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  The crew waited for another patch of rough weather to pass before hauling the vertical cylinder out of the water and laying it on the deck of Sea Diver, as they had when Link was inside. After the twelve-hour pause Sténuit was eased closer to sea level pressure by about ten feet every few hours. There also had to be a methodical increase in the amount of oxygen in the breathing mix to compensate for the decreasing gas concentration as the pressure gradually dropped. The cylinder’s oxygen level had been kept at just 3 percent while Sténuit was at seven atmospheres, but the laws of nature gave that 3 percent a seven-fold boost, thereby creating a healthy sea level equivalent of about 21 percent oxygen. There was some wiggle room, but too little or too much oxygen could spell trouble, and ultimately death.

  At twenty minutes past six o’clock on a Monday morning, September 10, Sténuit finally ended his pressurized confinement after a grand total of three full days, twenty hours, and thirty minutes. For almost twenty-six of those hours he was at a depth of two hundred feet, followed by the sixty-six hours it took to reel in the cylinder and ease him back to the benign pressure at sea level. A decompression lasting more than twice as long as a diver’s time on the bottom was not the way saturation diving was supposed to work, but this was an experiment. Even if Sténuit stayed only a day, it was fair to say, as Link and his team did, that he had become the first man to live in the sea. A year earlier, of course, in May 1961, Alan Shepard had made the first space flight, a suborbital trip that lasted just fifteen minutes—and he was hailed as the first American astronaut. The Russians had put the first man in space a month earlier than that when Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth on April 12—a considerably greater achievement than the Shepard flight. Both trips were indelibly etched in history.

  Link’s friend and admirer John Godley, the third Baron Kilbracken, had been on board Sea Diver to witness the cylinder dives and wrote about them for National Geographic. The issue in which the article appeared—spread across fourteen pages with color pictures—wasn’t published until eight months later. But it said that Sténuit’s dive “would be an advance as complete—and as important in its own way—as the orbits of the spacemen.” Lord Kilbracken declared: “There can be no doubt whatever that Robert Sténuit’s dive was an outstanding achievement” and “an immense step forward.”

  This belated assessment was perhaps compensation for the meager story that appeared in the back pages of The New York Times the day after the cylinder was raised—two noncommittal paragraphs under a small headline: “Diver Up After 34 Hours.” No mention of immense steps forward, nor of an inner space advance to rival those in outer space. This would not be the last time that barrier-breaking dives received barely a drop of ink in the newspapers. The quest to live in the sea may not have been the space race, but it did have Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and the benefit of being the world’s first celebrity diver could be seen in the finer treatment of a story about Cousteau’s impending experiment on the very same page of the Times. Accompanied by a picture of the undersea explorer’s familiar face and a catchy headline—“Two Frenchmen to Spend Week Living in House on Floor of Sea”—the article dwarfed the Link story. It also made Cousteau’s venture sound much more impressive.

  Cousteau’s prototype was not exactly a house, and one of his divers lightheartedly dubbed it Diogenes after the truth-seeking Greek philosopher who was said to live in a tub. The dwelling was set up in a protected cove near the island of Pomègues, a strand of jagged, glittering limestone a short boat ride from the sprawling harbor at Marseille, where Cousteau’s research group had its headquarters. It was a steel chamber shaped like a stout railway tank car, as envisioned when Cousteau had considered collaborating with Link. Seventeen feet long and eight feet wide, it was certainly roomier than Link’s cylinder. And instead of hanging vertically from the surface like an elevator it would be positioned horizontally, more like a house, and held in place by thirty-four tons of pig iron that hung in ungainly clumps from four heavy chains affixed along each side of the tank. With the habitat adequately pressurized, the sea would stop at the circular opening in the floor, just as it did at the bottom of Link’s cylinder. But this “house on floor of sea,” while it might appear to be a big advance, was really more about spectacle than science, as Link saw it.

  Thirty-three feet, or two atmospheres, the planned depth for Cousteau’s house, had long been considered the safe depth for a dive that would require no decompression stops, regardless of bottom time. Down to thirty-three feet, a diver could stay as long as he liked and swim straight back to the surface without getting bent. Such “no-decompression” dives, often called “no-D” dives for short, could also be made to greater depths, but you had to be careful not to exceed strict time limits. You could dive to sixty feet for sixty minutes, for example, or to ninety feet for a half-hour, and then come straight back to the surface without paying any decompression penalty. But from the surface down to about thirty-three feet, there was theoretically no time limit.

  Cousteau and his team were being intentionally prudent, reducing the risk of a widely publicized disaster that would besmirch the nascent reputation of saturation diving. Cousteau’s divers would also breathe ordinary compressed air, a much simpler approach than mixing helium and oxygen. At thirty-three feet they would be far too shallow to have to worry about l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs—nitrogen narcosis. While the project might not yield major scientific breakthroughs, Cousteau could nonetheless put on a good show by spotlighting duration, if not depth.

  Sixty people, including fifteen support divers, would set up and maintain Diogenes, and Cousteau picked two favorites from his team to be his leading men. They were Albert Falco, thirty-five and swarthy, and Claude Wesly, who was stocky like Falco, but a few years younger, with sandy hair and a more effusive personality. They were good friends and Cousteau sensed that they would make compatible undersea roommates.

  Cousteau’s project was known in English as Conshelf One, short for Continental Shelf Station Number One, or Opération Pré-Continent No. 1. The operation began shortly after noon on September 14, just a few days after Link had ended his experiment at Villefranche—timing that seemed to lend credence to Link’s suspicions about why Cousteau had dropped out of Man-in-Sea. A hundred miles to the west of where Link had placed his cylinder, Falco and Wesly climbed up a ladder through the liquid looking glass in the belly of Diogenes, which hovered about seven feet over the Mediterranean seabed. Compressed air, water, and power were piped in from the Calypso and Espadon, Cousteau’s smaller boat. A command center with backup systems was set up on Pomègues where Cousteau and other observers, including members of the press, could watch the unfolding drama live on closed-circuit TV.

  Once settled inside Diogenes, Falco and Wesly were free to don their Aqualungs and jump through the open hatch into the sea. They didn’t quite reach the goal of spending a total of five hours a day in the water, but they did put in a lot more time than Robert Sténuit. The two divers performed some perfunctory tasks, such as assembling patterned cubes as part of a psycho-technical test. They pieced together cement block fish houses and set up what Cousteau called a “fish corral”—basically a tent made of netting. The two divers also poked around a shipwreck discovered nearby. On a few occasions they swam down to eighty feet, a depth that, according to standard dive principles, should be safely within reach of their base at thirty-three feet. Back in the habitat, Falco and Wesly could take hot freshwater showers. To while away the hours inside their habitat, the two divers had a radio and television on the cluttered shelves over their sleeping cots. Wesly, a violinist, enjoyed listening to Bach and Vivaldi. Falco passed time by building a model ship. Two coffinsized pressure chambers were also built in, opposite the cots, although at this depth there would presumably be no emergency need for them.

  The Espadon chef sent down the main meals, some with regal sauces and pastries. The two divers were ravenous but by the third day suffered nasty bouts of gastritis and upset stomachs. They e
ased off the grains, animal fat, and milk in favor of more readily digestible dishes. Cousteau brought caviar and a bottle of Bordeaux on one of his visits. Doctors came down for several hours each day to observe the divers and do checkups. Cousteau even had a dentist and a barber drop in. At times it got so busy that Falco and Wesly just wanted to be left alone. Omnipresent photographers and the filmmaking crew added to the commotion. It was like a movie set, thirty-three feet down.

  On the seventh day, September 21, Falco and Wesly were set to return to the surface. Although no decompression stops should be needed, Cousteau’s doctors agreed on a precautionary schedule intended to hasten the release of whatever minimal amount of nitrogen had seeped into their tissues. So the divers each put on a mask and lounged on their cots for a couple of hours while breathing an oxygen-rich gas mix. By one-thirty that afternoon, on a calm and clear day, Falco and Wesly took a final plunge through the looking glass and then swam to the surface. Cousteau’s chief doctor kept an eye on them for two days afterward. As hoped, neither diver showed any signs of bends or other illness.

  Link privately remained adamant that Conshelf One proved little more than that man could live in a swimming pool, but it did make a good week-long show. Marion, Link’s journalist wife, lamented that Cousteau’s “exhibition,” as she called it, had thoroughly eclipsed their worthy Man-in-Sea project in the newspapers. Cousteau would acknowledge that Conshelf One was an experiment more logistical than physiological, and a timid one at that. But the following year in The Living Sea, his first book since The Silent World, he proclaimed that his divers were “the first men to occupy the continental shelf without surfacing for a significant period of time.” Falco and Wesly, too, took pride in being the world’s first human sea dwellers, even if theirs was a shallow venture. As Wesly saw it, Robert Sténuit’s dive, although much deeper, was simply too short to be considered a true example of living in the sea.

  One team had depth, one had duration. Whatever each may have lacked, George Bond could hardly have picked better preachers for the gospel of undersea living. A month later, Cousteau and Link were both in London spreading the word at the Second World Congress of Underwater Activities, a landmark gathering of diving specialists and dignitaries. Ed Link, one of two dozen featured speakers, paid brief tribute to Bond, Dr. Workman, and their animal experiments as he told of his eight hours at sixty feet in the cylinder. Mostly Link heralded Sténuit’s record dive—he didn’t hesitate to use the word “record”—of twenty-six hours at two hundred feet. Sténuit was in the audience and Link had him stand up, just to let everyone see that the dark-haired, lanky Belgian was indeed “a healthy specimen” and none the worse for his record number of hours under pressure and under the sea. Within a matter of months, Link said, he would push further into the depths with another long-duration dive, this time to an astonishing four hundred feet, a depth rarely attained for a few minutes, never mind days.

  While Ed Link made quite a splash, Cousteau had opened the prestigious conference with a flamboyant keynote speech in which he waxed poetic more than scientific about Falco and Wesly’s recent undersea experience and about the prospects for a manned undersea future. The celebrity diver announced that his team was already planning to build an undersea “village” that should be ready by the following year. He never mentioned saturation diving, or the target depth of his planned village, but fired the imagination of his appreciative audience by predicting the coming of a new kind of man, a surgically altered, deep-swimming underwater breed he called “Homo aquaticus.” Homo aquaticus! American news services earnestly reported Cousteau’s divination. JYC’s friend and scribe Jimmy Dugan breathed further life into this hypothetical species with an article in The New York Times Magazine.

  At the dawn of the 1960s, the mushrooming nexus of high technology and hubris held boundless potential. Man had lately split the atom, broken the sound barrier and the four-minute mile; he had produced the revolutionary transistor, cracked the DNA code, and was on his way to the moon. Living in the deep sea, on the continental shelves of inner space and deeper still, should be well within reach.

  6

  EXPERIMENTAL DIVERS

  In the fall of 1962, as Jacques Cousteau and Ed Link made their bold pronouncements in London, George Bond was getting ready for a new phase of Genesis. The combined effect of Link’s prodding of Navy brass, the favorable outcomes of Man-in-Sea, and Cousteau’s showy Conshelf One no doubt helped set the stage as Bond sought the necessary seals of approval to experiment further with saturation diving. Experimenting on animals had been one thing, but now he wanted to run tests with human subjects. For that he would ultimately need approval from the secretary of the navy. The fact that he got it was a tribute to his own persistent sermonizing, because along the way Bond befriended some influential supporters, perhaps none more important to his cause than Dr. James Wakelin, the Navy’s first assistant secretary for research and development.

  The Navy created the administrative post in 1959 and it gave Wakelin wide authority over R&D programs. A naval officer during World War II, Wakelin earned a doctorate in physics from Yale and then spent a decade in business before President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him to the new Navy post. Wakelin soon developed a reputation as an advocate for expanding the Navy’s oceanographic research, and he was troubled by the technical limitations that prevented man from delving very deeply into the sea. Wakelin was among Ed Link’s friends in high places and very likely had a hand in getting Link the Navy assistance he wanted for Man-in-Sea. How Bond managed to meet the secretary is unclear—he once recalled getting a visit from Wakelin at New London—but the two men developed enough of a rapport that Bond became a welcome visitor at the secretary’s Pentagon office. In addition to their mutual marine interests, they were personally compatible. Wakelin, like Bond, was an affable sort—one aide fondly called him “Gentleman Jim.” Because of Wakelin’s top role in setting R&D priorities, his support for Bond’s proposed human experimentation was critical, probably even decisive.

  Bond arranged to run a first human test called Genesis C—the major animal phases had been called Genesis A and B. The test would have been run at the New London lab but Bond was awaiting the installation of a suitable new chamber, so the experiment moved south to the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda. NMRI was part of the sprawling Naval Medical Center, its landmark headquarters a lone skyscraper in the Maryland countryside. President Franklin Roosevelt had chosen the home of the new medical center when the land was no more than a cabbage patch on a run-down farm, but the president was moved by the presence of a lovely spring-fed pond. It reminded him of the pool of Bethesda, a place of healing in the Gospel of John. Now Bond would come to Bethesda with Genesis and his diving gospel. Upon seeing the chamber, however, Bond thought it looked neglected and unworthy of the elegant breakthrough in biological science he was hopeful would take place.

  For this first human test, Bond and Mazzone intended to make themselves two of the guinea pigs, but the Navy didn’t want the principal supervisors doubling as test subjects. Dr. Workman was away in California as an observer at another experimental dive so to free up Bond and Mazzone, Bob Barth and others familiar with Genesis eagerly volunteered. For a test as risky as this one, participation had to be voluntary. Barth’s stint as goat herder had stoked his interest in Bond’s concept of saturation diving. Furthermore, he had come to trust and admire Commander Bond in a way that made him willing to be locked into a test chamber for six days over the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Barth’s embrace of Genesis was also shaped by the diving games he played growing up in Manila, during the peaceful twilight before the Second World War.

  Barth was an only child, the son of an Army officer. His parents divorced when he was young and Barth spent much of his itinerant youth with his mother, who managed an American shoe store in Manila, and his stepfather, a businessman. Through the age of eleven, when Barth wasn’t poolside at the Army and Navy Club, swiping peanuts off the grow
n-ups’ tables, his playground was the Philippine shoreline. The boys who lived around the bay were strong swimmers, a natural by-product of their island upbringing. One day Barth and another Army brat got hold of a gas mask and tried to fashion it into a makeshift diving rig. They climbed down the ladder at the deep end of the club pool, then continued their underwater antics at the officers’ boat landing, within sight of Pan Am Clipper flying boats arriving from the Orient, skimming onto Manila Bay.

  The mask and breathing tubes Barth and his pals used looked something like the gear that Leonardo da Vinci once sketched. As the boys dived, breathing surface air through their hose, they wondered why the simple act of inhaling and exhaling would become so laborious, even just a couple of feet below the surface. Years later, in dive school, Barth would remember his youthful hose-diving experience and immediately understood what was meant by lung squeeze. The year Barth turned seventeen he was living with his mother and stepfather in Durban, South Africa, and he wanted to get back to the States. He found himself a berth on a ship called the Westward Ho. He was taken on as an ordinary seaman, the lowest rank for the unskilled sailor, and worked his way back to the United States to join the Navy. More recently, besides getting his diver’s training, he had served on submarines before taking his shore duty at the escape training tank.