Jacques Cousteau

A press statement from the Cousteau Foundation, which in recent years has handled all his business and personal affairs, referring to one of his most famous documentaries, said: ''Jacques-Yves Cousteau has rejoined the Silent World.''

Cousteau's 60-year-long odyssey with the Earth's seas - much of it on his famous boat, the Calypso - was more than a great adventure. He co-invented the aqualung, developed a one-man, jet-propelled submarine, and helped start the first manned undersea colonies.

However, the bespectacled, wiry Cousteau, often wearing his trademark red wool cap, became a household name, primarily through his hugely

popular television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

After Cousteau led a 1972 voyage to Antarctica, a worldwide television audience saw for the first time the extraordinary beauty of sculptured ice formations under the sea.

Cousteau liked to call himself an ''oceanographic technician'', but he was also a romantic who once said that for him, water was the ultimate symbol of love.

''The reason why I love the sea, I cannot explain,'' a chuckling Cousteau said in a recent interview. ''It's physical . . . When you dive, you begin to feel that you're an angel. It's a liberation of your weight.''

He dreamed of a time when the world's energy crisis would be solved by channelling the sea's tides and temperatures, when essential raw materials would be taken from the ocean floor, and when man could be fed by plantations hundreds of feet beneath the surface.

But he was also a realist. In the last 15 years, he became an eloquent advocate of environmental protection and maintaining the delicate balance of the ecosystem.

Time magazine put him on its cover in 1960, and he received the National Geographic Society's Gold Medal in 1961 in a ceremony attended by President John F Kennedy.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born June 11, 1910, in Saint-Andre-de-Cubzac, a small town near Bordeaux. His father was a lawyer who travelled constantly. As a result, the boy was often on the move.

He was a sickly child. None the less, he learned to swim and spent hours at the beach. Formal schooling bored Cousteau; he was expelled from high school for breaking 17 of the school's windows.

His first dive was in Lake Harvey, Vermont, in the summer of 1920. He was spending the season away from New York City, where he and his parents lived briefly.

In 1930, Cousteau passed the highly competitive entrance examinations to enter France's Naval Academy. He served in the navy and entered naval aviation school.

A near-fatal car crash at the age of 26 denied him his wings, and he was transferred to sea duty, where he swam rigorously to strengthen badly weakened arms.

The therapy had unintended consequences, as Cousteau writes in his 1953 book, The Silent World, which has sold five million copies in more than 20 languages.

''Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course,'' he wrote. ''It happened to me . . . on that summer's day, when my eyes were opened to the sea.''

During the Second World War, Cousteau was involved in espionage activities for the French Resistance. After the war, he was decorated with the Legion of Honour, France's highest award. He also made his first underwater films during the war period, and, with engineer Emile Gagnan, perfected the piece of equipment he said enabled him to be a ''manfish'' - the aqualung, an underwater breathing apparatus supplying oxygen to divers.

In 1950, Cousteau bought the 400-ton former mine-sweeper Calypso. He converted it into a floating laboratory, outfitted with the most modern equipment, including underwater television gear. In 1952-53 Cousteau took the Calypso to the Red Sea and shot the first color footage ever taken at a depth of 150ft. With funding from the National Geographic Society and the French Academy of Sciences, he began in 1952 a four-year voyage across the world's oceans.

One of his most renowned exploits was the unearthing of the hull of an ancient Greek wine freighter, buried deep in fossil mud 130 feet below the surface off the French coast near Marseille.

The Calypso also conducted the first offshore oil survey by divers.

Cousteau's feature-length documentary, The Silent World, won him the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 and his first Academy Award a year later.

He wrote countless books, including The Living Sea (1963) and World Without Sun (1965). A 20-volume encyclopedia, The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau, was published in the United States and England.

In 1977, the Cousteau Odyssey series premiered on PBS. Seven years later, the Cousteau Amazon series premiered on the Turner Broadcasting System. In all, his documentaries have won 40 Emmy nominations.

In the 1970s, he formed the Cousteau Society, an environmental group based in Norfolk, Virginia. His ''Conshelf'' projects were ambitious experiments in undersea human habitation. Conshelf Three had six ''oceanauts'', including Cousteau's son, Philippe, living 300 ft below the surface.

Although he owned many apartments around the world, Cousteau preferred a spartan existence aboard the Calypso.

He had his critics. Some said he lacked scientific training. A biographer, Bernard Violet, said he mistreated animals during the filming of some documentaries, and that he once bought lobsters at a market in Marseille and used them in a film about the Red Sea.

Cousteau had no plans of slowing down. He was building Calypso II to replace the original, which sank off Singapore last year. Next year, he planned to study India's Ganges River, an ailing waterway worshipped by Hindus.

His son and heir apparent, Philippe, was killed in 1979 in a seaplane crash.

Cousteau's other son, Jean-Michel, is a renowned conservationist in his own right. However, a dispute over lending the Cousteau name to a Fijian resort soured their

relationship.

Survivors also include his second wife, Francine Triplet, and their children, Diane and Pierre-Yves.

In Florida last January, receiving one of his countless awards, Cousteau perhaps most succinctly articulated his message: ''The future of civilisation depends on water. I beg you all to understand this.''