Authors: Brad Matsen
Under direction from Cousteau, who was rarely aboard
Calypso
or in the field with his camera crews, the river teams focused on collecting samples to gauge pollution and photographing fish and other wildlife. Jean-Michel and his crews, however, gravitated toward recording the lives of the people they encountered. Jean-Michel’s selection of material was radically different from his father’s—he believed that their films had to carry hard-hitting investigative journalism as well as beautiful shots of animals. He stopped for ten days to film the frenzy of forty thousand men in an open-pit gold mine at the base of the Andes. The 200-foot excavation was producing tons of gold but was also spewing tailings into streams and mercury vapor from its refineries into the air, where it mingled with water droplets that fell as rain hundreds of miles downriver. He found and filmed remnants of once isolated bands of people. Jean-Michel and his camera crews, who arrived by a float plane, were the first outsiders they had ever seen. Convinced that the cocaine trade on the Bolivian border was part of what his father called “the internal pollution of man” and contributed to the deterioration in the health of the Amazon watershed, Jean-Michel chewed coca leaves with farmers to sample the power of the drug, photographed vast coca plantations, and filmed the torment of a cocaine addict’s withdrawal in a hospital in Lima.
As an unintended consequence of Jean-Michel’s forays into social inquiry and human interest, in Peru he fell under the influence of a Jivaro Achuara Indian, who became the only mentor he had ever had
other than his father. One of Jean-Michel’s advance teams, led by an anthropologist who had lived among the Jivaros, introduced him to their charismatic leader, a short man in his late fifties known only as Kukus. Like many explorers before him who had encountered profound wisdom in a person regarded as primitive by the rest of the world, Jean-Michel found a deep connection with this man in the Amazon jungle. Kukus wore Western clothes, had seven wives, and had emerged as a powerful opponent of outside timber, fishing, and petroleum interests. They killed his people directly by bringing diseases for which they had no immunity, Kukus told Jean-Michel. They were also killing children who had not yet been born by taking away the forest and the river. For three weeks, Jean-Michel followed Kukus around, filming him as he planted trees, worked on a fish farm in a lake, and built a canoe. “I learned more about leadership from this one man than I have learned in my forty-six years of life elsewhere,” Jean-Michel said. “From him I learned about the connectedness of everything.”
Ted Turner was delighted when Cousteau and Jean-Michel brought back enough film for seven hour-long Amazon specials. He watched reels of raw footage and listened to tales of harrowing adventure, great beauty, and profound ecological insights during story conferences with Cousteau, Jean-Michel, and their writers. Editing the shows in Paris was going to take at least two years, so the first of them wouldn’t air until 1985. In the meantime, Cousteau told Turner that he wanted to keep
Calypso
and his camera crews moving at full speed. Turner said fine. He had acquired exclusive television rights to the work of a man he considered to be an international treasure. Cousteau was one of his heroes and an expensive property but worth the money even if he was only breaking even on the deal. In the summer of 1983, Turner wrote a check for $2 million for an expedition to a less difficult but equally magical river, the Mississippi.
Calypso
was in surprisingly good shape when she tied up in Norfolk after the Amazon expedition, so Cousteau was able to sail for New Orleans a month later. Jean-Michel, in charge of the day-to-day operations, was confident that if anything major went wrong on the river there were plenty of shipyards that would make room for
Calypso
on short notice. The plan was simply to spend a year sailing
up the 2,300 miles of the navigable Mississippi, travel overland to film the headwaters in northern Minnesota’s Itasca State Park, and detour into its major tributary, the Missouri River, for another thousand miles.
As always, Cousteau claimed that he would perform a scientific mission on the voyage, announcing that the society’s science director, marine ecologist Richard Murphy, would take samples to measure pollution along the entire length of the river. The Mississippi was already the most studied major river on earth, so there was really no pressure to add to the enormous mass of data. Murphy spent just three days with his drogues and sampling tubes collecting less than a dozen samples.
Because the whole river system lived up to its nickname, Big Muddy, there wasn’t much opportunity for underwater photography, either. Jean-Michel, with his father’s permission, focused on the lives of the river’s human inhabitants, as he had on the Amazon. More than anything,
Calypso
’s voyage up and down the Mississippi was a grand public relations tour orchestrated by the Cousteau Society and Ted Turner to return Cousteau to prominence with a new generation of television viewers. New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, and Minneapolis threw huge parties to greet
Calypso
. Cousteau sailed only a few miles of the trip on his ship but flew in for his celebrations and shooting scenes. Carefully distributed press releases alerted smaller towns along the way to
Calypso
’s passage. Crowds of people lined the banks and levies as it steamed by, some of them with bands playing “Aye Calypso.” In Hannibal, Missouri, Cousteau played Mark Twain’s organ. At one of Lewis and Clark’s campsites on the Missouri, he entertained locals and the cameras with his bandonion squeeze box. In Minnesota, Jean-Michel cuddled black bear cubs at a research station, and one of the divers tried and hilariously failed to master logrolling at a lumberjack festival.
“The Mississippi River is not dead,” Cousteau declared in his coda to the two-part television series. “Rather, it is vital, in all the senses of that word, reflecting the power and diversity of the culture along its banks.”
Generalizations like this one did nothing for Cousteau’s reputation among scientists, but at that point in his life, it only mattered that he made them. What Jacques Cousteau said on television was important to the world mostly because it was Jacques Cousteau saying it, and the
truth was that oversimplifications and generalities were about as much as the average American could handle about ecology.
As he passed into his seventies, Cousteau had entered a realm of celebrity granted usually to beloved kings, presidents, and occasionally to athletes and movie stars. His name appeared on lists of the top ten most recognizable people on earth. He received thousands of requests every year to lecture, accept an award, or participate in a top-level international environmental gathering. France had made him a Grand Officier de l’Ordre National du Mérite and Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur, and awarded him every possible honor the nation could bestow. Monaco had inducted him into l’Ordre de Saint-Charles and made him a Commandeur ten years later. Belgium made him a member of l’Ordre de Leopold II, and Italy gave him its Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. He had been given gold medals and prizes by universities and exploration societies in ten countries, including the Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society, the United Nations International Environmental Prize, and membership in the American Academy of Sciences. Harvard, the University of California, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Ghent had granted him honorary doctorates. When Cousteau was seated on the stage at the commencement ceremonies at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the graduating seniors detoured from the prescribed path after the president awarded him his baccalaureate degree to ask Cousteau to autograph his diploma.
While Jean-Michel was keeping tabs on the society and the Mississippi expedition, Cousteau spent most of his time in Paris or La Rochelle, where his second Turbosail ship was taking shape. Pechiney and the French government maintained their support after the
Moulin à Vent
disaster because Cousteau convinced them that the real problem with the ill-fated catamaran was that it had not been built from the keel up as a windship. With some of the money from his deals with Ted Turner for the
Odyssey
reruns and the shows on the Amazon and Mississippi, he had just enough to finish his second windship. In the summer of 1985, Cousteau was ready to make good on his promise to demonstrate the revolutionary propulsion concept by sailing it across the Atlantic and making a dramatic entrance into New York Harbor.
Cousteau named his new ship
Alcyone
after the daughter of Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds. It was built of aluminum, almost twice the size of
Moulin à Vent
, 103 feet long with the wide beam of an offshore racing sailboat and a monohull bow that fared back into a catamaran stern for stability. Two 33-foot-high Turbosails, mounted on the foredeck and amidships, propelled the ship at 10 to 12 knots in a steady 25-knot crosswind. In calmer conditions, a computer-controlled diesel took over automatically to maintain speed, using only 60 to 70 percent of the fuel normally burned by a ship of
Alcyone
’s size on an Atlantic crossing.
The crossing of the Atlantic this time was without incident, though the crew quickly realized that
Alcyone
was a very uncomfortable ride because it was built so stiffly. Even in a light chop, it lurched and bucked; every one of its twelve-member crew got seasick. Its entrance into New York Harbor on June 17, 1985, was a well-choreographed celebration laid on by the Cousteau Society, Ted Turner, and the city of New York. With fireworks bursting overhead and camera crews in helicopters circling,
Alcyone
and
Calypso
sailed past the Statue of Liberty. Cousteau had boarded
Alcyone
from the pilot boat as the windship cleared Sandy Hook. Simone was aboard
Calypso
. Two reporters from Turner’s new international news network, CNN, fed live reports from the two ships. Every other news organization in America covered the arrival. Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York was on the dock to greet Cousteau and issue an official proclamation promoting him from captain to admiral. Koch then turned the microphone over to Admiral Cousteau.
“You will understand how moved I am to be received here in such a way with my old faithful ship
Calypso
and my new blond baby
Alcyone,”
he told a crowd estimated at more than ten thousand. He told them of the challenges he had encountered in building a windship and sailing it across the ocean. “Ships are like women,” he said. “Difficult to understand, but when you succeed it’s worthwhile.”
After two days of revelry and fund-raising in New York, Cousteau, Simone, Falco, Raymond Coll, and a select crew of current and former old hands sailed
Calypso
south to Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. At the White House, President Ronald Reagan presented Cousteau with the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian decoration, for having done more than any other human being to reveal the mysteries of the oceans. Among the
other recipients of the medal that year were Mother Teresa, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, and the first man to fly faster than sound, Chuck Yeager.
The following day, across the river in Mount Vernon with eight hundred guests under an enormous white tent, Cousteau celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday a few days late. Three crews patrolled the tent with handheld video cameras, mics, and lights. Standing in front of Cousteau, who was seated in a comfortable wicker chair, John Denver sang a sweet rendition of “Aye Calypso,” never breaking eye contact with the man he considered to be the greatest environmental hero in history. Ted Turner, looking like he’d arrived directly from a yacht club party in a casual summer suit, toasted Cousteau. “Happy birthday,” Turner said. “God bless you, Captain Cousteau.”
One of Cousteau’s families was there: Simone; Jean-Michel, Anne-Marie, and their children, Fabien and Céline; Philippe’s widow, Janice, and their children, Alexandra and Philippe Pierre Jacques-Yves; and Falco, Coll, and Papa Flash. When Perry Miller leaned down to embrace Cousteau in his chair, she knew they were both thinking the same thing: Philippe. She had been Cousteau’s most energetic promoter and confidant at the beginning of his television career in America and knew how deeply connected he had been to his younger son. Cousteau seemed old for the first time.
“A birthday is entirely artificial,” Cousteau said, typically banishing sentiment. “Nature doesn’t count days. Monkeys and mosquitoes don’t have birthdays.” He was looking forward to his next seventy-five years, but even if he did not live to enjoy that birthday he was content. The Cousteau Society would continue his work long after he was gone.
Three months later, after every network and newspaper in the United States and Europe covered the birthday party at Mount Vernon, WTBS and CNN broadcast the hour-long
Cousteau: The First Seventy-five Years
. It drew the highest ratings ever for a Jacques Cousteau special on the superstation.
The Amazon series began to air shortly after the birthday party. Turner was sure his instincts had not failed him when he had decided to back Cousteau four years earlier, so he launched a massive publicity
campaign. In magazine ads and endless promotional spots on all his radio and television stations, he touted the Amazon expedition as the most ambitious in history, the greatest and most difficult ever undertaken by Jacques Cousteau, the expedition of the century. The publicity surrounding the party in Mount Vernon had helped, too. Audiences soared when the first of the shows aired, with thousands of new subscribers paying to join his cable network. Turner was happy about the new business, but he also believed that Americans were living in ignorance of some harsh ecological truths and he had an obligation to bring Cousteau into their living rooms.
“If there is a mother of the environmental movement it was Rachel Carson,” Turner said. “If there is a father, it is Jacques Cousteau.”
Though the television audiences for the series were nowhere near what Cousteau had once drawn, many critics still applauded.