JACQUES-YVES Cousteau was indeed, as Des Brannigan so appropriately remarked (The Irish Times, June 26th), proud of the Irish element in his ancestry. He was a true giant among the innumerable monsters with raucous voices, no hearts and clay feet who are passed off as great men in this most blood-stained of a ny century in human history.
I had the extreme good fortune to be invited some 15 years ago to go on a lecture tour with Cousteau around the ports of Algeria. In the course of that tour I got to know not only of his affection for our country and his conviction that we should and could turn our island situation to our own ad vantage and that of mankind, but also of the vastness of his vision, the depth of his anxiety for the future of mankind and the strength of his determination to help us remove the causes of that anxiety. No man has ever so completely embodied the truth of Thomas Aquinas's famous dictum that the sea unites peoples that land divides.
Cousteau was an officer of the French navy, the record of which in the 1939 war was irreproachable, if often truly tragic. But to Algerians the French navy was part of the machine that had kept them in abject servitude for many generations and treated them with grim harshness when they revolted. Indeed, in many visits to many regions of Algeria I had, before my tour with Cousteau, heard (save from the mouths of two remarkable early collaborators of President Boumediene who saw in the true spirit of France humanity at its finest), though listening with all my might, only three names of Frenchmen pronounced with respect. These were de Gaulle for having recognised Algeria's right to freedom; and two with unexpected names: MacMahon, who as Governor under Napoleon III had restrained for a time the greed of land-grabbing European immigrants, and the remarkable scholar, cartographer, engineer and anti-militarist, the Yminenee grise du Sahara", Oscar MacCarthy.
But in Algiers, in Bou Ismael at the Marine Academy, in Oran, wherever we went, Algerians filled the streets to cheer Cousteau, packed his meetings to suffocation, engaged him afterwards in rapturous conversation after them, and cheered him from the depth of their being. Why?
Because, willing up from the depth of his being, he was able to give them such an Elysian vision of a world that might be - if they and their counterparts in the other lands of this globe that is 71 per cent sea would cherish the seas as the source of life, as the link between cultures, the inspiration of musicians, artists and writers, a mysterious, intriguing storehouse of infinite energy and riches, which, if treated with respect, protected from pollution and studied and valued, is beyond question the greatest resource for good that mankind has had the fortune to inherit.
Cousteau, through his films, his lectures, his broadcasts, his writings, his life, has left to all of us that Elysian vision. Fate will not forgive us if we ignore it.