Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

  “This is the Western Flyer. Is that you, Johnny?”

  “Yeah, that you, Sparky?”

  “Yeah, this is Sparky. How much fish you got?”

  “Only fifteen tons; we lost a school today. How much fish you got?”

  “We’re not fishing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Aw, we’re going down in the Gulf to collect starfish and bugs and stuff like that.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, O.K., Sparky, I’ll clear the wave length.”

  “Wait, Johnny. You say you only got fifteen tons?”

  “That’s right. If you talk to my cousin, tell him, will you?”

  “Yeah, I will, Johnny. Western Flyer’s all clear now.”

  Hitler marched into Denmark and into Norway, France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost—we didn’t know it, but we knew the daily catch of every boat within four hundred miles. It was simply a directional thing; a man has only so much. And so it was with the chartering of a boat. The owners were not distrustful of us; they didn’t even listen to us because they couldn’t quite believe we existed. We were obviously ridiculous.

  Now the time was growing short and we began to worry. Finally one boat owner who was in financial difficulty offered his boat at a reasonable price and we were ready to accept when suddenly he raised the price out of question and bolted. He was horrified at what he had done. He raised the price, not to cheat us, but to get out of going.

  The boat problem was growing serious when Anthony Berry sailed into Monterey Bay on the Western Flyer. The idea was no shock to Tony Berry; he had chartered to the government for salmon tagging in Alaskan waters and was used to nonsense. Besides, he was an intelligent and tolerant man. He knew that he had idiosyncrasies and that some of his friends had. He was willing to let us do any crazy thing that we wanted so long as we (I) 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. His boat was not busy and he was willing to go. He was a quiet young man, very serious and a good master. He knew some navigation—a rare thing in the fishing fleet—and he had a natural caution which we admired. His boat was new and comfortable and clean, the engines in fine condition. We took the Western Flyer on charter.

  She was seventy-six feet long with a twenty-five-foot beam; her engine, a hundred and sixty-five horsepower direct reversible Diesel, drove her at ten knots. Her deckhouse had a wheel forward, then combination master’s room and radio room, then bunkroom, very comfortable, and behind that the galley. After the galley, a large hatch gave into the fish-hold, and after the hatch were the big turn-table and roller of the purse-seiner. She carried a twenty-foot skiff and a ten-foot skiff. Her engine was a thing of joy, spotlessly clean, the moving surfaces shining and damp with oil and the green paint fresh and new on the housings. The engine-room floor was clean and all the tools polished and hung in their places. One look into the engine-room inspired confidence in the master. We had seen other engines in the fishing fleet and this perfection on the Western Flyer was by no means a general thing.

  As crew we signed Tex Travis, engineer, and Sparky Enea and Tiny Colletto, seamen. All three were a little reluctant to go, for the whole thing was crazy. None of us had been into the Gulf, although the master had been as far as Cape San Lucas, and the Gulf has a really bad name. It was a thoughtful crew who agreed to go with us.

  We could never tell when the change of attitude toward us came, but it came very rapidly. Perhaps it was because Tony Berry was known as a cautious man who would not indulge in nonsense, or perhaps it was pure relief that at last it had been settled. All of a sudden we were overwhelmed with help. We had offers from men to go with us without pay. Sparky was offered a certain price for his job that was more than he would get from us. All he had to do was turn over his job and sit in Monterey and spend the money. But Sparky refused. Our project had become honorable. We had more help than we could use and advice enough to move the navies of the world.

  We did not know what our crew thought of the expedition but later, in the field, they became good collectors—a little emotional sometimes, as when Tiny, in outrage at being pinched, declared a war of extermination on the whole Sally Lightfoot species, but on the whole collectors of taste and quickness.

  The charter was signed with dignity and reverence. It is impossible to be light-hearted in the face of a ship’s charter, for the law has foreseen or remembered the most doleful and arbitrary acts of God and has set them down as possibilities, but in the tone of inevitabilities. Thus, you read what you or the others must do in the case of wreck, or sunken rocks; of death at sea in its most painful and astonishing aspects; of injury to plank and keel; of water shortage and mutiny. Next to marriage settlement or sentence of death, a ship’s charter is as portentous a document as has ever been written. Penalties are set down against both parties, and if on some morning the rising sun should find your ship in the middle of the Mojave Desert you have only to look again at the charter to find the blame assigned and the penalty indicated. It took us several hours to get over the solemn feeling the charter put on us. We thought we might live better lives and pay our debts, and one at least of us contemplated for one holy, horrified moment a vow of chastity.

  But the charter was signed and food began to move into the Western Flyer. It is amazing how much food seven people need to exist for six weeks. Cases of spaghetti, cases and cases of peaches and pineapple, of tomatoes, whole Romano cheeses, canned milk in coveys, flour and cornmeal, gallons of olive oil, tomato paste, crackers, cans of butter and jam, catsup and rice, beans and bacon and canned meats, vegetables and soups in cans; truckloads of food. And all this food was stored eagerly and happily by the crew. It disappeared into cupboards, under little hatches in the galley floor, and many cases went below.

  We had done a good deal of collecting, but largely in temperate zones. The equipment for collecting, preserving, and storing specimens was selected on the basis of experience in other waters and of anticipation of difficulties imposed by a hot humid country. In some cases we were right, in others very wrong.

  In a small boat, the library should be compact and available. We had constructed a strong, steel-reinforced wooden case, the front of which hinged down to form a desk. This case holds about twenty large volumes and has two filing cases, one for separates (scientific reprints) and one for letters; a small metal box holds pens, pencils, erasers, clips, steel tape, scissors, labels, pins, rubber bands, and so forth. Another compartment contains a three-by-five-inch card file. There are cubby-holes for envelopes, large separates, small separates, typewriter paper, carbon, a box for India ink and glue. The construction of the front makes room for a portable typewriter, drawing board, and T-square. There is a long narrow space for rolled charts and maps. Closed, this compact and complete box is forty-four inches long by eighteen by eighteen; loaded, it weighs between three and four hundred pounds. It was designed to rest on a low table or in an unused bunk. Its main value is compactness, completeness, and accessibility. We took it aboard the Western Flyer. There was no table for it to rest on. It did not fit in a bunk. It could not be put on the deck because of moisture. It ended up lashed to the rail on top of the deckhouse, covered with several layers of tarpaulin and roped on. Because of the roll of the boat it had to be tied down at all times. It took about ten minutes to remove the tarpaulin, untie the lashing line, open the cover, squeeze down between two crates of oranges, read the title of the wanted book upside down, remove it, close and lash and cover the box again. But if there had been a low table or a large bunk, it would have been perfect.

  For many little errors like this, we have concluded that all collecting trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them. Some of the greatest difficulty lies in the fact that previous collectors have never set down the equipment taken and its success or failure. We propose to rectify this in our account.

  The library contained all t
he separates then available on the Panamic and Gulf fauna. Primary volumes such as Johnson and Snook, Ricketts and Calvin, Russell and Yonge, Flattely and Walton, Keep’s West Coast Shells, Fisher’s three-volume starfish monograph, the Rathbun brachyuran monograph, Schmitt’s Marine Decapod Crustacea of California, Fraser’s Hydroids, Barnhart’s Marine Fishes of Southern California, Coast Pilots for the whole Pacific Coast; charts, both large and small scale, of the whole region to be covered.

  The camera equipment was more than adequate, for it was never used. It included a fine German reflex and an 8-mm. movie camera with tripod, light meters, and everything. But we had no camera-man. During low tides we all collected; there was no time to dry hands and photograph at the collecting scene. Later, the anesthetizing, killing, preserving, and labeling of specimens were so important that we still took no pictures. It was an error in personnel. There should be a camera-man who does nothing but take pictures.

  Our collecting material at least was good. Shovels, wrecking-and abalone-bars, nets, long-handled dip-nets, wooden fish-kits, and a number of seven-cell flashlights for night collecting were taken. Containers seemed to go endlessly into the hold of the Western Flyer. Wooden fish-kits with heads; twenty hard-fir barrels with galvanized hoops in fifteen- and thirty-gallon sizes; cases of gallon jars, quart, pint, eight-ounce, five-ounce, and two-ounce screw-cap jars; several gross of corked vials in four chief sizes, 100x33 mm., six-dram, four-dram, and two-dram sizes. There were eight two-and-a-half-gallon jars with screw caps. And with all these we ran short of containers, and before we were through had to crowd those we had. This was unfortunate, since many delicate animals should be preserved separately to prevent injury.

  Of chemicals, we put into the boat a fifteen-gallon barrel of U.S.P. formaldehyde and a fifteen-gallon barrel of denatured alcohol. This was not nearly enough alcohol. The stock had to be replenished at Guaymas, where we bought ten gallons of pure sugar alcohol. We took two gallons of Epsom salts for anesthetization and again ran out and had to buy more in Guaymas. Menthol, chromic acid, and novocain, all for relaxing animals, were included in the chemical kit. Of preparing equipment, there were glass chiton plates and string, lots of rubber gloves, graduates, forceps, and scalpels. Our binocular microscope, Bausch &· Lomb A.K.W., was fitted with a twelve-volt light, but on the rolling boat the light was so difficult to handle that we used a spot flashlight instead. We had galvanized iron nested trays of fifteen- to twenty-gallon capacity for gross hardening and preservation. We had enameled and glass trays for the laying out of specimens, and one small examination aquarium.

  The medical kit had been given a good deal of thought. There were nembutal, butesin picrate for sunburn, a thousand two-grain quinine capsules, two-percent mercuric oxide salve for barnacle cuts, cathartics, ammonia, mercurochrome, iodine, alcaroid, and, last, some whisky for medicinal purposes. This did not survive our leave-taking, but since no one was ill on the whole trip, it may have done its job very well.

  2

  WHAT little time we were not on lists and equipment or in grudging sleep we went to the pier and looked at boats, watched them tied to their buoys behind the breakwater—the dirty boats and the clean painted boats, each one stamped with the personality of its owner. Here, where the discipline was as individual as the owners, every boat was different from every other one. If the stays were rusting and the deck unwashed, paint scraped off and lines piled carelessly, there was no need to see the master; we knew him. And if the lines were coiled and the cables greased and the little luxury of deer horns nailed to the crow‘s-nest, there was no need to see that owner either. There were deer horns on many of the crow’s-nests, and when we asked why, we were told they brought good luck. Out of some ancient time, they brought good luck to these people, most of them out of Sicily, the horns grown sturdily on the structure of their race. If you ask, “Where does the idea come from?” the owner will say, “It brings good luck, we always put them on.” And a thousand years ago the horns were on the masts and brought good luck, and probably when the ships of Carthage and Tyre put into the harbors of Sicily, the horns were on the mastheads and brought good luck and no one knew why. Out of some essential race soul the horns come, and not only the horns, but the boats themselves, so that to a man, to nearly all men, a boat more than any other tool he uses is a little representation of an archetype. There is an “idea” boat that is an emotion, and because the emotion is so strong it is probable that no other tool is made with so much honesty as a boat. Bad boats are built, surely, but not many of them. It can be argued that a bad boat cannot survive tide and wave and hence is not worth building, but the same might be said of a bad automobile on a rough road. Apparently the builder of a boat acts under a compulsion greater than himself. Ribs are strong by definition and feeling. Keels are sound, planking truly chosen and set. A man builds the best of himself into a boat—builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors. Once, passing the boat department of Macy’s in New York, where there are duck-boats and skiffs and little cruisers, one of the authors discovered that as he passed each hull he knocked on it sharply with his knuckles. He wondered why he did it, and as he wondered, he heard a knocking behind him, and another man was rapping the hulls with his knuckles, the same tempo—three sharp knocks on each hull. During an hour’s observation there no man or boy and few women passed who did not do the same thing. Can this have been an unconscious testing of the hulls? Many who passed could not have been in a boat, perhaps some of the little boys had never seen a boat, and yet everyone tested the hulls, knocked to see if they were sound, and did not even know he was doing it. The observer thought perhaps they and he would knock on any large wooden object that might give forth a resonant sound. He went to the piano department, icebox floor, beds, cedar-chests, and no one knocked on them—only on boats.

  How deep this thing must be, the giver and the receiver again; the boat designed through millenniums of trial and error by the human consciousness, the boat which has no counterpart in nature unless it be a dry leaf fallen by accident in a stream. And Man receiving back from Boat a warping of his psyche so that the sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in his chest. A horse, a beautiful dog, arouses sometimes a quick emotion, but of inanimate things only a boat can do it. And a boat, above all other inanimate things, is personified in man’s mind. When we have been steering, the boat has seemed sometimes nervous and irritable, swinging off course before the correction could be made, slapping her nose into the quartering wave. After a storm she has seemed tired and sluggish. Then with the colored streamers set high and snapping, she is very happy, her nose held high and her stern bouncing a little like the buttocks of a proud and confident girl. Some have said they have felt a boat shudder before she struck a rock, or cry when she beached and the surf poured into her. This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul. His spirit and the tendrils of his feeling are so deep in a boat that the identification is complete. It is very easy to see why the Viking wished his body to sail away in an unmanned ship, for neither could exist without the other; or, failing that, how it was necessary that the things he loved most, his women and his ship, lie with him and thus keep closed the circle. In the great fire on the shore, all three started at least in the same direction, and in the gathered ashes who could say where man or woman stopped and ship began?

  This strange identification of man with boat is so complete that probably no man has even destroyed a boat by bomb or torpedo or shell without murder in his heart; and were it not for the sad trait of self-destruction that is in our species, he could not do it. Only the trait of murder which our species seems to have could allow us the sick, exultant sadness of sinking a ship, for we can murder the things we love best, which are, of course, ourselves.

  We have looked into the tide pools and seen the little animals feeding and reproducing and killing for food. We
name them and describe them and, out of long watching, arrive at some conclusion about their habits so that we say, “This species typically does thus and so,” but we do not objectively observe our own species as a species, although we know the individuals fairly well. When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our species. If we used the same smug observation on ourselves that we do on hermit crabs we would be forced to say, with the information at hand, “It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individual to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind. It is not known whether this be caused by a virus, some airborne spore, or whether it be a species reaction to some meteorological stimulus as yet undetermined.” Hope, which is another species diagnostic trait—the hope that this may not always be—does not in the least change the observable past and present. When two crayfish meet, they usually fight. One would say that perhaps they might not at a future time, but without some mutation it is not likely that they will lose this trait. And perhaps our species is not likely to forgo war without some psychic mutation which at present, at least, does not seem imminent. And if one place the blame for killing and destroying on economic insecurity, on inequality, on injustice, he is simply stating the proposition in another way. We have what we are. Perhaps the crayfish feels the itch of jealousy, or perhaps he is sexually insecure. The effect is that he fights. When in the world there shall come twenty, thirty, fifty years without evidence of our murder trait, under whatever system of justice or economic security, then we may have a contrasting habit pattern to examine. So far there is no such situation. So far the murder trait of our species is as regular and observable as our various sexual habits.