Photo: Olivier Bernard

After a long legal battle, a French court has ordered Francine Cousteau, the second wife of the late Jacques Cousteau, to settle outstanding yard bills of €273,000 and remove the RV Calypso from a Brittany shipyard or the shipyard will be allowed to sell the 43 meter wooden research vessel.  Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a former French naval officer, writer, conservationist, scuba diver, documentarian and explorer who became famous for his expeditions on RV Calypso.  The ship was featured in his books and the award winning documentary “Silent World”  as well the American TV series “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” which ran from 1968 to 1975.  Kim Willsher, writing in the Guardian describes the Calypso as the “the ship that launched a thousand childhood dreams.”

The RV Calypso was built in 1943 as a British minesweeper under lend lease at the Ballard Marine Railway Company in Seattle, Washington. She was returned to the US Navy at the end of World War II and laid up. She operated as a Maltese ferry for two years in 1949 and 1950. In 1950 she was purchased for Jacques Cousteau by a secretive Irish millionaire and former MP, Thomas Loel Guinness, who leased the ship to Cousteau for one franc a year.  Reportedly, Guinness had two conditions for the lease; that Cousteau never ask him for money and that he never reveal his identity, which only came out after Cousteau’s death. Cousteau converted the ship into an expedition vessel and support base for diving, filming and oceanographic research.

In 1996, the Calypso sank following a collision with a barge in Singapore.  The following year, Jacques Cousteau died. Legal and family squabbles over the ship clouded its future. Over the last two decades, there have been a variety of proposals for the restoration and use of the ship, but all have come to naught.

A Tribute to Jacques Cousteau: Calypso – John Denver