Techniques & Culture Revue semestrielle d’anthropologie des techniques Suppléments au n°75

Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor Tout peut-il plonger ? Plonger au-delà de la métaphore

Damien A. Bright and Roy Kimmey

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/tc/15034 ISSN: 1952-420X

Publisher Éditions de l’EHESS

Electronic reference Damien A. Bright and Roy Kimmey, “Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor”, Techniques & Culture [Online], Suppléments au n°75, Online since 08 June 2021, connection on 17 June 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/tc/15034

This text was automatically generated on 17 June 2021.

Tous droits réservés Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor 1

Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor Tout peut-il plonger ? Plonger au-delà de la métaphore

Damien A. Bright and Roy Kimmey

For their constructive editorial guidance and engagement, we thank Stéphane Rennesson and Annabel Vallard. We greatly benefited from the contributions of two anonymous reviewers, as well as provocations from Helen Abbott, Diégo Antolinos-Basso, Cameron Hu, Max Holleran, William Mazzarella, Sue Reid, Marianna Szczygielska, and Tara Zahra. Gone are the days when we looked like phenomena, supermen. Now commonplace, diving is accessible to all. So many amateurs have taken it up, so many professionals, that we can say it is less dangerous, far less dangerous than we thought. As long as you know the laws and, of course, follow them. Frédéric Dumas, Angoisses dans la mer (1978) The short film Ten Fathoms Deep (1952) goes like this: a German U-boat spots a freighter, dives, launches a torpedo, and scores a direct hit. The SS Radames becomes a wreck. Fade to black. In full sun, a slight man swaps words with two others. His face drips mirth and his hair shines wet. Here is Jacques-Yves Cousteau, with Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas. At dock, they unload two torso-sized frames that bear three gas tanks topped with gauges, hoses, and straps. They load a camera into a metal case on a wooden arm and fill it with gas. Two don goggles, flippers, shoulder the gas contraptions, and jump into the water. One disappears behind the camera to film the other, who glides among barnacles, algae, and schools of fish, then through a sunken ship by way of openings both intended and fortuitous. sifts the wreckage and retrieves an ewer with Grecian lines. Throughout, bubbles stream from his head, enveloping neck and shoulders. Diver, camera, and water move in unison; the dock is a world away.

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1 In eight and a half minutes, Ten Fathoms Deep introduces a new diving technics, the Aqualung, as a heroic journey of transformation. The activity seems puzzling: a willing departure from the terrestrial condition, the body given over to technics as a disorienting milieu inundates the senses. And yet, the dive leads to a recognizable achievement: the resurfacing of something brimming with value to a community above. This picture of diving predates the Aqualung, remains familiar, and carries over into metaphorical use. A person dives into something mysterious in order to fathom its depths, the better to resurface intact and bearing new insights. This metaphor circulates in everyday speech and learned inquiry as a vibrant confrontation with a text, an archive, a field site, or the living world—as in the French expression “plonger dans le vif du sujet” (to dive into the heart of the matter). To dive is to extend the human reach beyond its present domain of knowledge and action.

2 As two landbound social scientists, we are struck by the power and pervasiveness of diving as metaphor. We wonder how much it gets at the dive’s practical exigencies: psychic attunement, the toll on the body, and effects on social life and the deep itself. Through two cases, we show how diving technics are foundational to the project of industrial modernity in its drive to recruit and manage the collective imagination, human physiology, and the earth’s . What makes possible? What are its uses? How do changes in diving technics interrupt or sustain its promise of recovery and discovery? What does the development of such technics tell us about the way industrial modernity knows and acts upon a finite world?

3 We track correspondences between mass media, industrial design, human biology, physical , and histories of violent world-making (Taussig 1993). First, we examine Cousteau’s “invention” of underwater cinema, , and recreation. We query the heralding of the Aqualung in the postwar Euro-American living room (Section I) then turn to its technics (Section II) to understand the world historical proposition it contained: the domestication of the ocean floor by a new kind of human, homo aquaticus (Section III). Second, we describe helmet diving, whose tethered relationship with the surface the Aqualung was designed to sever. Helmet diving dramatizes the inescapable problem of in the dive (Section IV). By situating helmet diving in Australia’s pearling industry at the turn of the 20th century, we show how pressure—atmospheric, economic, and racial—governs life, death, and profit at the colonial frontier (Section V). We juxtapose these two cases to discern the tethers that connect helmet diving to the Aqualung, divers to the surface, and fantasies of free movement to that span water and land.

4 Diving as metaphor tells us why we should dive but little of its repercussions or limits. We contend that diving in its industrialized form offers freedom of movement for some but always works through tethers, pressures, and confinement for all. We must feel these forces to reckon with the way diving technics saturates our present and presages a future in which social life strains at ever greater depths (Masco 2021). Rather than demystify the dive or the deep, we seek to extend the descriptive repertoire with which to think and feel the pull of this “beyond” on social life (Bryld & Lykke 1999).

Diving enters the living room

From the wreck of the Second World War, the Aqualung led a double life, at sea and in picture. Wartime newsreels of Navy “frogmen” provided a prototype for Cousteau’s

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experimental films and a culture industry in need of new adventure. One film—edited and repackaged as Épaves (1943), Danger Under the Sea (1951), and Ten Fathoms Deep (1952)—shows how the Aqualung travelled from the cinema of occupied and liberated Paris to the living room of 1950s America.

5 Ten Fathoms Deep was a montage. Castle Films, a leader in the 8mm and 16mm US home movie market, advertised this “thrilling adventure movie of daring men, equipped with the Aqua-lung” as an “ideal” Christmas gift in 1952 alongside family titles such as Alice in Wonderland. Its U-Boat shots are from newsreels, long the company’s stock-in-trade. The rest is an edit of Épaves, Cousteau’s 35mm short feature screened as a silent film in 1943 and rereleased with voiceover and full score in 1945. Universal-International, Castle Films’ parent company, acquired US distribution rights for Épaves in 1951 and promptly released it as Danger Under the Sea, earning an Oscar nomination.

6 In one sense, these three titles are the same film, altered in translation and editing (figs. 1a & 1b). They record the first open water tests of the Aqualung as exploratory vehicle and cinematic subject. In other senses—narratively, historically, and in format —they differ markedly. Épaves makes no mention of war within the frame because it is the unspoken backdrop to this passion project of equal part art, science, engineering, and reconnaissance. The film is a lyrical attempt to escape the occupation under which it came to life. Thus the narrative mirrors its creation: the team hoarded filmstock despite rationing in Marseilles and Toulon, and Cousteau carried papers from the Museum of Natural History in Paris presenting him as a marine biologist mad about sponges (Leaney 1997, Dugan 2004 [1948]).

Figure 1a. 1945 poster for Épaves

The poster has Dumas descending with the fish, arms spread winglike, before a sunken ship’s wheel. This pose became the logo for La Spirotechnique. © LAPI / Roger-Viollet, 1945

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Figure 1b. 1952 package of 8mm home movie Ten Fathoms Deep

The 8mm package is a picture-in-picture portrayal of the nuclear family delighting at the drama of cinema, in which the diver is but one player. © D. Bright

7 By contrast, Ten Fathoms Deep unfolds with dramatic efficiency. War is a plot device for launching the divers and their contraption on an adventure of recovery. Thus, the home movie and its industry draw out a claim that the cinematic feature Épaves can only imagine: there is a world beyond war, salvageable like treasure, as much for the diver as the viewer at home. The familiar grip of the newsreel gives way to recreation. Released, men with a movie camera restore a promise of worldly wonder. This does not just happen out there, on some faraway coastline, but also in the conjuring act of the home become underwater cinema. The film reel shifts from a technics of national mobilization to one of mass recuperation.

8 Formerly, recreation indexed curative practices undertaken by an ailing individual, the spiritually or physically overwrought. Now, it occurs in the living room. What Ten Fathoms Deep shows us is that technics of domestic viewing do more than summon an aquarium at the flick of a switch. Films like this, but also diving-themed advertisements, cartoons, and television series blurred the line between diver and viewer by depicting a postwar public made of brave souls who either dive or aspire to. Together, they turn domestic consumption into a recuperative ocean, provided viewers give themselves up to the image as the diver does to the water.

9 But what persuades viewers to dive? Why are they active participants and not passive observers? One contrary interpretation would be that viewers moved by the mass culture industry are duped by ideology. They only imagine themselves acting but in reality they are alienated by and captive to the inhuman drives of the market, which

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dominate their intellect and senses. Such viewing is not just passive but “regressive” (Adorno 1978 [1938]). This tradition asks: surely a person watching a home movie is not really diving? Strictly speaking, they are not. Yet, this question and answer presume to know what diving really is and who does it. In postwar diving imagery, these questions are not rhetorical but thrown open.

10 As Ten Fathoms Deep reaches its dramatic peak, the voiceover marvels: “What man— fragile, cuttable, breakable—can bring himself to enter the mystery that lies in this darkness with its hint of unknown horrors? Yet below he goes.” The question is loaded with heroic masculinity, a dominant trope in diving’s metaphorical usage and cultural history.1 At this point, however, we ask: what is the force of the question? Why does it work the viewer over?

11 The Aqualung enters the postwar living room not with a statement but a question. This casts the diver as the everyman, who defies his condition not through collective effort but equipped with Aqualung before the camera. A lack of opening credits or historico- geographical markers and generic male protagonists help clear the stage. The dive could be courage or madness; the voiceover can no more answer than the home viewer. And yet, this is not an entirely strange world. It is water and viewers have a sense of what it might contain. The question invites them to imagine exploring it, which anticipates Cousteau’s motto cum enlistment “we must go and see” (il faut aller voir). Such projective imagination centers the Aqualung as an enabling technics for an inquiry not only into the underwater world but also self-knowledge and so, the human. How does the Aqualung orient such inquiry, even drive it, and how does it style humankind? To answer, we turn to the Aqualung’s development, its derivation from wartime industry, and its promise to open up the underwater world to different exploratory prospects and with them the human condition.

Regulating breath

Cousteau was not the first underwater diver or filmmaker. He did, however, develop a powerful vision of how to bring the two technics together to popularize underwater “exploration” as an end in itself.

12 A self-proclaimed neurasthenic, Cousteau found solace during his globe-trotting youth in water that held his frame and home movies that fixed his gaze. He first dreamed of flying, however, not diving. Graduating from the French Naval Academy in 1933, he received a commission as second lieutenant and signed up for pilot training. A near- fatal car accident in 1935 dashed those hopes. He recuperated at the Toulon naval base where a superior, Philippe Tailliez, was a proficient helmet diver and instructor. Tailliez spoke of the inspiration he took from Tahitian pearl divers whose technique he witnessed and goggles he borrowed during his father’s colonial posting. The two clicked when Tailliez lent Cousteau a pair of goggles that revealed a ready-made film set. They joined up with Frédéric Dumas, whose breath-hold diving and was the talk of the port. Dumas became the star of Cousteau’s early films. The trio rehearsed a colonial fantasy of a childhood tutored in the sea: “We plumed ourselves at the thought that we late-comers could attain the working depths of pearl and sponge divers who had made their first plunges as infants” (Cousteau & Dumas 1953: 14).

13 The three “mousquemers”2 found existing equipment wanting. To make up for their “belated” arrival to diving, they enthused at tinkering with industrial and military

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technics whose limitations seemed to mirror their own (Dugan 2004 [1948], Dumas 1978). The standard dress of helmet diving, Tailliez’s expertise, steadied the diver by means of lead to walk the seafloor and work within a limited area. Cables tethered to a tender vessel above provided a constant supply of compressed air and communication with the crew, either by telephone or coded tugs on a life-line. This technics, we will later see, is an enabling configuration but to Cousteau it was ignominy: “obviously we had first to get rid of those hoses and lines that turned us into captive animals kept on leashes” (Cousteau 1979: 253). They rejected two existing designs for tetherless movement. The Le Prieur system used a hand-operated regulator to deliver a continuous airflow for dives of 10 to 15 minutes. The closed-circuit chemically absorbed carbon dioxide from exhaled breath for longer dive times. But depths beyond 10m proved dangerous as Cousteau twice learned, potentially triggering central nervous system toxicity.

14 This made for a design brief: an apparatus with the free movement of breath-hold diving, the depths and bottom times of helmet diving, and the portability of a shoulder- mounted system. In 1942, Cousteau asked his father-in-law for help. Henri Melchior, a board member of French industrial gas multinational Air Liquide, connected his son-in- law to company engineer Émile Gagnan. Gagnan had just created a “pressure regulator” to supply cooking gas to a motor vehicle engine—relieving dependency on petroleum under wartime rationing—by reverse engineering a 19th century breathing apparatus used in mine evacuations. Cousteau’s brief, he said, called for an analogous . A regulator within the circuit of rubber tubes running from gas tank to diver’s mouth could control air supply (fig. 2). The diver operates the regulator by inhaling, which reduces pressure in the circuit and releases a diaphragm to let compressed air in the circuit. By exhaling, the pressure increases, the diaphragm closes, and the valve cuts off supply. Released breath makes bubbles in the surrounding aquatic medium because one-way exhaust valves prevent water entering (Cousteau 1952).

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Figure 2

Plaque at Plage de Barry in Bandol, . It commemorates the 1943 field tests of the Aqualung, whose mechanism is illustrated top left. The three “pioneers” are at work: Cousteau films, Dumas salvages, and Tailliez lights the way. Created by Pierre Blanchard for the Musée Dumas, 1997; © Mairie de Bandol

15 Following trials, Air Liquide sent two prototypes to Toulon for field tests. Through over 500 dives, at times requiring troublingly close coordination with occupying Axis navies, Cousteau and friends tested every aspect of the equipment, and their own limits, too (Leaney 1997; Tailliez 1954). Épaves is their visual archive. The camera does not see the interested bystanders, as when Dumas conducted a depth test to file with the patent application and a crowd thronged while a public notary officiated (Cousteau 1953: 29).

16 After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Cousteau held screenings and lectures, socialized with cinephiles, and presented the prototype to military brass. The Aqualung seemed to have something for everyone—except, perhaps, the helmet diver on a “leash”—and Épaves was its calling card. “It was after showing the film to [Admiral Lemonnier],” Cousteau recalled, “that I understood the force and power of images” (Machu 2010: 40). The dive and its capture on film not only surfaced the underwater world; they disclosed new aspects and enthusiasms of terrestrial authorities. Air Liquide created a division, La Spirotechnique, to coordinate Aqualung manufacture (fig. 3). In the coming decades, Cousteau welcomed all comers to his way of breathing and seeing underwater. Buyers and devotees included military, industrial, scientific, media and recreational users. As their reasons for diving varied, so did their expectations of what to do with the Aqualung (e.g., Bascom & Revelle 1953).

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Figure 3

Design schematic for the 1949 US patent of the Cousteau-Gagnan Aqualung. As with many technics, the history of diving has many “pioneers” and “firsts.” Cousteau patented design upgrades and add- ons to maintain market leadership. Public domain (US Patent Office)

17 A commission from British Petroleum to take company geologists diving in the Red Sea allowed Cousteau to begin collecting footage for his landmark feature film, The Silent World (1956). Interest from French science agencies enabled its completion (Cans 1997). The film thus records the “discovery” of a marine petrofrontier and the emerging postwar world order. From the Calypso’s tiller, Cousteau and his team gave operational support to the most complex projects, sometimes of their own design. This yielded new technics and uses, along with troves of images deployed by Cousteau and his clients in a diversifying media market that, in a matter of years, made “le commandant Cousteau” a household name.

18 The open-ended use of the Aqualung begat multiple, even conflicting, uptakes. Though rarely in frame, the terrestrial forces of mass industry and national interest remained tethered to diving and extended its reach. Such “free” exploration motivated claims upon historical wrecks, geological strata, telecommunications infrastructure, and marine flora and fauna. In the 1960s, before Cousteau set his sights on ecological consciousness raising, these manifold projects augured a new kind of human: homo aquaticus.

Is the diver a cyborg?

In a now infamous 1960 article, neuroscientist Manfred Clynes and psychiatrist Nathan Kline took an unconventional approach to human movement and settlement in deep space. Instead of surrounding the exposed human body with life support systems (e.g., space stations or spacecraft), they proposed equipping it to thrive in outer space. The resulting “cyborg,” short for cybernetic organism, would be “without alteration of heredity” (Clynes & Kline 1960: 26, emphasis in original). An evolved kin rather than an aberrant monster, the cyborg would inherit and extend the modern historical project of boundless exploration (fig. 4). To illustrate, they invoked the fish. Any old fish, they reasoned, cannot live out of water but a “particularly intelligent and resourceful” one with the right R&D facilities might find a fix. This analogy yielded a simple solution to the main problem humans face beyond earth’s atmosphere: “Don’t breathe!” (27). Pharmacological or mechanical technics would replace the to “bring about the (necessary) biological changes” (27). Functionally, cyborgs would breathe, they simply would not think about it.

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Figure 4

1964 visualization of a “cyborg man” circulated in the US press. The vital organs (“replaceable parts”) are modified for external sensing or internal regulation, implying autonomy in any environment. World Book Science Service

19 Though it is unclear if Clynes and Kline were in direct dialogue with Cousteau, journalists and the commandant himself saw continuities (fig. 5).3 Cousteau channeled the duo’s proposed “participant evolution” when, in a 1962 speech, he predicted the coming of a new human: homo aquaticus. Homo aquaticus calls the underwater world home thanks to a technically refashioned physiology. With mechanical gills under arm or an oxygen-enriched liquid infusion, “he would inhale water instead of air, just as a fish does” (Dugan 1963: 58).4 Whereas Clynes and Kline figured the cyborg as a speculative response to the emerging limits of manned spaceflight, Cousteau predicted homo aquaticus as the culmination of a tradition of diving, deeper and longer, through technics. As Cousteau and his team tested new gas mixes, constructed submarine habitats, prospected for resources, and established an equipment and media empire, homo aquaticus seemed plausible, just on the horizon of history. Moreover, unlike the cyborg in outer space, whom Clynes and Kline worried would lose his mind without pharmacological help, homo aquaticus would gain access to “inner space” through the dive. The depths, Cousteau frequently claimed, bring psychic healing and moral clarity. 5

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Figure 5. Frontiers of Science comic strip from December 31, 1962

The authors connect Cousteau’s exploits in domesticating the underwater world to homo aquaticus (equipped with body camera) and cyborg experiments in deep space human biology. Rare Books and Special Collections, the University of Sydney Library

20 Cousteau viewed permanent aquatic settlement as a civilizing and civilizational mission that, by unleashing the human body underwater, would lift pressures of terrestrial existence, from psychic distress to economic scarcity. By viewing such matters as universals to evolve beyond, it is easy to forget that homo aquaticus embodies a loosely coordinated web of postwar industrial interests located in the Global North, possessed by the competitive fever dream of a Cold War technical arms race, and motivated to displace the claims of existing ocean users. As Jonathan Crylen (2019) observes, popular depictions and real-world prototypes prepared the way for homo aquaticus and remediated the oceans as a dominion inherited by groups of affluent, white men who saw exploration as their birthright. “From birth, man carries the of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth,” claimed Cousteau. “But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free. Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction—up, down, sideways—by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel” (“Poet of the Depths” 1960: 66). His epistemic and moral North Star was, in effect, the forever dive. Diving in this image will only come into its own when it fulfils the cyborg adage “don’t breathe!” And yet, what characterizes underwater breathing is the air bubble, whose creation gives divers a trusted guide for interpreting changes in behavior, mindset, and navigation—hence the diving adage, “follow your bubbles.”

21 In shunning breathing and bubbles as vestiges of life caught above water, the forever dive misconstrues what makes diving work, including the powerful projects it services. Diving technics gave renewed vigor and opportunity to some of the most persistent forces—military, industrial, colonial—of terrestrial life. We live with bubbles of sabotage, extraction, and privatization. If permanent recreation is one enduring aspect of the post-postlapsarian reality that Cousteau pictures, out of frame is the constant relapse that makes it seem appealing.

Under pressure

Rather than solve for breathing à la homo aquaticus, we can confront it and ask: what do divers do with breath, and what does it do with them? We consider these questions over the next two sections through helmet diving, the Aqualung’s precursor and nemesis. The first centers an inescapable reality of diving, not free movement but

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pressure and its hold. The second follows the physical and political tethers that connect diving to terrestriality by examining pearling on the Australian colonial frontier.

22 Diving imposes a practical understanding of the physics of bubbles, bubbles that divers produce in water and those that pressure differentials can produce in them. These phenomena are related. Take, for example, the saying, “Never ascend faster than your smallest bubbles.” This names the risk of bubbles forming within the body and causing sickness, known colloquially as caisson disease or the dreaded “bends.” Though associated with diving today, the condition emerged as a public health concern in the industrializing 19th century (Phillips 1998). It presented in underground laborers working within caissons, pressurized chambers built in riverbeds and seafloors to complete large infrastructure projects. Symptom onset can be sudden or delayed, including itching, throbbing pain, numbness, paralysis, and even death. At high pressures, nitrogen dissolves within the bloodstream. If a caisson worker exits a pressurized chamber (or a diver resurfaces) too quickly, the abrupt decrease in pressure causes nitrogen to escape solution and form internal bubbles with effects dependent upon location. The bent diver is an archive of the human condition going deep, not in endless flight but in a strain to accommodate two worlds.

23 Diving manuals old and new begin with the that govern the physics and physiological effects of descent, depth, and resurfacing. Perhaps the most important is Boyle’s: at constant , the volume of a gas varies inversely with pressure. Classes often invite students to visualize the lung as a red balloon filled with a volume of air. Placed in a bell jar, the lung/balloon expands as pressure drops. If pressure decreases by half, the lung/balloon doubles in volume or simply pops—a denouement that dramatizes the prospect of lung “blowout” if a diver does not exhale upon ascent.

24 But the lung is less a balloon than a collection of hundreds of millions of balloons, or alveoli, that can burst and release bubbles capable of blocking blood flow to vital organs, and this from a pressure differential equivalent to as little as 1.5m of ascent on a full breath. To land this lesson, instructor Alex Brylske channels the brusque persona of Mike Nelson (Lloyd Bridges), star of Sea Hunt, the hit midcentury US diving action drama he watched as a child. “You see this thing?” he points to the regulator. “You put it in your mouth and breathe. Whatever you do, keep breathing; don’t ever hold your breath, or your lungs will burst and you’ll die!” Diving injuries are complex and vary from body to body. But the extreme tends towards fatality, which produces a paradox: the first and ideally lasting impression a would-be diver gets is an outcome no diver wants (fig. 6). The specter of death and accident haunts diving because pressure and its differentials are an inescapable consequence of moving under water.

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Figure 6. A popular midcentury US diving manual’s illustration

The “squeeze” is a colloquialism for rapid pressure venting in helmet diving —a typically fatal accident —later generalized to other kinds of . Gallows humor plays an important pedagogical role in diving instruction. Association Press

25 Consider helmet diver Clarence Benham, whose memoir Diver’s Luck (1949) is typical of diving’s narrative genre: a mix of epic, technics, and bildungsroman that retells going deep to process it with surface context. When Benham emerged from his first dive in the early 1920s in Australia’s Darwin harbor, he had bloodied his nose and suffered an earache. And yet, he felt a success. Taking a friend up on an offer of a “dip,” he donned the full 80kg of standard dress: lead soled shoes, a heavy canvas suit, chest and back weights to negate the suit’s , and a brass corslet and helmet (Davis ca. 1909). This final pair was likely a Pearler model, first manufactured by the English firm Heinke & Co. and imitated widely (fig. 7). Suiting up took the assistance of one or more shipmates.6

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Figure 7. Heinke “Pearler” made in England, ca.1880

The three lights (windows) are unguarded to improve visibility and tilted downward for scanning the bottom. The squared-off corslet allowed divers to bend down to gather pearl oysters with their hands. Queensland Museum H3888

26 Benham’s instructions were minimal. From dockside observation, he knew to step off the dinghy’s ladder backwards. His friend gave a parting lesson: “Don’t forget to close your valve when you come up—one pull on the line is the signal to come up.” Benham knew the outlet valve’s location on the side of the helmet but would feel its effects before he learned its use. With this valve, the diver can adjust outward airflow for breathing comfort, especially on entry, and regulate the amount of air in the suit for buoyancy control. “A practised diver can thus slip easily, and without exertion, up or down the shot-rope,” wrote British diving engineer and historian Sir Robert Davis (Davis ca. 1909 : 6B). For the “new chum” diver—a sobriquet that equates the novice with fish food—such ease of movement was yet to come.

27 A ship tender threw over a weighted rope, or “shot-line,” to keep Benham straight on his descent, connected an air-pump to the inlet at the back of his helmet, and screwed on the face glass. Handing Benham his life- and air-lines, the tender patted his helmet to signal the all clear. The new chum diver’s step off the ladder would be his last sure one. He descended to a depth of 22m, enough to reach the seafloor at neap . His ears burned and water pushed the base of his helmet up over his eyes. At bottom, Benham moved clumsily. His chest and abdomen felt weightless in the air-filled suit while the pressure of the water gripped his legs. Variations in pressure, even over his head, torso, and legs felt like a struggle between three embodied atmospheres. When tenders gave him the pull to come up, Benham, remembering the pain in his ears on descent, chose not to heed his only words of advice. “What could be more natural, therefore, than that I should ignore my orders and leave my valve open, fearing that if it was closed I would

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suffer again?” Thus, reeled in like a fish, Benham surfaced from his first dive. But he had a valuable find in hand, a gold-lip, a pinctada maxima mother of pearl shell.

28 What just happened to Benham? From one aspect: suiting up, backwards descent, confusion, seclusion, strange movement, resurfacing, the shame and thrill of disobedience, the delight of discovery, in short, an initiation into Australia’s pearling industry. From another: barotrauma and the effects of unmanaged pressure differentials. An increase in pressure underwater has no effect on much of the human body, because living tissue is primarily fluid and no more compressible than the surrounding water. And yet, bodies also contain air-filled spaces in ears, sinuses, lungs, and stomachs—and can create more such spaces around the body. As pressure increases with depth, it is transferred across the fluid parts of the body up to, but not necessarily into, those filled with air. For spaces lined by soft or movable tissue (e.g., lungs), the air inside will be compressed. For those lined by rigid or semi-rigid tissue (e.g., middle ear), the result is a “compromise” of pressure across the wall and some compression of the gas inside. In these cavities, in the deconcealment of inner atmospheres our bodies hold but we do not always feel, the diver comes into intimate contact with Boyle’s law (Streever 2019).

29 Unable to pressurize the air within his ears upon descent, Benham experienced middle ear “squeeze.” Divers have long devised strategies for handling pressure within. The most familiar is the , to do it just close your mouth, pinch your nose, and blow. Helmet divers would press their nose against the front of the helmet and blow, assisted by drops applied to the ears the night before. Benham’s problem, then, was not that he was helmet diving and thus, as Cousteau had it, “a captive animal kept on a leash.” Rather, he was a “new chum” diver, inexperienced with the reality of pressure differentials and their management. Far from dissuading Benham, this dive inspired him to learn the techniques required for artful movement and breath in pursuit of pearl oysters.

Colonial bubbles across atmospheres

Benham’s text can be read as a record of diving’s lessons, tethered to and inseparable from the world of pearling. As we shall see, he was an outlier to this milieu. What does an attention to living under pressure—rather than free movement—do to how we understand diving technics and its historicity?

30 Helmet diving transformed the Australian colonial project from the North, straining the human condition across multiple atmospheres to build a global industry. The opaline shells of pinctada albina and pinctada maxima were used in the manufacture of furniture handles and decorative inlays, buttons, and other accessories (McCarthy 1990). Yet long before colonization and for generations since, collecting, fashioning, and trading maritime goods has been integral to the social life of First Nations in Northern Australia. Pearl shell was one among many—including trepang, seeds, stories, and religious customs—that sustained diplomatic and intercultural exchange between different First Nations and overseas neighbors in ways that confound the doctrine of terra nullius and its reckoning (Edwards & Yu 2018, Macknight 2011, Standfield 2018).

31 From the 1850s, Anglo-European merchants, settler pastoralists, and profiteers observed, then conscripted and displaced First Nations’ men and women through successive experiments with wading, breath-hold diving and helmet diving that

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remade seascapes from shoreline to open water (McCarthy 2008). Pearling operated on a depleted yield basis as divers pursued greater depths to harvest the largest and oldest oysters. The returns were great yet varied wildly due to unpredictable weather, prospecting, and market fluctuations in the metropole (Ganter 1994).

32 Pearling pushed the Australian colonial frontier outward into Asia, downward to the seafloor, and inward into the continent. By 1900, the industry spanned 5000km of the northern border region and supplied the majority of the world’s mother of pearl. Lobbying or simply acting as colonial officials, white “pearling masters” working in Australian waters treated the region as a labor pool through sometimes free but often forced migration and systematic violence that subordinated life itself to the dive. Indeed, the mortality rate in pearling was an order of magnitude greater than in nearby landed industries (Ganter 1994). The extent of these depredations is reemerging today (Paterson & Veth 2020). From the end of March to the end of November (i.e., outside of cyclone season) and during all daylight hours (other than Sunday), skin and helmet divers descended in hours-long shifts. When “on patch,” helmet divers sent up an average of 100 to 120 oysters a day.

33 By bringing together workers from coastal and inland First Nations, present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, the Philippines, as well as India, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan, pearling tested the would-be boundaries of the Australian colonial project. Helmet diver and technics, ship tender, crew, and surface vessel together choreographed vertical equilibrium in open waters. Sometimes for weeks at sea, they achieved lateral coverage of the seafloor. While divers worked the bottom, crews monitored life- and air-lines from the decks of the “pearling lugger,” a sailboat designed for the volatile surface conditions (fig. 8). By the 1890s, Japanese helmet divers achieved a dominant position within the industry. Popular literature as well as official reports interpreted their technical and economic acumen through the colonial lens of natural ability tied to biological race (e.g., Idriess ca. 1937, Sowden 1903). Pearling communities negotiated difference through everyday acts of solidarity and hostility, formal and informal labor organizing, and tactical brokering across multiple colonial authorities in the region (Martínez & Vickers 2015, Sissons 1979).

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Figure 8. 1879 engraving from Melbourne-based monthly The Australasian Sketcher

Pearl diving was traded as mother of pearl shell, but it also circulated in imagery, public debate, colonial exhibitions, and lobbying efforts. State Library of Victoria A/S25/10/79/124

34 Not only did Australian colonial and federal officials fail to curb the cruelties of the resource frontier, they often aggravated them. Regulations on labor contracts, currency, ownership, and trade, but also housing, marriage, and education interfered with the consolidation of non-white capital and the coming together of a community that challenged the self-image of the “civilizing” colonial project (Affeldt & Hund 2019, Choo 2001, Mullins 2019). After federation in 1901, the White Australia Policy sought to isolate Australia from its regional neighbors through immigration restrictions on non- European workers. Exemptions made for pearling acknowledged the industry’s harsh conditions yet rationalized them on racial grounds. For instance, in 1912, the federal government sponsored 12 British Royal Navy-trained helmet divers to work the depths using newly established decompression tables and the latest equipment. The “white experiment” aimed to unsettle the authority of Japanese helmet divers by publicly demonstrating that diving was work befitting white settlers, reducible from a cooperative undertaking to a technical achievement. It backfired. All 12 divers got the bends and three died. And still, the results fed a 1912-16 royal commission into pearling that justified its distancing from the official Australian story as diving, the report states, makes for a life “incompatible with that a European worker is entitled to live” (Affeldt 2019: 53).

35 The diverse communities of Australia’s northern border region did not just dive for pearl shell but lived within empire. So doing, they disconfirmed Australia’s isolationist and exclusionary self-image (fig. 9). Scottish physiologist John Haldane is often celebrated for producing safe stage decompression tables in 1908 to prevent the bends. Yet far from this metropolitan experimental theater, a coordinated personal and

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collective reckoning with the bends and its acute, chronic, and fatal consequences was part of living under the pressures of the pearling resource frontier. The Australian colonial project had a political stake in pearling, which also meant in helmet diving as a practical achievement that often came at enormous cost. Contemporary celebrations of this “bygone” technics—such as through tourism ventures that encourage visitors to don a Pearler helmet and experience a flight of fancy—banalize the multi-generational transformation of the human condition that took place under social and physical pressures while extending the expectations of industry and power to furnish domestic life with marine riches. Tethered to history, diving is an ambiguous force that escapes its metaphoric reduction to heroism or villainy.

Figure 9. A pearl lugger crew in Broome, ca. 1900-1920

The crew poses proudly with its shell haul, opened and laid out on the deck. National Archives of Australia K1349 WA00272[A]

Diving as metaphor yields powerful fantasies of discovery, overcoming, and self- transformation. As a practice, diving is a way of moving while constrained, at every fathom, by the changing force of pressure. This requires techniques of the mind and body, and, for longer and deeper dives, technics that regulate and invigilate human living in the underwater milieu. These are some of diving’s tethers; how and for whom they hold is not given once and for all, but a matter of earthbound circumstance.7 When cast in a constitutively heroic mode, the dive is all too quickly severed from its history, its ambiguity, indeed what makes it human—the very terms needed to reclaim a metaphorical otherwise.

36 The Cousteauvian fantasy of diving without tethers abjures the helmet diver’s “leash” and so styles the metaphor as one of boundless exploration. Yet no matter how liberating the image of outgrowing the need for surface support might seem, the reality of the seafloor’s attempted domestication has been no less fraught than that of any other domain. Cousteau never stopped touting the possibilities for the human

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condition opened up by the Aqualung. But the ends of underwater life were no more his to determine than the terrestrial pressures he sought to escape in the first place. This bind marks the tension between the popular imaginary Cousteau projected and the military, industrial, and colonial realities he learned from and tutored—as had other diving technicians before him.

37 The closest living relatives of homo aquaticus might be deep sea saturation divers. Most work on contract for the global oil and gas industry to construct and maintain offshore drilling infrastructure. They live for weeks at a time in a chamber held in a ship’s underbelly, pressurized to match the depths—scores or hundreds of meters—in which they will work and to which the body must be domesticated.8 Their every need is met through an air lock and they live in quasi-surrogacy with a support team, some known as “Betties.” Their living space comprises two rows of bunk beds and an aluminum table. A journalist pictures a US chain restaurant to make this all seem quite normal: “The divers will spend their waking hours either under hundreds of feet of water on the ocean floor or squeezed into an area the size of a booth at Applebee’s.”

38 Once again, the tether is not optional nor is it a guarantee as the slightest disruption will literally destroy the divers’ bodies. The forever dive becomes the forever umbilicus. As one commercial salvage diver explains: If my main communications in my helmet was lost, I could talk to the surface through the speaker in the bell, they could talk to me. They could actually also wrap on the bell, and they could hear it in the bell wire. Or you could pull on the bell umbilical and send line-pull signals. Everything is redundant. The reason for in diving is we always say, ‘Two is one. One is none.’ If you’ve got two systems online, a main and a backup, you’re good to go.

39 The pull of the helmet diver’s life-line persists. Two is one. One is none. This obscure yet sound mathematics of underwater living imagines a wholeness that can never be surrounded, a tether that forever bends, held in the provisional, fraught, embrace of the dive. At the same time, everything must maintain redundancy, its principle reduplicated, mirrored, backed up.

40 Does anything dive? We follow diving’s tethers to argue that what this technics aims at is not only extended time and depth under water, but the ability to strain particular human claims from one atmosphere across another, in short to assert and expand the domain of power. The expression of such strain can be as quotidian as a button—made of mother of pearl a century ago or hydrocarbons today—and yet still transform lives, communities, and the oceans themselves.

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NOTES

1. Diving imagery fashions publics against a set of prescriptions, like the natural history diorama (Haraway 1984) and pre-Cousteauvian underwater cinema (Elias 2019). Jonathan Crylen (2015) discusses the gender politics of postwar diving and cinema and notes that domestication and

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exploitation converge in Cousteau’s films and expeditions, often on the model of the company town rather than the nuclear family. 2. Late in life, Tailliez coined the "three mousquemers” moniker. It references the swashbuckling adventures of the three musketeers (mousquetaires) but transposes their heroics from land (terre) to the sea (mer). 3. Although a fringe project, the cyborg stoked public debate in the 1960s and beyond as it activates standing hopes and fears about the way technics transforms the relationship between self and world (see Hacking 1998, Haraway 1985, Kline 2009). 4. For Bryld and Lykke (1999), homo aquaticus epitomizes “progressive regression” whereby postwar underwater technics takes man down the evolutionary ladder to launch him towards a better outer space future. 5. The innocent wonder to which Cousteau’s lays claim holds enduring inspiration for some marine scientists in spite of, even in contrast to, the messiness of his terrestrial affairs (e.g., McClain 2010). 6. Helmet diving still occurs within the technical parameters described here. 19th and 20th century equipment lives a museological existence and circulates in collector and replica worlds. 7. For a similar argument, see Klein's (2017) study of diving for coral in Indonesia, which marks the uncanny intimacy between diving as a recreational fantasy and the industrial strain of diving for a living. 8. Cousteau pursued this technics with the Conshelf projects (1962-1965) but, once again, its development preceded and exceeded his involvement (Bond 1993, Sontag & Drew 1998).

AUTHORS

DAMIEN A. BRIGHT Damien A. Bright is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the crisis of scientific representation in the face of global warming.

ROY KIMMEY Roy Kimmey is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago. His research examines migration and mass movements in post-war Central Europe.

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