The Explorer: Jacques Cousteau’s Association with Nature Often Masks his Interest in Civilization

From Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set

The final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey begins not in the sea but in the sky. Sideways, we soar though the clouds, glimpsing a solitary island below, far into the Pacific. As always, we hold our breath in anticipation. A couple of years before “Clipperton: The Island Time Forgot” first aired, Jacques Cousteau gave his son and trusty costar Philippe a PBY seaplane named Flying Calypso, after Cousteau’s famous boat, Calypso. It was a fatherly gesture to a son who lived in his father’s shadow. The plane was meant to distinguish Philippe, whose true love was flight.

Eventually, we land. A menacing army of poisonous crabs mans the shoreline. The camera pans to a couple of rusted shipwrecks and some abandoned shacks, which are now perches for some booby birds. “Human beings have come and gone, leaving mute evidence of their troubled presence,” the narrator intones. This is what the remote island has to offer: some intimidating crabs, a flock of booby birds, the wreckage of failed attempts at civilization. In the final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey, the story of man and the story of nature will intertwine; melancholy, futile, but beautiful all the same.

Then, music! That triumphant theme song that trumpets, WE ARE ALL GOING ON AN ADVENTURE AND IT’S GOING TO RULE! Dah dah dah dah daaah! That music represents everything the whole world loves about Jacques Cousteau. It’s what we will blast on June 10, when we all grab a bottle of champagne and toast Jacques Cousteau on what would have been his 100th birthday.

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