New Trails

Television, that relentless blazer of old trails, opened some fresh territory for a change last week. On NBC, retired Astronaut John Glenn, 46, premiered his Great Explorations series with "The Trail of Stanley and Livingstone." And on ABC, The Undersea World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau cycle was launched with "Sharks."

Glenn, on leave from the board chairmanship of Royal Crown International, retraced Henry Stanley's 1,000-mile trek, from Bagamoyo to Ujiji, in what is now Tanzania. The New York Herald headline hunter took 71 months to reach Missionary David Livingstone in 1871. Glenn made it in 51 weeks by foot, rail and Land-Rover. In the process, his documentary flashed back and forth artfully but not artily between Stanley's diary and line drawings of the day and troubled contemporary Tanzania. Glenn's words were not quite up to his pictures, though. By contrast with ABC's Project Africa or with Stanley's own eloquence, the Glenn chronicle at times sounded as elementary as My Weekly Reader.

Saddened by much of what he found, Glenn showed the audience the sites of the ancient slave trade and pointed out the tall mango trees "grown from seeds spat out by slaves." He winced visibly at a beggar who had been blinded, deplored disease, illiteracy (80%), and the poached-out game lands that the natives suffer with "silent resignation." "Shooting for the pot" (living off the land) for part of the journey, as did the Stanley expedition, Glenn briefly tried to master hurling the knobkerrie, a throwing stick, and missed his target. But he used a Winchester 70 rifle to dispatch--in two shots--a massive rogue elephant that was ravaging the crops. "There was a cause for destruction," he told his viewers. "But I'm not proud of killing this great beast." Then the caravan smoked great chunks of it over a makeshift barbecue.

Killing Machine. "This voyage is the culmination of my life's work," proclaimed the 57-year-old Cousteau (TIME cover, March 28, 1960) as he set out last February from Monaco. For the opener of his series, which will run to at least twelve specials over a five-year span, his converted minesweeper Calypso pursued sharks in the waters of the Middle East. For half a year, Cousteau's crew was aswirl in terrifying hammerheads, blue whalers and tiger, shovelnose and white-tipped sharks--"by whatever name," the narrator said of the breed, "a fearsome brute, a perfect killing machine." But Cousteau's red-capped divers fearlessly ran off experiments right in their menacing midst. One crewman rode the back of a 60-ton whale shark. Others worked in pairs, back to back, each carrying a shark billy to fend off attackers on all flanks. When the quarry was most frenzied or aggressive, the explorers made their studies from behind steel cages lowered from the Calypso.

The divers moved as gracefully as if they were choreographed by Balanchine; the sharks circled with the sinister determination of a Pinter villain. Remarkably, there were no accidents. "It was good that we finished without trouble," said the chief cameraman, Cousteau's 27-year-old son Philippe, "because I think we were getting overconfident."

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