Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

  The mist lifted from the water but the oily slickness remained, and it was like new snow for keeping the impressions of what had happened there. Near to us was the greasy mess where a school of sardines had been milling, and on it the feathers of gulls which had come to join the sardines and, having fed hugely, had sat on the water and combed themselves in comfort. A Japanese liner passed us, slipping quickly through the smooth water, and for a long time we rocked in her wake. It was a long lazy day, and when the night came we passed the lights of Los Angeles with its many little dangling towns. The searchlights of the fleet at San Pedro combed the sea constantly, and one powerful glaring beam crept several miles and lay on us so brightly that it threw our shadows on the exhaust stack.

  In the early morning before daylight we came into the harbor at San Diego, in through the narrow passage, and we followed the lights on a changing course to the pier. All about us war bustled, although we had no war; steel and thunder, powder and men—the men preparing thoughtlessly, like dead men. to destroy things. The planes roared over in formation and the submarines were quiet and ominous. There is no playfulness in a submarine. The military mind must limit its thinking to be able to perform its function at all. Thus, in talking with a naval officer who had won a target competition with big naval guns, we asked, “Have you thought what happens in a little street when one of your shells explodes, of the families torn to pieces, a thousand generations influenced when you signaled Fire?” “Of course not,” he said. “Those shells travel so far that you couldn’t possibly see where they land.” And he was quite correct. If he could really see where they land and what they do, if he could really feel the power in his dropped hand and the waves radiating out from his gun, he would not be able to perform his function. He himself would be the weak point of his gun. But by not seeing, by insisting that it be a problem of ballistics and trajectory, he is a good gunnery officer. And he is too humble to take the responsibility for thinking. The whole structure of his world would be endangered if he permitted himself to think. The pieces must stick within their pattern or the whole thing collapses and the design is gone. We wonder whether in the present pattern the pieces are not straining to fall out of line; whether the paradoxes of our times are not finally mounting to a conclusion of ridiculousness that will make the whole structure collapse. For the paradoxes are becoming so great that leaders of people must be less and less intelligent to stand their own leadership.

  The port of San Diego in that year was loaded with explosives and the means of transporting and depositing them on some enemy as yet undetermined. The men who directed this mechanism were true realists. They knew an enemy would emerge, and when one did, they had explosives to deposit on him.

  In San Diego we filled the fuel tanks and the water tanks. We filled the icebox and took on the last perishable foods, bread and eggs and fresh meat. These would not last long, for when the ice was gone only the canned goods and the foods we could take from the sea would be available. We tied up to the pier all day and a night; got our last haircuts and ate broiled steaks.

  This little expedition had become tremendously important to us; we felt a little as though we were dying. Strangers came to the pier and stared at us and small boys dropped on our deck like monkeys. Those quiet men who always stand on piers asked where we were going and when we said, “To the Gulf of California,” their eyes melted with longing, they wanted to go so badly. They were like the men and women who stand about airports and railroad stations; they want to go away, and most of all they want to go away from themselves. For they do not know that they would carry their globes of boredom with them wherever they went. One man on the pier who wanted to participate made sure he would be allowed to cast us off, and he waited at the bow line for a long time. Finally he got the call and he cast off the bow line and ran back and cast off the stern line; then he stood and watched us pull away and he wanted very badly to go.

  Below the Mexican border the water changes color; it takes on a deep ultramarine blue—a washtub bluing blue, intense and seeming to penetrate deep into the water; the fishermen call it “tuna water.” By Friday we were off Point Baja. This is the region of the sea-turtle and the flying fish. Tiny and Sparky put out the fishing lines, and they stayed out during the whole trip.

  Sparky Enea and Tiny Colletto grew up together in Monterey and they were bad little boys and very happy about it. It is said lightly that the police department had a special detail to supervise the growth and development of Tiny and Sparky. They are short and strong and nearly inseparable. An impulse seems to strike both of them at once. Let Tiny make a date with a girl and Sparky make a date with another girl—it then becomes necessary for Tiny, by connivance and trickery, to get Sparky’s girl. But it is all right, since Sparky has been moving mountains to get Tiny’s girl.

  These two shared a watch, and on their watches we often went strangely off course and no one ever knew why. The compass had a way of getting out of hand so that the course invariably arced inshore. These two rigged the fishing lines with feathered artificial squid. Where the tackle was tied to the stays on either side, they looped the line and inset automobile inner tubes. For the tuna strikes so hard that something must give, and if the line does not break, the jaws tear off, so great is the combination of boat speed and tuna speed. The inner tube solves this problem by taking up the strain of the first great strike until direction and speed are equalized.

  When Sparky and Tiny had the watch they took care of the fishing, and when the rubber tubes snapped and shook, one of them climbed down to take in the fish. If it were a large one, or a sharp-fighting fish, hysterical shrieks came from the fisherman. Whereupon the one left at the wheel came down to help and the wheel swung free. We wondered if this habit might not have caused the wonderful course we sailed sometimes. It is not beyond reason that coming back to the wheel, arguing and talking, they might have forgotten the set course and made one up almost as good. “Surely,” they might think, “that is kinder and better than waking up the master to ask the course again, and five or ten degrees isn’t so important when you aren’t going far.” If Tony loved the truth for itself, he was more than counterbalanced by Sparky and Tiny. They have little faith in truth, or, for that matter, in untruth. The police who had overseen their growing up had given them a nice appreciation of variables; they tested everything to find out whether it were true or not. In a like manner they tested the compass for a weakness they suspected was in it. And if Tony should say, “You are way off course,” they could answer, “Well, we didn’t hit anything, did we?”

  7

  March 16

  BY TWO P.M. we were in the region of Magdalena Bay. The sea was still oily and smooth, and a light lacy fog lay on the water. The flying fish leaped from the forcing bow and flew off to right and left. It seemed, although this has not been verified, that they could fly farther at night than during the day. If, as is supposed, the flight is terminated when the flying fins dry in the air, this observation would seem to be justified, for at night they would not dry so quickly. Again, the whole thing might be a trick of our eyes. Often we played the searchlight on a fish in flight. The strangeness of light may have made the flight seem longer.

  Tiny is a natural harpooner; often he had stood poised on the bow, holding the lance, but thus far nothing had appeared except porpoises, and these he would not strike. But now the sea-turtles began to appear in numbers. He stood for a long time waiting, and finally he drove his lance into one of them. Sparky promptly left the wheel, and the two of them pulled in a small turtle, about two and a half feet long. It was a tortoise-shell turtle.4 Now we were able to observe the tender hearts of our crew. The small arrow-harpoon had penetrated the fairly soft shell, then turned sideways in the body. They hung the turtle to a stay where it waved its flippers helplessly and stretched its old wrinkled neck and gnashed its parrot beak. The small dark eyes had a quizzical pained look and a quantity of blood emerged from the pierced shell. Suddenly remorse, seized Tiny; he w
anted to put the animal out of its pain. He lowered the turtle to the deck and brought out an ax. With his first stroke he missed the animal entirely and sank the blade into the deck, but on his second stroke he severed the head from the body. And now a strange and terrible bit of knowledge came to Tiny; turtles are very hard to kill. Cutting off the head seems to have little immediate effect. This turtle was as lively as it had been, and a large quantity of very red blood poured from the trunk of the neck. The flippers waved frantically and there was none of the constricting motion of a decapitated animal. We were eager to examine this turtle and we put Tiny’s emotion aside for the moment. There were two barnacle bases on the shell and many hydroids which we preserved immediately. In the hollow beside the small tail were two pelagic crabs5 of the square-fronted group, a male and a female; and from the way in which they hid themselves in the fold of turtle skin they seemed to be at home there. We were eager to examine the turtle’s intestinal tract, both to find the food it had been eating and to look for possible tapeworms. To this end we sawed the shell open at the sides and opened the body cavity. From gullet to anus the digestive tract was crammed with small bright-red rock-lobsters 6; a few of those nearest the gullet were whole enough to preserve. The gullet itself was lined with hard, sharp-pointed spikes, not of bone, but of a specialized tissue hard enough to macerate the small Crustacea the turtle fed on. A curious peristalsis of the gullet (still observable, since even during dissection the reflexes were quite active) brought these points near together in a grinding motion and at the same time passed the increasingly macerated material downward toward the stomach. A good adaptation to food supply by structure, or perhaps vice versa. The heart continued to beat regularly. We removed it and placed it in a jar of salt water, where it continued to pulse for several hours; and twenty-four hours later, when it had apparently stopped, a touch with a glass rod caused it to pulse several times before it relaxed again. Tiny did not like this process of dissection. He wants his animals to die and be dead when he chops them; and when we cut up the muscular tissue, intending to cook it, and even the little cubes of white meat responded to touch, Tiny swore that he would give up sea-turtles and he never again tried to harpoon one. In his mind they joined the porpoises as protected animals. Probably he identified himself with the writhing tissue of the turtle and was unable to see it objectively.

  The cooking was a failure. We boiled the meat, and later threw out the evil-smelling mess. (Subsequently, we discovered that one has to know how to cook a turtle.) But the turtle shell we wished to preserve. We scraped it as well as we could and salted it. Later we hung it deep in the water, hoping the isopods would clean it for us, but they never did. Finally we impregnated it with formaldehyde, then let it dry in the sun, and after all that we threw it away. It was never pretty and we never loved it.

  During the night we crossed a school of bonito,7 fast, clean-cut, beautiful fish of the mackerel family. The boys on watch caught five of them on the lines and during the process we got quite badly off course. We tried to take moving pictures of the color and of the color-pattern change which takes place in these fish during their death struggles. In the flurry when they beat the deck with their tails, the colors pulse and fade and brighten and fade again, until, when they are dead, a new pattern is visible. We wished to take color photographs of many of the animals because of the impossibility of retaining color in preserved specimens, and also because many animals, in fact most animals, have one color when they are alive and another when they are dead. However, none of us was expert in photography and we had a very mediocre success. The bonitos were good to eat, and Sparky fried big thick fillets for us.

  That night we netted two small specimens of the northern flying fish.8 Sparky, when we were looking at Barnhart’s ,Marine Fishes of Southern California, saw a drawing of a lantern-fish entitled “Monoceratias acanthias after Gilbert” and he asked, “What’s he after Gilbert for?”

  This smooth blue water runs out of time very quickly, and a kind of dream sets in. Then a floating box cast overboard from some steamship becomes a fascinating thing, and it is nearly impossible not to bring the wheel over and go to pick it up. A new kind of porpoise began to appear, gray, where the northern porpoise had been dark brown. They were slim and very fast, the noses long and paddle-shaped. They move about in large schools, jumping out of the water and seeming to have a very good time. The abundance of life here gives one an exuberance, a feeling of fullness and richness. The playing porpoises, the turtles, the great schools of fish which ruffle the water surface like a quick breeze, make for excitement. Sometimes in the distance we have seen a school of jumping tuna, and as they threw themselves clear of the water, the sun glittered on them for a moment. The sea here swarms with life, and probably the ocean bed is equally rich. Microscopically, the water is crowded with plankton. This is the tuna water—life water. It is complete from plankton to gray porpoises. The turtle was complete with the little almost-commensal crab living under his tail and with barnacles and hydroids riding on his back. The pelagic rock-lobsters 6 littered the ocean with red spots. There was food everywhere. Everything ate everything else with a furious exuberance.

  About five P.M. on the sixteenth, seventy miles north of Point Lazaro, we came upon hosts of the red rock-lobsters on the surface, brilliant red and beautiful against the ultramarine of the water. There was no protective coloration here—a greater contrast could not have been chosen. The water seemed almost solid with the little red crustacea, called “langustina” by the Mexicans. According to Stimpson, on March 8, 1859, a number of them were thrown ashore at Monterey in California, many hundreds of miles from their usual range. It was probably during one of those queer cycles when the currents do amazing things. We idled our engine and crept slowly along catching up the langustina in dip-nets. We put them in white porcelain pans and took some color moving pictures of them—some of the few good moving pictures, incidentally, made during the whole trip. In the pans we saw that these animals do not swim rapidly, but rather wriggle and crawl through the water. Finally, we immersed them in fresh water and when they were dead, preserved them in alcohol, which promptly removed their brilliant color.

  8

  March 17

  AT TWO A.M. we passed Point Lazaro, one of the reputedly dangerous places of the world, like Cedros Passage, or like Cape Horn, where the weather is always bad even when it is good elsewhere. There is a sense of relief when one is safely past these half-mythical places, for they are not only stormy but treacherous, and again the atavistic fear arises—the Scylla-Charybdis fear that made our ancestors people such places with monsters and enter them only after prayer and propitiation. It was only reasonably rough when we passed, and immediately south the water was very calm. About five in the morning we came upon an even denser concentration of the little red Pleuroncodes, and we stopped again and took a great many of them. While we netted the langustina, a skipjack struck the line and we brought him in and had him for breakfast. During the meal we said the fish was Katsuwonus pelamis, and Sparky said it was a skipjack because he was eating it and he was quite sure he would not eat Katsuwonus pelamis ever. A few hours later we caught two small dolphins,9 startlingly beautiful fish of pure gold, pulsing and fading and changing colors. These fish are very widely distributed.

  We were coming now toward the end of our day-and-night running; the engine had never paused since we left San Diego except for idling the little time while we took the langustina. The coastline of the Peninsula slid along, brown and desolate and dry with strange flat mountains and rocks torn by dryness, and the heat shimmer hung over the land even in March. Tony had kept us well offshore, and only now we approached closer to land, for we would arrive at Cape San Lucas in the night, and from then on we planned to run only in the daytime. Some collecting stations we had projected, like Pulmo Reef and La Paz and Angeles Bay, but except for those, we planned to stop wherever the shore looked interesting. Even this little trip of ninety hours, though, had grown long, an
d we were glad to be getting to the end of it. The dry hills were red gold that afternoon and in the night no one left the top of the deckhouse. The Southern Cross was well above the horizon, and the air was warm and pleasant. Tony spent a long time in the galley going over the charts. He had been to Cape San Lucas once before. Around ten o‘clock we saw the lighthouse on the false cape. The night was extremely dark when we rounded the end; the great tall rocks called “The Friars” were blackly visible. The Coast Pilot spoke of a light on the end of the San Lucas pier, but we could see no light. Tony edged the boat slowly into the dark harbor. Once a flashlight showed for a moment on the shore and then went out. It was after midnight, and of course there would be no light in a Mexican house at such a time. The searchlight on our deckhouse seemed to be sucked up by the darkness. Sparky on the bow with the leadline found deep water, and we moved slowly in, stopping and drifting and sounding. And then suddenly there was the beach, thirty feet away, with little waves breaking on it, and still we had eight fathoms on the lead. We backed away a little and dropped the anchor and waited until it took a firm grip. Then the engine stopped, and we sat for a long time on the deckhouse. The sweet smell of the land blew out to us on a warm wind, a smell of sand verbena and grass and mangrove. It is so quickly forgotten, this land smell. We know it so well on shore that the nose forgets it, but after a few days at sea the odor memory pattern is lost so that the first land smell strikes a powerful emotional nostalgia, very sharp and strangely dear.