The Log from the Sea of Cortez Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6 - MARCH 12

  Chapter 7 - MARCH 16

  Chapter 8 - MARCH 17

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 - MARCH 18

  Chapter 11 - MARCH 20

  Chapter 12 - MARCH 22

  Chapter 13 - MARCH 23

  Chapter 14 - MARCH 24, EASTER SUNDAY

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16 - MARCH 25

  Chapter 17 - MARCH 27

  Chapter 18 - MARCH 28

  Chapter 19 - MARCH 29

  Chapter 20 - MARCH 30

  Chapter 21 - MARCH 31

  Chapter 22 - APRIL 1

  Chapter 23 - APRIL 2

  Chapter 24 - APRIL 3

  Chapter 25 - APRIL 22

  Chapter 26 - APRIL 5

  Chapter 27 - APRIL 8

  Chapter 28 - APRIL 11

  Chapter 29 - APRIL 13

  APPENDIX: ABOUT ED RICKETTS

  GLOSSARY

  INDEX

  THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ

  Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez, (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

  Richard Astro is professor of English at the University of Central Florida, where he is also director of the Eastern Europe Linkage Institute. He is the author of John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist, as well as studies on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and western American literature.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Pengum Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads,

  Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, Englan

  Sea of Cortez first published in the United States of America

  by The Viking Press 1941

  The Log from the Sea of Cortez first published by The Viking Press 1951

  Published in Penguin Books 1977

  This edition with an introduction by Richard Astro

  published in Penguin Books 1995

  Sea of Cortez

  Copyright John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, 1941 Copyright renewed John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, Jr., 1969

  All rights reserved

  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

  Copyright John Steinbeck, 1951

  Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck IV and Thom Steinbeck, 1979

  Introduction copyright © Richard Astro, 1995

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.

  [Sea of Cortez]

  The log from the Sea of Cortez/John Steinbeck; introduction by

  Richard Astro.

  p. cm.

  “The narrative portion of the book, Sea of Cortez (1941), by John

  Steinbeck and E. F. Ricketts.”

  Originally published: New York: Viking, 1951.

  “Appendix: About Ed Ricketts”: p.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 9781101398890

  1. Marine invertebrates—Mexico—California, Gulf of.

  2. California, Gulf of (Mexico)—Description and travel.

  3. Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968—Journeys—Mexico—California, Gulf

  of. 4. Ricketts, Edward Flanders, 1896-1948—Journeys—Mexico—

  California, Gulf of. I. Ricketts, Edward Flanders, 1896-1948.

  II. Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968. About Ed Ricketts. III. Title.

  QL225.S74 1995

  508.3164’1—dc20 95-14802

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  INTRODUCTION

  In February 1995, a large and diverse group of Californians, most of them at least in their mid-seventies, gathered on Cannery Row to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Steinbeck’s novel of the same name, and otherwise to reminisce about the two men who made the Row famous: the novelist himself and his closest personal and intellectual companion, marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts. The event was billed as “a symposium,” and was co-sponsored by the Cannery Row Foundation and Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University. But given the list of participants—Including two of Ricketts’s children; Joel Hedgpeth, senior curmudgeon of the California intertidal; Virginia Scardigli, former teacher and friend of both Steinbeck and Ricketts; Alan Baldrige, for many years the librarian at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station on Ocean Avenue near the Row; and Robert Enea, a nephew of two of the crew members from the Sea of Cortez expedition—the event was less a symposium than a giant party. And this seemed an appropriate way to commemorate the publication of the book in
which Steinbeck wrote that every party has its own pathology, and that “a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended.” Of course, that book’s leading character is a fictionalized version of Steinbeck’s closest friend and his collaborator on Sea of Cortez—his most important work of nonfiction, a volume which contains the core of Steinbeck’s worldview, his philosophy of life, and the essence of a relationship between a novelist and a scientist that ranks among the most famous friendships in American letters. If many tall tales were told at the symposium, embellished by years of telling, it made no difference, except to enhance the festivities. For whatever the excesses, the surviving few from the Steinbeck-Ricketts years knew and talked about the breadth and depth of a friendship that was deep and permanent, and that, because of the impact of Ricketts’s thinking on Steinbeck’s most important fiction, accounts in large measure for the novelist’s success as a writer.

  Cannery Row was published five years after the Steinbeck-Ricketts expedition to the Gulf of California, and while Ricketts’s life in Monterey remained largely unchanged afterward (he was drafted into the army during World War II, but never left the Monterey presidio), Steinbeck departed California altogether. His marriage to his first wife, Carol, ended. He romanced Hollywood singer Gwen Conger, married her in New Orleans, joined the war effort as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote a novelette about the war entitled The Moon Is Down (1942) and some propaganda pieces for the Army Air Corps that were later published as Bombs Away (1943), bought a brownstone on Manhattan’s East Side, and gradually became a New Yorker. He and Ricketts communicated by mail, but they hardly ever saw each other again.

  Cannery Row, which Steinbeck claims he wrote for a group of soldiers who told him to write something funny, something that wasn’t about the war, is more nostalgia than anything else, and the leading character, Doc, is a Ricketts who sometimes resembles the original and is at other times purely a creation of Steinbeck’s imagination. He is not the Ricketts who co-authored Sea of Cortez, which was published days before Pearl Harbor was bombed and America entered the war that separated two men whose ideas were so closely interrelated that it is sometimes difficult to know who learned what from whom. That relationship and the thinking of the two men who wrote it are what Sea of Cortez is really all about. It is a useful work of travel literature, and it is a pioneering work of intertidal ecology, though it was written a full three decades before Earth Day turned environmental thinking into one of our national pastimes.

  When Steinbeck died in December 1968, his critical reputation as a writer was severely tarnished. He had written little of significance in nearly two decades, and his support of the American war effort in Vietnam had put him in critical disrepute among even those critics who earlier had commended him as the champion of the victims of the Oklahoma dustbowl and the avarice of California agribusiness in The Grapes of Wrath, and for his compelling portraits of the simple but decent denizens of the Central California valleys in Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Pastures of Heaven. When he died, there were few serious scholars who did not share Harry T. Moore’s feeling that his ultimate status as a writer would be that of a Louis Bromfield or a Bess Streeter Aldrich, and that even his best books were watered down by what Arthur Mizener called his “tenth-rate philosophizing.”

  History has proved otherwise. During the past quarter century, a veritable Steinbeck industry has emerged. All of his books have been reprinted. Important full-length critical studies have been published by major academic presses, and articles on virtually every aspect of his work have appeared in the best scholarly journals. The publication of his letters by his widow, Elaine, in collaboration with Robert Walsten, and a comprehensive and carefully researched biography by Jackson J. Benson, have shed new light on the man and his creative process. Steinbeck research centers now exist at several universities, most notably in the unlikely location of Muncie, Indiana, where, at Ball State University, Tetsumaro Hayashi began in 1969 publishing the Steinbeck Quarterly, which helped young Steinbeck scholars to share their views long before the more prestigious journals were prepared to question the judgments of Harry Moore and Arthur Mizener.

  Today, Steinbeck’s reputation seems secure. While few would disagree that his canon as a whole reflects an uneven talent, it is clear that his best books champion ordinary men and women, simple souls who do battle against the forces that dehumanize the species, and who struggle, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to forge lives of genuine meaning and worth. At the center of Steinbeck’s thematic vision is a continuing dialectic between contrasting ways of life: between innocence and experience, between primitivism and progress, between narrow self-interest and an enduring commitment to the human community. His most interesting characters—George Milton and Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men, Doc Burton of In Dubious Battle, Tom Joad and Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, and Mack and the boys in Cannery Row—search for meaning in a world of human error and imperfection.

  At the heart of this dialectic are the contrasting views of human society held by the novelist and Ed Ricketts. This contrast in views can be seen in Sea of Cortez, and in large measure accounts for the book’s importance. For while in much of his work, and most notably in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck celebrates what he calls “man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit,” the fact that man “grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments,” he also concedes (in the narrative portion of Sea of Cortez) that man “might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.”

  I have long believed and I have written elsewhere that “the tragic miracle of consciousness” is, for Steinbeck, man’s greatest burden and his greatest glory. And it is the manner in which Steinbeck portrays this burden and this glory in his novels and his short stories that accounts for his success as a writer. This is the basis of the feeling in his fiction, the compassion, and at its extreme, his sentimentality. It was his central concern as a writer, from Henry Morgan’s drive for power in Cup of Gold and Joseph Wayne’s search for meaning in To a God Unknown, to the last sentence of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he paraphrased John the Apostle, stating, “In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man, and the Word is with Man.” It is to Sea of Cortez that we must look if we are fully to understand all this, if we are to grasp the thematic vision of this writer whose books continue to be read and reread by millions of all ages, in his native California, across the United States, and throughout the world—where. in such diverse countries as Portugal and Poland, Mexico and Moldova, Steinbeck remains among the most loved and appreciated of all American novelists.

  Though Steinbeck was born and grew up in the city of Salinas, a major processing center for the foodstuffs raised in one the most fertile agricultural lands in America, he spent much of his childhood and adolescence in the towns along nearby Monterey Bay. In 1930, he settled in the bayside community of Pacific Grove with his bride, Carol Henning, whom he met and married in nearby San Jose. The center of California’s sardine fishing industry, Pacific Grove and its neighboring communities of Monterey and Carmel were for many years California’s “seacoast of bohemia.” Robinson Jeffers built Tor House along Big Sur. Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce were frequent short-term visitors, and Charles Warren Stoddard, George Sterling, and Mary Austin were permanent residents. Monterey Bay itself, as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in “The Old Pacific Capital,” resembles a giant fishhook—with Monterey cozily ensconced beside the barb. Just outside the barb, in a cove embraced by rugged Point Lobos, lies Carmel. And just short of Point Lobos, the Carmel River reaches the sea, flowing down from what Stevenson called �
��a true California valley, bare, dotted with chaparral, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills.”

  The Steinbecks were in poor financial shape as the decade began. His first novel, Cup of Gold, failed to sell, and Carol had given up a teaching job in San Jose to move with him to the Steinbeck cottage in Pacific Grove. When Steinbeck and Ricketts met in 1930 (not at a dentist’s office as Steinbeck states in his retrospective “About Ed Ricketts,” but rather at the home of Ricketts’s friend and other collaborator, Jack Calvin), the most immediate result of their budding friendship was that Ricketts hired Carol as his secretary at his Pacific Biological Laboratory, where Ricketts made ends meet during the Great Depression by selling prepared slides to local high schools. At the same time, Steinbeck and Ricketts gradually developed a deep and lasting friendship, based largely on the novelist’s interest in Ricketts’s work in the intertidal.

  It is generally assumed that Steinbeck’s interest in marine science began when he met Ricketts. But Steinbeck had been interested in the subject for several years, at least since 1923, when he took a summer course in general zoology at the Hopkins Marine Station taught by C. V. Taylor. Taylor was a student of Charles Kofoid at Berkeley, and both were devotees of William Emerson Ritter, whose doctrine of the organismal conception of life formed the zeitgeist of the Berkeley biological sciences faculty at the time. In fact, Ritter’s ideas were transmitted via Kofoid and Taylor to the young and impressionable Steinbeck, who years later told Hopkins professor Rolf Bolin that what he remembered most about his summer at Hopkins was Ritter’s concept of the “superorganism.”

  Ritter believed that “in all parts of nature and in nature itself as one gigantic whole, wholes are so related to their parts that not only does the existence of the whole depend upon the orderly cooperation and interdependence of the parts, but the whole exercises a measure of determinative control over its parts.” This notion of “wholeness” is inherent in every unit of existence, claimed Ritter, since each living unit is a unique whole, the parts of which “contribute their proper share to the structure and the functioning of the whole.” Ritter believed that since “one’s ability to construct his own nature from portions of nature in general is a basic fact of his reality,” man is capable of understanding the organismal unity of life and, as a result, can know himself more fully. This, says Ritter, is “man’s supreme glory”—not only “that he can know the world, but he can know himself as a knower of the world.”