Jacques-Yves Cousteau has rather receded from public notice in this century, but in the twentieth century and up until his death in 1994, he was the king of the ocean explorers. His documentaries were a staple on television. Together with his son Philippe, he sailed his yacht, Calypso, from sea to sea and from pole to pole.
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau ran from 1966 until 1987. It’s still available on DVD, but it hasn’t been digitized for streaming. Only one of his original productions that I can find has been preserved in that format, a precis of his Antarctic expedition, Voyage to the Edge of the World.
As it happens, my favorite section of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is the voyage to the South Pole. It’s nearly pure speculation, as in the 1860s, no explorer had yet managed to reach the pole. That would have to wait another half-century, for Roald Amundsen’s expedition. Verne knew of the Great Ice Barrier or Ross Ice Shelf, which barred the way to shipping—but his Captain Nemo had a solution to that: his submarine, the Nautilus.
Captain Nemo and the book’s narrator, Professor Aronnax, venture to sail beneath the great wall of ice. On the other side they find open water, but it’s a harrowing journey and they’re nearly fatally trapped inside an ice cave on the way out. It’s only through hard labor that the ship and its crew are able to break free.
On the way in, Aronnax notes tremendous numbers of mammals and birds, including seals, various species of whales, and penguins. He also mentions auks and walruses, which are not found in the Antarctic. The closest thing to either around the South Pole are penguins and elephant seals.
The Pole itself is a volcanic wasteland, and the sea—unlike the land and sky—is nearly empty. There Verne’s imagination failed, because as Cousteau says with a kind of giddy delight, “The southern polar waters are the richest of the world’s oceans.” The surface is stark and bare and barren, but the ocean is absolutely bursting with life, some of it downright alien. It’s taken modern technology, with submarines and submersibles that Verne could only dream of, to discover the incredible quantity and variety of life in these icy waters.
The icefish, for example, which has no hemoglobin in its blood. What flows through its veins is clear, almost like natural antifreeze. It thrives in water just this side of freezing.
Underwater explorations yield more wonderful weirdness. There’s a kind of jelly shaped like a bell that swings in the current, and gigantic many-armed starfish, and beautiful translucent squid (filmed alive for the first time), and a long-legged crab like a huge spider. And then there’s the stuff of nightmares: a six-foot wormlike creature that is nearly all digestive tract, covered in venomous cells that paralyze shrimp and draw them into its mouth.
Even while he celebrates the richness of life in Antarctic waters, Cousteau mourns the destruction of whale species by human predation. In 1975 when he mounted his expedition, the population of the humpback hovered around 6% of its numbers in the previous century. He was thrilled almost beyond words to encounter a mother and her calf at the beginning of the voyage, and to film them together until they vanished into the ocean. They were the only humpbacks he encountered, though he saw other species including the orca, or so-called killer whale.
Cousteau is a fan of the killer whale, which is misnamed, he says. It travels in family groups led by a big male, with several females and their young. It’s a social animal, and quite intelligent; while it is a powerful predator, the most powerful of the seas, it’s not a random killer. It feeds on fish and squid, and the occasional seal.
The over-hunting of whales had, at the time of the expedition, led to an oversupply of the creatures on which the whales had fed, notably the tiny red shrimp called krill. Other species moved in to fill the niche, notably starfish, which he calls “less interesting forms of life.” Cousteau deplores this waste of resources, as he sees it.
With the help of a naturalist, Dr. Raymond Duguy, Cousteau and his crew constructed a memorial to the whale on the beach where whalers brought their catch to be butchered. It “presents a vision out of Dante,” he says, “an appalling ossuary.” They put together a macabre jigsaw puzzle of gigantic wind-scoured bones of a blue whale. The head alone weighed eight hundred pounds, and the beak was fifteen feet long. They left it there, all ninety feet of it, as a monument to a species that had nearly been hunted to extinction.
Other species at that time not only survived but thrived. We see huge colonies of penguins leaping like porpoises through the water and swarming toward their summer breeding grounds. Males first, Cousteau notes, seeking out their nesting spots and raising their voices to call the females, with whom they essentially mate for life. These, after an eight-month separation, come flocking to their mates for a passionate reunion, multiple varieties gathering together to incubate their eggs and raise their young. Male and females share nesting duties, taking turns hunting for fish and shrimp to feed their offspring.
Skuas, large and aggressive gull-like birds, nest nearby and prey on penguin eggs and babies. Seals go for the adults as they head for the water, not always successfully—one of Cousteau’s crew chases one off before it can enjoy a dinner of fresh penguin.
I love penguins, and I think Cousteau does, too. He spends quite a bit of time with them. As funny and cute as they are on land, photobombing the whale memorial and following the humans around and belly-sledding along the ice, they’re amazing in the water. They’re fast, agile, and their little arms turn into powerful oars that propel them through the sea and carry them up and over the breakers onto the shore.
Although the leopard seal doesn’t get his penguin, his relatives gather en masse in the sea and demonstrate their prowess on the ice: digging circular holes through six feet of ice and slipping gracefully down into a strange and beautiful underwater world. Divers from the crew, led by Philippe, open up one of their holes and head down a thousand feet into the realm of the seal.
It’s no little bit terrifying, with its roof of ice and its few small openings into the air. A seal can stay down there for an hour, tracking by sonar; the sea is full of their songs. It’s amazing that they not only can find their way in the dark, but know exactly where their exits are.
Cousteau speculates that they must not be comfortable in that world, but I wonder. After all, they’re made for it; it’s their natural habitat. On land they’re slow and rather clumsy. In water they’re transformed: fast, sleek, powerful.
Watching Cousteau’s footage, I can see where the legends of the selkie come from. The huge soft eyes, the rotund, supple bodies lolling on land and skimming through the water. There’s an almost human quality in them, and yet they’re alien, with powers and capabilities that humans can only approximate with technology.
I think Verne would have loved Cousteau’s discoveries and been enthralled by his technology, especially the helicopter that allows the team to scout ahead of the ship. Much of the documentary seems to me to reflect Verne’s chapter, enlarging on his descriptions of the life above the surface and revealing a whole new world below it. Verne’s imagination came remarkably close to the truth, with the knowledge he had at the time, and his sense of wonder finds a clear echo in Cousteau and his crew.