“A World Crammed with Treasure”: Past and Present Under the Sea
(Sunday Times , April 26, 1953)
By Ian Fleming
(Last Sunday, in an exclusive despatch to The Sunday Times, Ian Fleming told of a visit to the little island of Grand Congloué, near Marseilles, where Commandant Jacques Cousteau and his team of divers are raising the wreck of a Greek galley that foundered in about 250 B.C. Ian Fleming is now back in London and here comments on some of the questions that have been put to him.)
“I am interested in the history of trade marks…” “We are manufacturers of corks…” “Did all this happen between the First and Second Punic wars?” “What did the wine taste like?”
“What are these lizards you talk about?” “Where can I buy an aqualung?” “I am spending my holiday near Marseilles. Can you…?”
If one is a specialist it must be tantalising to read a report in the newspapers which touches one’s subject , however lightly. “Why didn’t he bring back one of those lizards?” “At least he might know how much saffron goes into bouillabaisse.” “Surely he noticed the name of the people who make those German compressors.”
I warmly sympathise and I have answered all questions as well as my capacities have allowed. I would have to be too many different people at the same time to answer them any better. I now feel very sorry for Cousteau. When I said goodbye to him aboard the Calypso, he and Madame Cousteau were working on their correspondence. They have just reached September, 1952!
As further background to this exciting story (there must be thousands of little Everests being climbed every day that one never hears of) I can only add that this Greek galley must have sailed for Massilia (Marseilles) in about 250 B.C. to sell wine and household pottery for the private profit of a rich Greek merchant adventurer. Perhaps the ship was about as big as a Thames barge, but much higher in the water, and perhaps it had one large sail.
It hugged the Côte d’Azur and sailed only by day, at between two and three knots. At night the crew probably slept on board, and they certainly drank a lot of the wine that was carried in huge jars, or amphorae, on deck. They must have drunk it with straws or pipettes inserted into holes drilled in the shoulder of the jars below the neck. I examined such a hole and it could only have been made by man.
Protective Mud
Then they hit this tiny island and the galley sank in the position you see above [graphic omitted]. There is no current here, so the mud and sand began to silt over the wreck and continued to do so through 2,200 years, protecting the upper cargo, and even more so the lower, which the divers have hardly reached, from erosion and the fingers of the sea. Except where it has been cleared by the suction pump, the mud is still about ten feet deep.
“How was the galley ever found again?” Fishermen from Marseilles kept on bringing up amphorae that had broken loose from the deck cargo, and one day Christianini, a Marseilles salvage diver, went down and found a long grey tumulus in the mud. Commander Cousteau came to hear about it and he and his divers cleared enough mud away to realise that a whole galley lay buried at the maximum depth at which skin divers could work.
Disinterested people, such as the Chamber of Commerce at Marseilles, put up funds, and Cousteau added all his private means, including his profits from his book, The Silent World, and his films and under-water photographs. Le Figaro and the National Geographic Magazine of America also came to his help, and operations started last August.
No one is making any profit out of this venture. Everything salvaged goes straight to the Musée Borely at Marseilles. And if fame were the spur the story would not have been kept almost secret for nine months.
Work will go on all through the summer and anyone who happens to be near Marseilles will find no difficulty in hiring a motor-boat to go to the island, though for safety’s sake they will not be allowed to approach very near. Since sightseers are inevitable I suggested to Cousteau that he should put a collecting box on a buoy near the island with the notice visitors to France know so well: “Pour l’entretien du chateau.”
Lonely, Queer
As for the diving itself, there is little to add to my short account except to say that going over the side into deep water, and deep water only, without rocks or sand to give you bearings and keep you company, is a lonely and queer business. The visibility has that annoying degree of opaqueness you meet motoring at dusk. You can’t quite see and yet you would see still less with your lights on.
I was not quite sure how my body would react to the depth, and, if it did react, whether I would do the right thing or make a fool of myself. Naturally I was exasperated at not being able to walk on the wreck. At a depth or about 50 feet I could just see the diver at work on the bottom.
But this was the most advanced type of under-water experience, and every other grade is available to all of us, men, women and children. On holiday this summer, round the shores of England, it will be worth going to the local carpenter and getting him to putty a pane of glass into the bottom of a two-foot square box, about one foot deep, make the whole thing watertight and cut a couple of hand holes near the top of two sides. Then all that is necessary is to walk into the sea, within, your depth, and put the box on the surface of the sea and look through it.
There, waiting for you, is a new world, crammed with treasure and beauty and excitement. From that first moment to goggles and aqualungs and sunken galleys is just turning the pages of the most exciting book that has been given to us since we learnt to fly—the book of the sea. The first instalment will cost about half-a-crown.
Notes: Fleming had met Jacques Cousteau at a party given by the publisher Hamish Hamilton, and when Cousteau invited him to visit his underwater project, Fleming eagerly agreed, though this meant being out of the UK on Casino Royale’s publication date of April 13, 1953.
John Pearson writes that “Jacques Cousteau, that lean, vital, ex-gunnery officer of the French Navy, with his cool efficiency and panda-ringed eyes, had a very special appeal for Ian Fleming. Cousteau was his sort of hero…And like all Fleming’s real-life heroes Cousteau possessed several of those vital qualities which Fleming lacked but desired. He was a man of action devoted to a cause with a wholeheartedness which Fleming had never really succeeded in bringing to anything. He was an expert and something of a scholar. He was self-sufficient.”
Before Fleming left France, Cousteau presented him with a copy of The Silent World . Referring to their first meeting, Cousteau signed it, “En souvenir d’une soirée à Londres, où il y a beaucoup été question de poissons … et d’illusions menacées.” [“In memory of an evening in London, where there was much talk of fish … and threatening illusions.”]
Fleming wrote he was “aiming to become the journalist of the underwater world,” but this never quite happened, though he certainly wrote extensively about the underwater world in his fiction. Pearson speculates that “a fortnight on the Calypso probably gave him enough experience of the rough end of underwater exploration to last him a lifetime.”
He adds: “Fleming’s experience with the expedition, and particularly the underwater swimming, gave him a chance to add to the description of Bond’s underwater swim to Mr. Big’s ship, the Secatur, in the manuscript of Live and Let Die , which was awaiting his final corrections when he got back to Victoria Square. When he left the Calypso and Marseilles he and Anne drove along the coast road to the big aquarium at Monte Carlo, where he noted some of the final details for his description of the aquarium in the same novel, along with the names of the rare fish which Mr. Big’s organization used as a front for their gold smuggling.”