The Log from the Sea of Cortez Book

On March 11, 1940, John Steinbeck and his good friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts (who served as Steinbeck's inspiration for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday) cast off from Monterey Bay with a chartered crew of four aboard a 75-foot purse seiner christened the Western Flyer. Their makeshift expedition made way for the Gulf of California. Or, as the narration goes, "Once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and that is a better-sounding and a more exciting name. We stopped in many little harbors and near barren coasts to collect and preserve the marine invetrebraes of the littoral."

The expedition concluded on April 20, 1940 and the following year, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research was published on the heels of Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Grapes of Wrath. The book consisted of Ricketts' log, based on notes he took on the voyage and that Steinbeck edited, as well as an appendix that Ricketts compiled with photographs and drawings of specimens. Ricketts would be killed in 1948 three days after a passenger train struck his car in Monterey. To honor his friend's memory, Steinbeck republished the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez in 1951, removing the appendix and adding a preface dedicated to his friend.

If Ricketts or Steinbeck only published Sea of Cortez, they'd have contributed more to marine biology, geography and the humanities than most. As recently as 1940, the Gulf of California had been documented with only varying degrees of accuracy; the work of an 18th century Jesuit priest named Clavigero rates higher in Ricketts' esteem than the Coast Pilot, the maritime guidebook he begrudges for its "austere tone." There was no sonar, no satellite imagery. Photographic records were poor. Communication along Lower California was primitive. Ricketts and Steinbeck sailed one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world for a month (albeit the month of calmest seas) with less technology than I'm using to write this book review.



Though my mother might get a dizzy spell to see me admit this (she's a retired science teacher), the scientific passages of the book were ones that my eyes tended to glaze over. Crustaceans and other invetrebraes are simply not fascinating subject matter for me to read about. They may be for you. The marine biology portions of the book are far from dense or jargon-filled and do have a pleasant knack for appealing to the ten-year-old explorer in all of us. Many of the classifications simply started to pass by my eyes like something Willy Wonka would make up during a tour of the Chocolate Factory.

We found extremely large sponges, a yellow form (probably Cliona), superficially resembling the Monterey Lissodendoryx noxiosa, and a white one, Steletta, of the wicked spines. There were brilliant-orange nudibranchs, giant terebellid worms, some shell-less air-breathing (pulmonate) snails, a ribbon-worm, and a number of solitary corals. These were common animals and the ones in which we were most interested, for while we took rarities when we came upon them in normal observation, our interest lay in the large groups and their associations--the word "association" implying a biological assemblage, all the animals in a given habitat.

Initially, the boats that Ricketts and Steinbeck attempt to charter in Monterey Bay are owned by Italian, Slav or Japanese sardine fishermen uneasy about anything not related to fishing. The Western Flyer proves game. Her captain, Tony Berry, is intelligent and tolerant. "He was willing to let us do any crazy thing we wanted so long as we (1) paid a fair price, (2) told him where to go, (3) did not insist that he endanger the boat, (4) got back on time, and (5) didn't mix him up in our nonsense." The rest of the crew consists of "Tex" Travis, the engineer, who demonstrates an aversion to sharing dish washing duties, and two able seamen, "Sparky" Enea and "Tiny" Colletto, who "grew up together in Monterey and they were bad little boys and very happy about it."



The highlights of Sea of Cortez for me were Ricketts' picturesque accounts of his experiences in the Gulf, which transported me to that place and time. I was reminded of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the sense that the further the boat travels, the further back in time it seems to travel. In ports of call like Cape San Lucas, the Western Flyer is welcomed with pomp by authorities as if the shrimper was the Queen Mary. In La Paz, little boys swarm the deck once word gets out that gringos are throwing away money on worthless sea creatures. In Puetro Escondido, a rancher invites the crew on a hunting trip with Indian guides in which no hunting takes place. In Loreto, a little boy takes them on a tour.

This small boy could have been an ambassador to almost any country in the world. His straight-seeing dark eyes were courteous, yet firm. He was kind and dignified. He told us something of Loreto; of its poverty, and how its church was tumbled down now; and he walked with us to the destroyed mission. The roof had fallen in and the main body of the church was a mass of rubble. From the walls hung the shreds of old paintings. But the bell-tower was intact, and we wormed our way deviously up to look at the old bells and to strike them softly with the palms of our hands so that they glowed a little with tone.

I can imagine that the only thing grander than Ricketts and Steinbeck exploring the Sea of Cortez for a month was editing Sea of Cortez. Even though Steinbeck refused to take any credit whatsoever for the log, I was able to connect this book with the travelogue Steinbeck wrote twenty years later, Travels with Charley: In Search of America. While that book was about a successful author trying to rediscover the country he'd been writing about from the comfort of his home in Long Island and autumnal in tone, Sea of Cortez is full of spring's youthful vigor, of living in the present, exploring the flora and fauna of Old Mexico with your best friend and other men.



My list of John Steinbeck books ranked from favorite to least favorite:

1. East of Eden (1952)
2. The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
3. Sweet Thursday (1954)
4. Of Mice and Men (1937)
5. The Wayward Bus (1947)
6. Tortilla Flat (1935)
7. The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
8. Cannery Row (1945)
9. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941)
10. Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)
11. The Pastures of Heaven (1932)