Jacques Cousteau by Brad Matsen

Author:Brad Matsen [Matsen, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37827-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

The harbor at Monaco (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

Monaco itself is less than a square mile of land, bordered on three sides by France and on the fourth by the Mediterranean. Until Louis Blanc, a gambler exiled from Germany, arrived in 1872, the principality was a few narrow streets winding over a precipitous rock cliff, a fishing fleet of a dozen small boats, and a population of eight hundred people who scratched out a wretched existence under the guard of a battalion of French troops With the roulette wheel he brought with him from Bad Homburg, Blanc transformed Monte Carlo into the gambling capital of the world in less than a decade. He ensured his welcome and the continuing health of Monaco by cutting in the Grimaldi family, heirs to the throne of the principality, for 10 percent of his action, which quickly amounted to millions of francs a year.

Albert’s heir, Prince Louis, inherited the throne in 1922. He had no interest in the sea or its creatures, so the museum went into a quarter century of decline. When Prince Rainier took over in 1949, he made the resurrection of his grandfather’s vision one of the priorities of his reign, spending the next eight years rebuilding the now decrepit fortress on the cliff. In 1957, the museum was just beginning to attract not only tourists but scientists again. Rainier decided that Jacques-Yves Cousteau would be the perfect man to raise it up the next notch to its former glory as one of the world’s great centers of inquiry into the nature of the world’s oceans.

Rainier saw Cousteau as a celebrated explorer who also knew how to tell the world what he saw underwater in books and movies. He was a master fund-raiser and a great showman, traits that fit perfectly into Rainier’s dream that the museum would, like the casino at Monte Carlo, become a source of revenue for the tiny principality as well as contributing to scientific knowledge of the ocean. The prince envisioned it becoming a self-sustaining aquarium, featuring creatures from the Mediterranean, in particular the dolphins that had so moved him in The Silent World.

Cousteau told the prince that exhibiting live dolphins in an aquarium had been a dream of his since his first expeditions aboard Calypso. He found out that American marine parks captured dolphins by lassoing them, and put his research group to work figuring out how to do it. They mounted a platform on the front of one of their launches, where Falco stood with a rope and a long pole to place the noose over the animal riding the bow wave. It didn’t work. Falco killed a few dolphins before giving up. Cousteau then realized that the kind of dolphin the Americans captured with lassos was the bottle-nosed dolphin, a much more robust animal than the common dolphin in the Mediterranean, which was lighter and more delicate. Falco tried anesthetizing the dolphins with curare before lassoing them. More dolphins died.

Finally, Falco got a line

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