Dumas and Tailliez swam down with the bathyscaphe. At one hundred and fifty feet they got the last glimpse of her rapidly disappearing into the blue. If the bathyscaphe did not return, Piccard's wonderful idea was finished forever. A failure today meant that the dream of science of penetrating the last earthly unknown would be set back decades. If the bathyscaphe returned, we knew that in our lifetime, depth vehicles built on her principles would carry men into the abyss.
An impressive silence ruled the ships. I pledged a bottle of cognac to the first man to spot the bathyscaphe. The crew scampered up the masts and funnel, and the blue sky was dotted with the red pompons of the matelots. After twenty-nine minutes came an ear-splitting shout from mechanic Dudbout, "There she is!" The balloon emerged from the ocean two hundred yards off. We were so overstrained at the sight of the marvel that it took a moment to grasp a very odd fact. The well-fastened aluminum radar mast was wleanly removed, as though by a mechanic.
The divers went into the water en masse and raced to inspect her. I swam around the submerged machine and found her floating well wit no gas leaks, but the thin plates of the balloon, especially where they passed through the surface, were rending, billowing, and sucking inward like the cheeks of an obese giant puffing on a fire.
By sundown we managed to get the bathyscaphe alongside the mother ship, but the flotilla was drifting away from the shelter of the island, and we could not get a hook on the submarine. Georges and a deck mate from the Scaldis stood atop the balloon, trying again and again to make her fast. The submarine pitched and rolled in a freshening breeze, and we feared she would be destroyed by crashing into the Scaldis Dumas and Tailliez worked all night on the Scaldis to avert the collision. They could not couple gas hoses to siphon her silos. Cosyns ordered the gas tanks blown with compressed carbon dioxide. Plumes of gas vapor enveloped the Scaldis. A spark would have touched off an explosion which would have certainly destroyed both vessels. Georges and th deck mate clung heroically to the valves, receiving jets of gasoline in their faces. They completedtheir work and were taken off, temporarily blind and exhausted. Through the night we fought to save the bathyscaphe. She was at last lowered into her hangar in the glorious sunrise.
It sickened us to look at the vehicle of our overweening ambitions. The envelope was lacerated beyond repair. One of the motors and propellers was torn away. Inside the balloon was a mess of paint dissolved by the escaping gasoline. We opened the hatch to examine the instruments. We read the automatic gauge showing the depth attained, and made temperature and salinity corrections. The bathyscaphe had reached four thousand six hundred feet.
The ironical fact was that she had survived all the pressures of the deep, with the exception of the mysterious loss of the radar mast, and then been knocked out of commission by a mild surface swell. We had the machine to carry mn to the abyss, but we could not pass it through the molecular tissue of air and water.
The bathyscaphe has been redesigned to make her seaworthy. She can be towed without the use of a mother ship. The pilots can enter immediately before the plunge and come out of the observation car as soon as the vellel has surfaced. There will be another trial. I am confident that the second bathyscaphe will take men to the basement of the world.
Jacques Cousteau, The Silent World, "The Submarine Dirigible," pages 191-193.