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Cousteau has been traveling ever since. His father, Daniel P. Cousteau, is a witty, urbane lawyer whose job consisted in being factotum and traveling companion to a pair of itinerant U.S. millionaires. The first was James Hazen Hyde, high-living son of the founder of Equitable Life Assurance Society. Back in 1905, as an Equitable vice president, Hyde had given a $200,000 costume party in Manhattan that put the whole insurance business under outraged public scrutiny, brought on an investigation by the New York State legislature. In anger, Hyde sold his stock, huffed off to self-exile in Europe with Cousteau père as company. "One day I argued with him," says Father Cousteau. He soon found another U.S. client: Carpet Millionaire Eugene Higgins, famed as New York's most eligible bachelor. The athletic Higgins demanded that Cousteau match him in tennis, golf and swimming, once blithely entered him in a chess match with the Polish champion.
Panting around the world in father's wake, the Cousteau family covered so much ground that Jacques's earliest memory is of a tossing train hammock. At the age of ten, Jacques spent a year in a Manhattan apartment on the corner of 95th Street and Broadway. He and his older brother Pierre played stickhall in the streets, gained local fame by introducing two-wheeler European roller skates, and went to summer camp in Vermont.
A Theory Proved. Against all odds, young Cousteau became a powerful swimmer. For six years he suffered from chronic enteritis; in his early teens he contracted anemia, and doctors advised him to avoid all strenuous activity. He also developed a technical flair that produced a three-foot, battery-powered automobile and home movies at the age of 13. But studies were a bore until Jacques, a sophomore in a French lycée, found a novel use for his school. Demonstrating his theory that a strongly thrown stone makes only a small hole in glass, he broke 17 of the building's windows.
Expelled in disgrace. Cousteau was shipped to a rigorous pension in Alsace ruled by a former German schoolteacher. The change was instantaneous. Under challenge and discipline, Cousteau turned scholar. He easily passed the tough exams for the naval academy, where he graduated second in his class ("I even studied with a flashlight in bed"). He set out to learn how to fly, had soloed and was about to graduate from the navy's air academy when he borrowed his father's Salmson sports car to go to a wedding. Rounding a curve, the headlights suddenly flickered out. When Cousteau crawled from the wreck, his left arm was broken in five places, his right was paralyzed. The doctors wanted to amputate his left arm. "I refused, thank God," says Cousteau. "You are always owner of your body."
A Jungle Discovered. To recuperate, Ensign Cousteau was assigned to shore duty at Toulon, spent hours working strength back into his arms by swimming in the Mediterranean. There in 1936 a fellow naval officer named Philippe Tailliez gave him a pair of goggles used by pearl fishermen. Cousteau put his head beneath the surface. Instantly his life was changed: "There was wildlife, untouched, a jungle at the border of the sea, never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof."