer to reconnoiter, and the little submarine was picked up and escorted closely by about 30 large and bold sharks. Pierre Goupil, our cinematographer, and his three teammates dived at night to get some footage, with the antishark cage along just in case.

At a depth of 100 feet the floodlamps held by Raymond Coll and Christian Bonnici picked up the glittering eyes of a dozen big sharks. As Goupil and his assistant Gilbert Duhalde prepared to film them, the pack circled our team, moving in and growing in numbers until there were maybe 70 sharks.

Now Goupil was confronted with a fateful decision: The antishark cage would hold only three men, and the fourth man might well be taken by the sharks. Goupil rang the alarm to have the cage raised, then grabbed his assistant, who was the least experienced diver, and shoved him inside. Then he, Coll, and Bonnici got on top of the cage and sat back-to-back, facing all angles of attack.

The sharks broke their circle and flew at the men head on, confident as wolves of their superior numbers. The divers struck back with cameras, lights, and shark billies as we winched them up. The cage broke water. The men were unhurt. The frustrated killers thrashed on the surface in a frenzy.

Goupil wanted to film the diving saucer in the middle of the maddened pack. So we rigged two powerful floodlights on the front of the anti-shark cage, and he and Daniel Tomasi, the still photographer, went down in it, while Falco and I took the diving saucer down through the sharks.

Falco and I hovered near the cage at 80 feet. We were astonished to see Goupil and Tomasi suddenly abandon their cameras and dance crazily, slapping their ankles and leaping. Around them, picked out in the lights, innumerable white dots were swirling, like gnats around a lawn lamp in summer.

The cage was quickly hoisted out of our sight, apparently in answer to the alarm bell from Goupil. Falco and I later emerged from the submarine to find Calypso's work deck slippery with blood and the cameramen laid up with bandaged ankles. To my knowledge this was the first instance of bloodshed from attacks by "sea mosquitoes," agile planktonic crustaceans, probably isopods, as vicious for their size as the fearsome piranhas.

Goupil and Tomasi had been entirely protected by their diving suits—except for their ankles. On the way up, they had swatted away at the little monsters as the sharks followed. Léandri, on the crane, stopped the cage ten feet from the surface for the obligatory five-minute decompression stop. During the halt, said Goupil, "I was suffering such tortures from the mosquitoes that I felt like opening the door and going out in the middle of the sharks."

Although we set up our antishark cages at Sha'ab Rūmi, we saw few sharks there. Throughout our stay, we had to swim well out of sight of the station to see one. Apparently the sharks were equally impressed by us. And that is the way I hope it remains.

Silver Suits Mark Undersea Exiles

After weeks of aggravations, setbacks, and galling labor in steaming weather, Continental Shelf Station Number Two was finally ready for human occupancy.

The five oceanauts dressed for departure. I talked with them on the diving deck. They were dressed in flexible diving suits of gleaming silver, actually aluminized nylon-neoprene. The romantic armor had practical origins. Reflecting fabric could be seen farther at night, and it was vital that any of these five be instantly distinguished from the dozen or so black-suited servant divers and technicians who would be working with them.

The silver livery of the oceanaut was a sort of convict suit—the wearers were sentenced to one month in a watery dungeon and could come to the surface only at peril of their lives. During their prolonged stay in two atmospheres, including lengthy dives down to pressures of three and a half atmospheres, the silver men would become heavily saturated with nitrogen and could not rise into lighter pressures without decompressing, lest the gas bubble into their blood streams and kill or cripple them with embolisms.

The rest of us, wearing black diving dress, must always watch the silver oceanauts and never let one of them accidentally drift above the sunken village, possibly to his death.

At the end of a month, we planned to administer to the oceanauts a mixture of gases containing the minimum amount of nitrogen permissible, so as to lower the nitrogen saturation of their bodies and to allow them to swim nonstop to the surface. In case of an emergency, we were equipped to take a man immediately to the surface in a pressurized can and transfer him under pressure to a decompression chamber on Rosaldo.

The five men standing in front of me, sweating in their silver suits in the tormenting Red Sea sun, were not exceptional physical specimens. For Conshelf One I had picked two crack divers in top physical condition, but for this longer and more grueling trial in debilitating heat and humidity, I chose five unexceptional men. They averaged more than 35 years of age. Two were not very experienced divers. All were married, with a total of six children. One was pudgy and had minor arteriosclerosis. The only thing out of the ordinary about the oceanauts was loyalty to one another as Calypsonians and pride in being selected for Conshelf Two.

The second day that our contingent was living in Starfish House, I went down for dinner. Davso was still rigging the air conditioner, but even without it, the undersea house was noticeably more comfortable than Calypso. After coffee Professor Vaissière introduced me to the magical evening's entertainment they had discovered on the first night—house lights out, external floodlamps on. I suspect that looking out into the search-lighted sea will be something of which men in future undersea settlements will never tire.

DS-2 Takes to the Deep

Starfish House was a stationary viewing gallery. The beauty of the diving saucer, among other things, is its mobility.

We loved to take the saucer out at night because of the exotic creatures that come out then, and because of our long-held interest in the mysterious deep scattering layers that rise and fall in the depths of the sea. Here is the log of one of my Red Sea dives with Falco before we arrived at Sha'ab Rūmi:

"It is 2:00 a.m. Henri Plé, officer of the middle watch, awakens me and, despite the sultry clime, I pull on a blue nylon coverall. It will be cooler below.

"On the afterdeck, the diving saucer is lying in her cradle. Falco and I step on bathroom scales and the divemaster chalks the weights on the blackboard. Davso reads the weights and adds a little water ballast to DS-2's inner tank to attain neutral buoyancy.

"We climb in. While Falco dogs fast the top hatch, I start the oxygen recirculation system and check over the control panel. On the phone Falco answers the pre-dive catechism of the divemaster. Everything is O.K.

Sharks Keep the Saucer Company

"Maurice Léandri, at the controls of the hydraulic crane, picks us neatly off Calypso's deck and, with a velvet swish, the saucer is in the sea. I switch on the headlights. A couple of sharks are hanging around. Christian Bonnici, keeping an eye on them, ducks under to wipe off our Plexiglas ports. At a thumbs-up signal from Falco, the diver gets on top of the submarine, pulls out the phone jack, and casts off the lifting tackle. Bonnici lends his weight to pressing us under, and our voyage begins.

"One hundred and sixty feet down, the echo sounder sketches the bottom of the first reef—a gray slope of rock fragments. We land briefly. Falco adjusts our buoyancy and we go slaloming down the coral bank.

"We come to the very sharply defined drop-off line of the second reef. We leap into the void beyond and circle back to sink along the animate wall, our lights picking up the delicate pastel colors of coral and alcyonarians.

"Two hundred feet down we encounter the first deep scattering layer—DSL—a huge accumulation of micro-organisms that has risen at night from its daytime position 600 or more feet deep. From above and below small squids and many gill rakers come to graze in this plankton pasture. One of the things that makes night diving so profitable is these glimpses of deep creatures feasting in the DSL.

"We reach a depth of 325 feet and encounter there a phenomenon of the Red Sea reefs that has never been detected before, even by robot cameras or echo sounders. It is a well-defined horizontal ledge from six to 30 feet wide, running continuously along the vertical reefs. We have seen this ribbony shelf at every single place the saucer dived in the Red Sea.

"Calypso's echo sounders had not given the slightest hint of this hard, level 'Andean highway' ranging the reefs of the Red Sea, always found about 325 feet down. The winding corniche seems constructed of hard, dead coral. The only explanation we can think of for the ledge is that it marks a sea level during one of the glacial epochs, a level eventually overcome by water. [Our geologists are busy now trying to solve that riddle.]

"Now DS-2 sinks along the vertical wall of the third reef. We are conscious of the overhanging ledge above us. Four hundred feet down, DS-2 stops on her own.

"'It's the thermocline,' says Falco. We have touched the thin border layer between hot and cold water, and we are floating on top of the denser cold fluid.

"We can dive again, of course, by admitting a few pounds of water to our trimming tank, but we take time to let nature make the adjustment by cooling us off. The thermometer falls from 95° F. to 79° F. Falco pulls on a sweater. Again we are on our way down.

Squids Whirl Like Sea Dervishes

"We reach the floor 900 feet down, and Falco cruises on a sloping sandy bed strewn with great boulders, perhaps fragments of the fossil shelf far above. The water is very clear. In our headlights, we can see objects 100 feet away. We watch spiny lobsters with grotesquely long antennae excavating nests in the sand with their tails. Our lights turn small squids into whirling dervishes. The squids pivot on their heads in the sand, twirling their mantles and tentacles like carrousels.

"At the base of the reef, the sea floor is hidden under a tangled and struggling bed of living crabs, each averaging the size of a human fist. There must be hundreds of millions of them. Above, in the lands bordering the Indian Ocean, are hundreds of millions of half-starved people. Falco and I muse that while men are trying to reach the moon, it also might be well to find out how to fish these crabs.

"It is now dawn, time to go up. Falco drops a ballast weight, and we soar aloft. Soon we are in green water, then dazzling sunshine. Divers put on the lifting tackle and Leandri hoists us aboard. The voyage is over."

Divers Tend Undersea Stock Pens

Perhaps the main achievement of Conshelf Two was to operate a submarine boat entirely from a submerged base for the first time. At Shaab Rūmi, DS-2 was safe and efficient, stealing in and out of her sunken onion dome. No wind or wave menaced her, as often happened when Calypso launched or lifted her. Based on the bottom, she was never immobilized by bad weather.

Conshelf Two was a realistic approach to an industrial station under the sea, and the daily routine of the oceanauts was one of work. Housekeeping was shared among the quintet. They took turns standing watches at the control console and performed daily outside assignments for Professor Vaissière.

Every day a team turned out to scrub fast-growing tropical seaweed and algae from the dome of the Saucer Hangar and the "tentacles" of Starfish House. The field work consisted of capturing live specimens for the biologist and putting them in the fish pens, steel frames fitted with plastic panels.

The divers captured live specimens by winding gill nets around a coral head. When fish had emerged and become enmeshed, the collectors gently disengaged the captives and placed them in plastic bags full of sea water. The men carried the fish in these invisible cages to the stock pens.

One time a powerful red snapper struck at a fish that Falco was carrying in a plastic bag. The sharp teeth slashed the bag and left the snapper with a mouthful of ripped plastic. The intended victim, thus dramatically liberated, jumped safely into a hole in the reef.

Professor Vaissière had none of the usual frustrations of the marine biologist—the difficulties of obtaining live specimens. He simply flippered out to the fish pens, picked the ones he wanted for the laboratory, and chose others to be air-expressed in oxygen-charged plastic bags to the Aquarium at Monaco.

Chef Pierrot did not use captives from the fish pens. In order to retain an innocent environment for Vaissière's biological researches, we enforced a nonaggression policy around the station. Seaman Antonio Lopez fished for the pot on distant reefs. I found out early in Calypso expeditions that easy access to fish does not increase one's appetite for them. We had a substantial red-meat dinner twice a day on Calypso and in the submerged house.

If you are planning a manned underwater station, don't forget to lay in a bunch of pressure cookers. They are the ideal containers for fetching and carrying between the surface and the bottom. They were invented to keep pressure in, but they also keep it out. We carried medical instruments, a broken television tube, mail, biscuits, and even a live parrot in them.

Just as miners once took canaries into the pit and submariners took mice into the boat to give early warning of high concentrations of carbon gases, for the same reason we took along the parrots, Claude (after Claude Wesly) and Armand (for Davso). We took two just in case we lost one.

Standby Parrot Never Goes Below

Claude was selected as the first parrot under the sea, although Professor Vaissière disliked the idea. He was sure Claude was going to disturb his repose by squawking out sailors' blasphemies.

Wesly put his namesake in a pressure cooker and carried him down. Claude bore the dive well and settled calmly into his new quarters. He was not caged—Starfish House was escape-proof for a bird. The professor slept the sleep of the contented savant, and Claude came up at the end of the experiment in good health. The standby parrot, Armand, was never called to duty.

Our youthful doctor, Jacques Bourde, swam down and checked the men every day. Although his average patient was nearing middle age, Dr. Bourde found little to treat.

Once Vannoni complained of the incessant physicals. "I feel fine. What good are all these checkups?" Bourde explained that they went into the clinical record that would be published for the use of other sea-floor establishments.

The peculiar experience of living inside the sea, cradled in man-made shells, cosseted by machines and cables, and nursed by many comrades on the surface, quickly became natural to the oceanauts. Falco and Wesly had found this to be true in the earlier experiment, Conshelf One. Man is a very adaptable species, especially when a new experience contains so much that is novel, beautiful, and exciting.

In recent years our underwater groups have been diving more and more at night because of the strikingly different face that darkness puts upon marine nature. The creatures of the day are withdrawn and asleep, and the night animals are out.

"Walking Shrub" Startles Hardened Divers

At Sha'ab Rūmi in the rich Red Sea, night showed us a secret world within the silent world. We used the ingenious stiletto light that our undersea research and development center at Marseille had built for Albert Falco. Its narrow, intense beam has the power of mesmerizing fish in midwater, so that the divers can gather unharmed specimens with their bare hands.

The parrot fish did not come out after dark. These daytime strollers lodged safely for the night, asleep in the sheltering arms of poisonous fire coral, to whose sting they seem immune. When we came by, they rolled their lidless eyes about but did not stir. They were supremely confident of their formidable fortress.

At night there came into the open a creature that struck momentary fear even in our veteran plongeurs. Picture an animal shaped like a small bush with five main branches, a great tangle of sub-branches and thousands of twigs. You find it standing on top of a coral head. It begins to writhe, twisting its slimy branches in cobralike motions. Play your light on it, and the weird creature shrinks and makes fast to the coral. Then, before your eyes, it walks away, contracts, squeezes into a crevice, and vanishes. This nightmare of the enchanted forest, which we saw only at night, is the basket star, or Gorgon's head, a member of the starfish family.

On previous Red Sea explorations we had been intrigued by rare observations of a large type of parrot fish that we nicknamed "the bumpfish," because it has a big buffer on its forehead as hard as the brow of a bison. The fish weighed from 60 to 80 pounds and traveled in herds, chewing up coral hunks the size of a fist to get at tiny animals living in the coral maze.

The bumpfish would swim over a coral block, dive swiftly, and butt it heavily with the hard bumper, dislodging the plat du jour. Occasionally it would defecate large clouds of white sand, the end product of its menu.

During our first dives at the Roman Reef, we spotted a school of about forty mature bumpfish that appeared to be in residence, although they whipped off when we tried to take their pictures. Then, thanks to the privilege of actually living under the sea, we discovered where the bumpfish stayed at night. Investigating grottoes in the reef, we came upon them sleeping singly or in pairs.

Holding the hypnotic flashlight in their eyes, we were able to examine them closely. They were a bright, flashing blue-green and orange in hue, but their teeth were covered with seaweed. We saw them emerge from caves in the morning and rub themselves vigorously against the sand to clean off parasites before moving off to graze. That accounted for their pristine bodies, but there was no natural toothbrush to demoss their teeth.

When we were in the caves with the bump-fish at night, we could feel their heads and look into their mouths, but one touch on the tail sent them flying. One night Falco entered a bumpfish lair behind a big coral boulder and accidentally brushed the tail of an 80-pound specimen. The fish leaped past him and crashed head-on into the boulder. The coral, which must have weighed a ton and a half, overturned and rolled down the slope. The fish went on, apparently unhurt. Falco is convinced that if a diver had been in the way of the mad escape he would have been killed instantly.

Our divers have seen plenty of sea urchins in their years below, but they never dreamed of the species they found one night near Conshelf Two—a large urchin with the usual mess of radial spines, but with the startling addition of a radarlike scanner on top. This appendage turned back and forth in what seemed to be a full circle, for all the world like the radar atop Calypso's mainmast.

Quite a few large triggerfish lived around the undersea hamlet. We saw the females lay grapelike clusters of pink eggs in hollows dug in the sand, then stand on their heads and blow streams of water on the eggs to oxygenate them. The male circled around protectively, prepared to strike at any intruder, be he shark or man.

We saw sharks turn tail and flee before an angry triggerfish, although the latter's teeth can deal no more than a peck to a shark or a painful nip to a man. Bernard Marcellin, Goupil, and myself were bitten to the blood by heroic males we blundered upon.

One of the most amazing creatures the divers found in Sha'ab Rūmi they dubbed the "bulldozer crab." It resembled a two-inch-long miniature lobster and spent its time shoving sand and coral around to construct homes and repair damages by intruders or currents.

Journal of a Modern Jules Verne

While Professor Vaissière kept the formal log of Conshelf Two, Vannoni, the meticulous ex-customs inspector, kept a rough, informal log—"What It Is Like to Live and Work Inside the Sea."

When he first popped his head up through the watery carpet in Starfish House, Vannoni had a "wonderful feeling of comfort and well-being" despite the "dreadful" heat and humidity. Indeed the accommodations were the best he had ever lived in—a cozy sitting room, delectable meals, a luxurious bed, and boon companions.

Of the work outside—the shifting of tons of lead ballast from the ballast rack to the large footplates of Starfish—Vannoni wrote: "In the water it is child's play to carry lead bars which would weigh a hundredweight on the surface. It is not long before we finish the job and return to the house fresh and well. But we do just a few light jobs, for we are still adapting to our new surroundings."

By the end of the first week of total submersion, Vannoni and his messmates had settled into "the usual daily chores"—such as setting up colored panels on the reef to see if fixed fauna and fish were attracted to certain hues; building Professor Vaissière's underwater aquariums; and scrubbing down the outside of the buildings. Vannoni noted that "the professor is becoming more dangerous day by day"—at chess. He wrote:

"June 21—We've been down for a week. I feel pretty well, but we've all had an earache in just one ear. Odd that it should be just one ear. I suspect the air ventilators which blow on our faces during the night. The doc [Bourde] is skeptical. But otherwise we're in pretty good form."

One morning, Vannoni wrote, he and Pierrot the cook were alone in Starfish House when "a triggerfish comes to look through the window into our living room. Guilberttorments him by holding a chicken leg against the glass. The fish bites at the window. We have a good laugh at the zoological textbook that claims the only way to study triggerfish is to kill them with depth charges or poison."

Submarine Pests Shun Bathless Diver

Vannoni looked forward to the night strolls in the coral mazes—"aesthetic orgies," he called them. The oceanauts went out in the dark, shrimping with hand nets: "Sorry we don't have an extra pair of eyes in the back of our heads." Once a barracuda swooped into the torchlights and seized a jack, which struggled desperately to free itself. "It disappears a moment later," wrote the diarist, "gulped down by the toss of the head and something like a yawn."

Always and everywhere in our liquid plantation we were surrounded by tiny beings—plankton—and were able to study them in situ, greatly enlarged with a movie camera devised by our research and development center in Marseille. One man would sweep a fine silk net through a fog of plankton and transfer living specimens to a clear plastic container the size of a matchbox. The container fits precisely into a theatrically lighted receptacle before the lens of the submarine cinecamera. The cameramen would then film in color the normal movements of wonderful life forms that dwell by the megatrillions in the world oceans.

Underwater people at Sha'ab Rūmi were tormented by stings from almost invisible siphonophores—stringy colonies of gelatinous animals that suffused the water. These tiny pests are armed with a remarkable weapon. Coiled inside a single cell called a nematocyst is a hollow poison tube. When the nematocyst makes contact with an alien body, the tube uncoils and drives deep into the victim, discharging venom. Smaller prey are paralyzed or killed. Divers itch cruelly and often become infected.

The siphonophores concentrated on areas where our diving dress didn't protect us, especially on our ears. After a while, we noticed that one of the black-suited divers was never bothered. It developed that he, excusably enough in a place where every drop of fresh water was precious, did not wash too often. The natural wax in his ears protected him from stings. Some of his friends at once joined the water-conservation movement.

Wounds Heal Almost Overnight

The new life under the sea that is beginning to summon man will have a new hygiene. A fascinating avenue of medical research is opening in continental shelf stations. On shipboard, for example, in the burning miasma of Sha'ab Rūmi, ordinary cuts took as much as three weeks to heal. Below, in Starfish House, the same wounds disappeared in two days. Was this due to an excess of oxygen under doubled pressure, a difference in bacterial life, or what?

Vannoni noted in his journal: "Day by day we notice that our visitors are losing weight and getting rings under their eyes. The effort demanded from everyone above is enormous. We follow all this from our sunken castle as powerless onlookers, rosy and plump, idle and pampered."

Arabs in dhows passing the dreaded Roman Reef at night must have counted their black coral prayer beads at the sight of the Conshelf expedition. A small diesel ship rode in an impregnable lagoon, throwing off the racket of generators and compressors. A white ship lay outside the lagoon, its crew working like galley slaves. Camera crews, toting apocalyptic floodlamps, lighted up the sea above and below, giving the whole scene a supernatural air.

Nobody worked harder than our electricians Bernard Marcellin, Jacques Roux, Pierre Servelo, and Louis Bidegant, who is called "P'tit Louis." They became so dazed with fatigue they made fun of it.

One morning Simone, the only woman among 45 men, wearing her most feminine sunsuit, encountered Bidegant in a narrow alleyway and bonjour-ed him cheerfully. The electrician squeezed past her with no reply.

"Alors, P'tit Louis," said Simone in a hurt tone. He turned, deadpan. "Oh, pardon, Madame. I didn't recognize you."

Barracuda Becomes a Mascot

The black-suited servants shuttling back and forth between the ship and shelf became accustomed to a loiterer—a six-foot barracuda that hung under the midships rail ten feet down to receive chef Jacques Morgan's garbage. Falco named the scavenger "Jules" and said, "He's old and bitter, almost unable to make a living."

A visitor arrived from France and eagerly donned an Aqua-Lung. As he started down the ladder, Simone said, "Look out for Jules." The visitor put his faceplate under. Jules was yawning. The guest suddenly lost interest in diving.

Simone thereupon got her lung and conducted the visitor safely through Jules's territory.

Rosaldo's captain, Louis Sinagra, was rowing lazily one day over the outer rim of the lagoon when he noticed a pale ringlike form protruding from the shallow coral table under the boat. He reached in and felt the neck of an ancient amphora, or earthenware jar.

We excavated the jar from its coral bed and found it surrounded by shards of other amphorae. It closely resembled third-century B.C. Rhodian cargo jars we had found in the ancient wreck at Grand Congloué. The presence of these broken jars hinted at the wreck of a Hellenic ship on Sha'ab Rūmi. Was the reef itself misnamed for this wreck of two millenniums ago? If so, it is the only Hellenic shipwreck so far found in the Red Sea, and how it got there no one knows.

Depth Trial Begins 90 Feet Down

Ninety feet under stood our rocketlike Deep Cabin for two men. It had two vertical rooms, the lower containing diving gear, tools, and the open sea hatch; the upper containing two bunks, kitchenette, intercom, phone, and a TV camera connected with the monitor in Starfish House.

The two men in the Deep Cabin were to breathe a recirculating mixture of air and helium—next-to-lightest gas in the atomic table. Many years ago U.S. experiments proved that helium would permit divers to go deeper than with ordinary compressed air. We intended to use a helium environment as a jumping-off base for deeper working dives with compressed-air Aqua-Lungs.

Our computations promised that the two men in the rocket could drop out of their bottom hatch and perform useful labor down to 165 feet, and that they could safely bring off short dives to 330 feet without too great a risk of nitrogen narcosis, or "rapture of the deep." We calculated conservatively that two men could spend a solid week in and out of the Deep Cabin.

I must here stress that we were not trying to break diving records, but simply testing, methodically and cautiously, the theory that a helium booster station could convey divers to deeper encampments on the continental shelf. The main point was to see if the deep men could work with clear brains in this stratum, and not be overcome by rapture of the deep.

The previous sinkings of the Deep Cabin did not daunt the two men who were to stay there a week. Raymond Kientzy, 33, is a splendid diver who has been ten years with our team. He is a robust, equable, reliable man. His companion was André Portelatine, 46, the volatile and highly accomplished director of the famous free-diving school at Nice, the Aventure Sous-Marine. Their first hour in the Deep Cabin was a harbinger of the torments they were to meet.

The worst was the humidity. We had not provided air conditioning for the cabin, because we thought that the 90-foot depth would be in colder water below the thermocline. Also we had planned the expedition for March, when the Red Sea is nearly as cold as it ever gets. Now, it was July—hot July—and our thermocline data was wrong. The torture cabin was standing in water temperature of 86° F. with 100 percent humidity inside.

Deep Cabin Gear "Does Not March"

Kientzy was the diarist of the Deep Cabin. His first day's entry in "The Sauna," or Finnish bath, is datelined 5 July and notes, "Le telephone ne marche pas." Other things that did not march included the refrigerator and the emergency oxygen system, because of repeated flooding and reassembly. The deep men dined lightly the first evening and turned in at 7:30. They tossed sleeplessly all night. Kientzy got up once and found water risen in the lower story—there was a leak somewhere.

On the second day Portelatine could eat no breakfast. Kientzy managed coffee and jelly bread before they went out in the sea. Portelatine had severe ear pains and had to return to the cabin, while his cellmate swam around. They lunched on tomato salad, turkey (which Kientzy called "desert ostrich"), spinach, cheese, fruit, and wine. "L'appetit marche bien," Kientzy noted.

That night Portelatine slept a little and Kientzy was out for eight hours. They perspired incredibly. I visited them and was appalled at the Finnish-bath environment. I promised to send down some cakes of ice.

Dr. Bourde, who was making daily visits to the pair, reported generally good reactions: Their health was not in danger, although the Deep Cabin was a supreme trial of well-being.

The third night was the worst thus far. Kientzy said they "perspired like fountains." Several times he went out for strolls to cool off. He saw a pair of sharks that had been hanging around the rocket. He played his flashlight on them.

"Their eyes were brilliant in the night, like cats' eyes," Kientzy noted.

The next day the deep men went down to 175 feet, to a dim forest of black coral that grew at the foot of their cliff perch. There they peered at another drop-off extending down, how far they could not tell. Despite his constant ear pain, Portelatine was as determined as Kientzy to attain the depth they had planned together, 330 feet

They were seldom hungry or thirsty and forced themselves to eat and drink. Portelatine suddenly hated the taste of coffee. Kientzy forswore his beloved pipe because they were living in a recirculating breathing system that could not eliminate smoke.

A big laugh came whenever the controller in Starfish House spoke on the intercom with men in the Deep Cabin. Helium has a hilarious effect on the human voice. The gas is so light that it cannot fully resonate the vocal cords, and the most manly male produces a high-pitched twitter.

I tape-recorded reports from Sha'ab Rūmi for French radio during the expedition and airmailed them home. Later I heard what happened in Paris when one of the "helium" tapes went on the air. The sound engineers heard a normal voice answered by soprano chirps. They stopped the machine, and the announcer apologized for the "technical difficulty." The sound men reasoned that the tape operator had accidentally speeded up when recording, so they slowed the tape. This time my voice went into a horrible, cavernous drawl, and the reply from Deep Cabin was like nothing ever heard on land or sea.

The fourth night in the Deep Cabin was another bad one for the almost sleepless Portelatine, and in the morning they found the water once more rising in the rocket. Kientzy wrestled a bottle of helium off the outside rack and released the gas in the chamber, pushing the water back down with the added pressure. The mysterious leak persistently threatened to flood them in their sleep, although there would still be enough air compressed into a pocket in the nose cone to give them time to arrange escape.

Kientzy's terse narrative for the fifth day mentions a temperature of 89° F., humidity unknown (the hygrometer did not march).

"The water continues to rise in our house," he noted. "André slept a little and I did, too. Tout va bien [All goes well]."

Electrician Pierre Servelo, who had once been trapped in the rocket, came up with a theory about the leaks. "Is it possible that helium is seeping into the television cable and escaping through it to the surface?" he asked.

I had a strong inner seal put on the stuffing box. Servelo had the answer. The TV cable had been merrily conducting the superbuoyant helium to freedom in the world above.

During the week of the Deep Cabin trials, the men in Starfish House were completing their month underwater. Aboard Calypso Simone announced to me in tones that implied argument-will-get-you-nowhere, "I am going down to see them."

I said, "I'll have Davso go with you." Before the mechanic could charge his bottles, she was down the ladder. The lady who came for supper at Starfish House enjoyed the evening illuminations. Quietly two of the inhabitants evacuated a bedroom and doubled up with others so she could stay overnight. It turned into quite a visit. Simone might not be up yet, except that the fifth day was the close of the project.

Simone's subaqueous sojourn included our 26th wedding anniversary. I was invited down for the occasion. The champagne was terribly flat—doubled pressure tended to keep the bubbles imprisoned in the wine.

On the fifth day, the men in the Deep Cabin swam down through changing visibility and contradictory currents to the black coral copse and reconnoitered the region they would visit on the climactic 330-foot dive. Below, said Kientzy, "the water was crystalline and unmoving. I was near to vertigo." They returned to the Deep Cabin, confident they could make 330 feet.

It was a good day. Portelatine's ears felt better. A moray snatched a plastic bag of lunch leftovers out of Kientzy's hand and swallowed it, plastic and all. For the first time both men were able to enjoy a siesta.

"The surface world interests us only because of our friends up there," wrote Kientzy. "The rest, the world, France, we do not think of. What day is it? I think it is the fifth day we have been here. It is of no importance."

After the nap, the pair went down again and reached a sandy slope at a depth of 250 feet—only 80 feet short of their goal. Hundreds of little eels stood on their tails in the sand, their bodies arched into question marks. When the men got within six feet of them, they vanished into the floor.

The sixth day was the one planned for the Aqua-Lung dive to 330 feet, a depth much too hazardous for compressed-air dives from the surface. However, dwellers in undersea stations could, we reckoned, attain the depth with clear heads and perform useful work there. Our calculations proved right.

Kientzy and Portelatine drilled down through the lambent depths to 300 feet. There, looming below, stretched the ribbony coral shelf, the "Andean highway" that we had discovered with the diving saucer. The deep men looked over the edge of the shelf; below 325 feet the cliff fell straight down.

At this depth the divers were breathing 11 times the volume of air that they would on the surface, and even their four-tank AquaLungs were quickly becoming exhausted. They shot up to Deep Cabin. They had not experienced rapture of the deep—nitrogen narcosis—despite the extreme depth. In the log Kientzy entered 330 feet as their greatest depth. Not until a week later did he confess to me that they had actually gone to 363 feet.

In the forenoon of their seventh day, Kientzy and Portelatine went out for their last swim, while black-suited divers rigged special gas masks over their bunks in the Deep Cabin to prepare them for a safe ascent to Starfish House. The pair put on the masks and breathed a mixture of 50 percent oxygen and 50 percent nitrogen for three and a half hours. This reduced the helium saturation in their bodies to a safe level. When Kientzy stuck his grinning face through the wet carpet in Starfish House, Wesly stuck a lighted pipe in his mouth.

Diarist Vannoni in Starfish House wrote: "Our stay draws to a close. Honestly, we don't think of our return to the surface as a relief. To continue our experiment further beyond the limits planned would not be difficult, but would prove nothing beyond what has been shown already."

In order to give the deep men room for an overnight stay to pass off gases, Vannoni and André Folco surfaced after 29 days below. The other three stayed until the 31st day, then breathed a mixture of 80 percent oxygen and 20 percent nitrogen—inverse proportions of these gases in the atmosphere—for 15 minutes. They took 15 minutes off, then a half hour back on, a half hour off and an hour on, and they were ready to go.

The last silver helmet passed through the blue floor, and they swam up to the roseate blaze in which other people live.

The manned undersea research station is a revelation to oceanography. Ocean scientists of the past like Prof. Henri Milne-Edwards of the Sorbonne, the first biologist to dive—in a clumsy and dangerous bucket helmet in 1844—would turn sea-green with envy over our Professor Vaissière's privilege of spending a lordly month in the fishes' habitat with his own collecting staff, underwater cameras, stock pens, and field laboratory.

The Red Sea demonstration was especially interesting to the petroleum industry because of its offshore operations. Indeed, the main sponsor of Conshelf Two was Bureau de Recherches de Pétrole, the French national petroleum office. We believe that placing marine oil wells and their personnel on the sea floor will be cheaper and safer than maintaining offshore drilling platforms. Professor Vaissière is confident that his oceanographic colleagues all around the world will sooner or later demand ocean-bottom laboratories.

Military applications of manned undersea stations include antisubmarine warning installations, coastal defenses, and submerged bunkering stations for submarines.

Conshelf One and Conshelf Two have convinced our underwater team that industrial and scientific sea-bed stations will become a routine thing in our lifetime.

A hundred practical applications will undoubtedly be found for submerged stations. Yet for us the greatest reward for the toil at the Roman Reef was none of these, but the ever-enchanting realization that we were living inside the sea.