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Fear on the Reef. Cousteau could scarcely wait for the war to end to develop his new discovery. He sold the French navy on the virtues of the Aqua-Lung, soon got leave for government-backed oceanographic work on the 360-ton Calypso, a converted minesweeper from the British Royal Navy. Aboard the Calypso, Cousteau gathered the material and shot the films that were to bring sudden fame to diving and himself. The Silent World, written originally in English, was published in the U.S. in 1953, sold more than 486,000 copies (worldwide sale: 5,000,000). His 86-minute color film of the same name won the Grand Prix at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, and an Academy Award in 1957.
As his horizons expanded, the naturalist in Cousteau soon became disgusted with spearfishing, and he gave it up ("We have a tremendous responsibility to nature"). He noted that the fish quickly became wary of the spearfisherman. "An atmosphere builds up in a reef that is understood by the younger fish," says Cousteau. ''The fish learn to avoid the man with the gun. The longer the gun, the farther away the fish keep."
Web & Wine. For new sport, Cousteau turned to prowling about the skeletons of ships on the ocean floor. Unless the ship is ancient, he has no interest in salvaging anything. He just wants to look: "I am absolutely enraptured by the atmosphere of a wreck. A dead ship is the house of a tremendous amount of life—fish and plants. The mixture of life and death is mysterious, even religious. There is the same sense of peace and mood that you feel on entering a cathedral.''
His greatest find is a 1,000-ton Roman freighter owned by one Marcus Sestius, which sank in 140 ft. of water ten miles off Marseille about 205 B.C.-the oldest seagoing vessel ever found. It had a cargo of 10,000 amphorae filled with Greek and Roman wine, and a great store of black dinnerware of untold value to modern archaeologists.
In recent years Cousteau has put himself more and more at the service of science. He resigned from the navy in 1956 with the rank of capitaine des corvettes, now sits at the center of a bewildering web of profitmaking, nonprofit and governmental enterprises. He is director of Monaco's first-rate Museum of Oceanography, founded in 1910 by Prince Albert I of Monaco, the great-grandfather of Free Diver Prince Rainier. Cousteau is also head of France's Underwater Research Center. He is backed in part by the French government, and in part by Washington, D.C.'s National Geographic Society, takes up the slack with profits from his business firms. In addition to controlling the Aqua-Lung patents, he runs on the side a film company, dubbed Associated Sharks as his own wry commentary on the ethics of the trade. Even so. Cousteau's wife has sold many a belonging to hold the spider web together for the sake of science.