‘Unforgettable stuff ... vivid, lyrical and quite brilliantly written … a modern classic about the underwater world that mixes personal memoir with travel, history and a cast of characters that defy description’
Tony Parsons

‘Wonderfully engaging. It took a subject I knew next to nothing about and kept me gripped from beginning to end. Eccentric, eclectic and highly readable’
Fergal Keane

‘Non-divers will be captivated by Tim Ecott’s engaging mix of personal odyssey and hard science’
Times Literary Supplement

‘Gripping tales of expeditions for treasure, the feats of sponge divers, and the derring-do of Second World War frogmen are enriched by learned yet accessible swathes of science … A highly readable and detailed history of man’s exploits beneath the waves’
Scotland on Sunday

‘An eloquent, poetic account of Tim Ecott’s fascination with subaqua diving’
Esquire

‘Riveting … An elegantly written, intelligent homage to diving – a romp through history, a round-up of fascinating characters and an investigation into why breathing compressed air underwater is so, so marvellous. A modern classic’
Dive

‘Gripping and finely written … A brilliant mix of memoir, reportage and diving history’
FHM

And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The Future is not Wholly Dry.

Rupert Brooke, ‘Heaven’

In Italy, a young woman once told me that learning to dive had mended her broken heart. In Spain, the chief executive of an international hotel company said that she dived because no one could telephone her underwater, or ask her to make any business decisions. In England, an engineer told me that he dived in order to experience flight, to escape the ties of gravity. His technical training had made him wish he could fly through the air, like a bird, but on reflection he decided that to be a fish would be superior, in general, he reasoned, a bird cannot choose to stay motionless in this air. The bird may soar and glide above us seemingly unconstrained by gravity, but is dependent on the wind. The fish can choose to rest in one spot, even with a current flowing and yet the fish can also move in three-dimensional space. In Switzerland, a man told me that he preferred to dive in alpine lakes rather than tropical seas. He said he found the marine life in warm waters too distracting; there was too much colour, too many things to take in. For him, the joy of diving was the opportunity to see inside himself. In order to examine his own character he needed to be in cold, dark deep water where diving, just breathing underwater was an end in itself. In the Seychelles, a former professional motorcyclist who was paralysed from the waist down said that diving allowed him to forget his disability for a time. In Papua New Guinea there was an American who told me that diving was his church. What he saw underwater was a clear affirmation of God’s presence on earth and being in the sea was the only place be found complete solace. In California, a man told me that an hour underwater was better than any therapy session with a psychoanalyst. A Russian once said to me that, however hard he tried, he could never imagine any creature as weird as those he sometimes found underwater. Whatever space creatures he saw or read about in science fiction were a pale approximation of the variety of life forms he met in the sea.

Diving for pleasure is a young sport. Mass participation in the joy of swimming freely underwater, for no other reason than to be in the liquid world, has only been possible for fifty years. It is easier, cheaper, and safer to learn to dive than ever before. And yet, the prospect of immersion continues to inspire fear. To go underwater is simply not a natural activity. We enter a hostile element where the most basic life fuel, air, is unattainable, to survive, we must take it with us. To confront the liquid world, to enter the element and return to the air world, reinforces our will to live. It provokes joy and contentment in a world where people find less and less time to experience their own personal space.

Throughout history, the motive for going underwater has been to collect and retrieve objects of value, nutrition or decoration. Sponges, mother of pearl, shellfish, items of value lost overboard in a dock, have all been enough to make men and women plunge into the sea. The riches of the oceans have been legendary, and the secrets of the Seven Seas have inspired fantasy and fear. For over two thousand years the aim of going underwater has been simply to work, or to fight. Only recently have we sought out the marine world as free-swimming divers who seek nothing other than the pleasure of being underwater.

Childhood experiences stay with us, and colour our onward journey. Places and people embed themselves in our personality, forever remaining symbols of good or bad times which can be impossible to eradicate. Try as I might, I find it impossible to think fondly of Wales. I can’t apologize for it, the country remains for me the place where I began school, and hated it. Shortly afterwards, I contracted pneumonia, which left me a wheezing bronchitic child forever unwell in the permanently, or so it seemed, damp climate. Fearing the long-term health of my lungs, my parents were advised to take me abroad, and as my father was in the Army we were able to move to Malaya. There, I taught myself to swim, and spent every day at one of two pools, where my mother would leave my sister and me to amuse ourselves for hours on end.

I have tried to analyse my obsession with being underwater, and conclude that although everyone must draw their own inspiration from any activity, mine has to do with a return to the time when my life seemed totally in balance.

The contrast between Wales and Malaya could not have been more extreme. Just getting there involved a six-week journey by ship from Southampton, a prolonged holiday on which every day brought warmer weather and new adventures. Each stop at a new port was an education. Le Havre, where I saw a pissoir for the first time, Lisbon, where my mother wanted to buy a Siamese cat and smuggle it on board ship, and Gibraltar where one of the passengers was bitten by a Barbary ape. Then the slow, hot crawl as the ship passed through the Suez Canal, followed by more days at sea before reaching Ceylon. There, I had my first entrancing sight of an Indian elephant. One morning at sea we sighted a pair of whales, and there were often dolphins to be seen from the deck in the early morning. These are my impressions of the long voyage, telescoped by boyhood memory.

Once in Malaya, I was transformed by the warmth of the tropical climate and an outdoor life. School was a mere half-day, and every afternoon was a time for adventure in the wild landscape around our house on a hill. There was very little television in that childhood; my only regular viewing was the weekly episodes of Flipper. Books were my education, and I would stay awake at night too scared to sleep after reading a few pages of Jim Corbett’s Man Eaters of Kumaon. In the daytime, giant spiders, scorpions and snakes were always to be found, and my friends and I would invade the jungle armed with sharpened bamboo poles in search of wild pigs. More importantly, I learned to swim. I became a fish.

For Tim Ecott, author of the bestselling Neutral Buoyancy, the underwater world is one of great healing and wonder. Here, he tells us how it helped him to come to terms with a great loss, and shares his obsession with the magic of the ocean.

Working as a journalist for the BBC World Service in the 1980s and 1990s I had the great good fortune to find myself reporting regularly from the islands of the south western Indian Ocean - dream holiday destinations like Seychelles and Mauritius and the far less developed islands of the Comoros and Madagascar.

I enjoyed visiting the region from a professional point of view because the islands were all so different from one another, both physically and culturally, as well as geographically. Politically the area was complex and fascinating, and all but overlooked by the majority of English-speaking journalists because of its strongly Francophone heritage and its seeming irrelevance to the wider world. In fact, the region was fraught with pre and post cold-war allegiances and was a magnet for adventurers of many kinds; mercenaries, treasure-hunters and entrepreneurs. I met dealers in cloves and vanilla, exporters of rare essences like ylang-ylang oil and patchouli, as well as emerald smugglers and arms dealers and a smattering of modern day pirates who lived off the cut and thrust of inter-island trading.

The very smell of the islands was intoxicating to me and I craved any opportunity to return there. As a child I had lived in Malaysia and I associated the sound of the cicadas, the heavy humid air and the clear, bright night skies with carefree days spent running around in flip-flops and shorts. Whatever my working commitments, I enjoyed the chance to swim in the Indian Ocean before I had to leave my hotel for the trip to the airport and a return flight to London. There were colourful fish and occasional sightings of barracuda and small sharks and it seemed as if swimming among them could cleanse my mind and soul.

Ironically, I had always avoided scuba diving. I always imagined that it was a dangerous sport, rather technical and cumbersome in its equipment, and no-doubt financially ruinous on a BBC salary. Occasionally I would see divers traipsing down the beach in their gear and hear them talking about their experiences afterward in the hotel bar. But somehow they never gave me an impression of just how wonderful their underwater visits could be. It was only at a time of great personal sadness that I discovered that the underwater world could be a healing and wondrous place.

When my mother died (after a long and difficult illness) I was desperately sad. Her death, even though it was expected, left a terrible void. After her funeral my immediate instinct was to escape from an empty house to the warm bright islands of the Indian Ocean. Rather than leave him alone, I invited my brother to accompany me, and it was his suggestion that we should try scuba diving.

Perhaps because I associate the tropics with a childhood reverie of unfettered adventure, diving affected me in a profound way. I became obsessed with it and did everything in my power to find a way of living on an island where I could dive whenever I wanted. For two years I made a home in Seychelles, and worked as a divemaster taking other divers on underwater tours. It was that experience that eventually led to writing Neutral Buoyancy.

Initially I wanted to write about fish sharks and dolphins, the charismatic creatures that charm anyone with a feeling for the liquid world. I wanted to take readers to the Bahamas, Seychelles, Papua New Guinea and into the cool green depths of the English channel. Only as the book took shape did I fully appreciate how fundamental the desire to go underwater has always been for mankind. While researching the history of the sport and the earliest attempts to allow men to breathe underwater I entered a world of truly inspirational human characters.

I can only describe it as an honour to have met some of the pioneers of the diving world. Non-divers may not realise that it is only in the last sixty years or so that diving for pure pleasure has been possible. In search of the history of those pioneers I met people like Jean Michel Cousteau, son of the late great Jacques, whose television films inspired countless individuals to become marine biologists, divers and explorers.

It was a great privilege to meet the Austrian diving pioneer Hans Hass, still going strong at eighty years of age and his charming wife Lotte, the first TV stars of diving way back in the 1950s. I also met ‘Dickie’ Greenland, one of the bravest divers of the Second World War and the irrepressible Dottie Frasier, America’s first female scuba instructor.

I didn’t know what kind of book Neutral Buoyancy might eventually become when I sat down to write it. In part it is a history of underwater exploration, in part a personal memoir. It is also an attempt to capture the spirit of the sea, the mesmerising appeal of breathing underwater and communing with creatures whose lives are still mostly a mystery to us. Most of all I hope I have captured something of the magic that being underwater brings to me and to so many other people who are obsessed with immersion in the liquid world.

Download your free Neutral Buoyancy screen saver here. It’s easy, just click on either the PC or MAC screensaver links and follow the instructions below.

PC screensaver. 

Mac screensaver.

PCs

Double click on the file named ‘neutral_buoyancy_setup_pc.exe’.

A small rectangular window will open with a preview of the screensaver.

Click on the ‘install’ button.

The screensaver will then install some files to your PC and automatically launch

the ‘Display Properties’ window.

In the field marked ‘Wait’ you can select the number of minutes your machine

stands idle before the screensaver appears.

If you click on ‘Settings’ there is a checkbox which enables you to mute the sound

should you so desire.

Macs

Copy the file ‘neutral_buoyancy_setup_mac’ into your Control Panel.

Restart your machine.

The screensaver is now active.

To adjust the settings for the screensaver enter your Control Panel and click on

‘neutral_buoyancy_setup_mac’. An information window will open that allows you to

adjust the minutes of no activity before the screensaver starts, select the sleep

corner of your mac and mute the sound.

Licence and Disclaimer

LICENSING AGREEMENT AND LIABILITY DISCLAIMER (referred to below as 'the

Licence and Disclaimer') between the user (‘you’) of this screensaver software (the ‘Software’) and Penguin Books Limited (‘Penguin’).

Before installing the Software, you must read the terms of the Licence and Disclaimer. If you accept them, you may load the screensaver. By installing the screensaver, you will be regarded as having read and accepted the Licence and Disclaimer, so if you haven't done so, do not install the screensaver.

1. Licence

Penguin hereby grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to:

(a) load and store the Software on a single computer;

(b) make one back up copy of the Software if it is used and stored in RAM or to retain the CD-ROM as a back up copy if the Software is downloaded to hard disc, which copy will be covered by the terms of this Licence and Disclaimer;

(c) to run the Software;

(d) to display the Software on screen and print off single screens,

in each case for personal, non-commercial use only.

2. Disclaimer

To the fullest extent legally possible, you are receiving the Software on an 'as is' basis and Penguin hereby excludes any warranty, express or implied, as to the quality, accuracy, completeness, performance, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement of third party rights of the Software or any of its contents.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Penguin will not be liable for any direct, indirect, consequential or incidental damage or loss of any kind (including, without limitation, loss of profits, business interruption, loss of or corruption to business information or data, damage to business equipment or assets), however caused, arising in contract, tort or otherwise from the use of or inability to use the Software or any of its contents, even if a Penguin representative has been advised of the possibility of such damages, or for any claim by a third party. You are solely responsible for the adequate protection and backup of the data and equipment used in connection with the Software.

For the avoidance of doubt, Penguin does not limit its liability for death or personal injury to the extent only that it arises as a result of the negligence of Penguin, its associates, directors, employees or other representatives.

3. Copyright Notice

The Software is owned by Penguin Limited and its licensors, and its structure, organization and code are the properties of Penguin and its licensors. The Software is protected by copyright laws and use of it in contravention of the terms of this Licence and Disclaimer will be dealt with by the copyright holders in accordance with those laws.

4. No modification or transfer

You must not rent, lease, distribute, loan, sublicense or otherwise deal in the Software. You must not modify, adapt, translate, merge, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software in any way for any purpose, including, without limitation, for error correction.

5. Governing law/General provisions

The Software and the Licence and Disclaimer are governed by English Law. The English Courts have exclusive jurisdiction over any disputes arising in relation thereto.

If any part of the Licence and Disclaimer is found void and unenforceable, it will not affect the validity of the balance of the Licence and Disclaimer, which shall remain valid and enforceable according to its terms. You agree that the Software will not be shipped, transferred or exported into any country or used in any manner prohibited by export laws, restrictions or regulations.

6. Our address

Penguin Books Limited

80 The Strand

London

WC2R 0RL

United Kingdom

Copyright 2001 Penguin Books Limited.

All rights reserved