Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

THE trolling jigs picked up two fine sierras on the way. Our squid jigs had gone to pieces from much use, and had to be repaired with white chicken feathers. We were under way all day, and toward evening began to see the sport-fishing boats of Guaymas with their cargoes of sportsmen outfitted with equipment to startle the fish into submission. And the sportsmen were mentally on tiptoe to out-think the fish—which they sometimes do. We thought it might be fun some time to engage in this intellectual approach toward fishing, instead of our barbarous method of throwing a line with a chicken-feather jig overboard. These fishermen in their swivel fishing chairs looked comfortable and clean and pink. We had been washing our clothes in salt water, and we felt sticky and salt-crusted; and, being less comfortable and clean than the sportsmen, we built a whole defense of contempt. With no effort at all on their part we had a good deal of dislike for them. It is probable that Sparky and Tiny had a true contempt, uncolored by envy, for they are descended from many generations of fishermen who went out for fish, not splendor. But even they might have liked sitting in a swivel chair holding a rod in one hand and a frosty glass in the other, blaming a poor day on the Democrats, and offering up prayers for good fishing to Calvin Coolidge.

  We could not run for Guaymas that night, for the pilot fees rise after hours and we were getting a little low on money. Instead, about six P.M. we rounded Punta Doble and put into Puerto San Carlos. This is another of those perfect little harbors with narrow rocky entrances. The entrance is less than eight hundred yards wide, and steep rocks guard it. Once inside, there is anchorage from five to seven fathoms. The head of the bay is bordered by a sand beach, changing to boulders near the entrance. There was still time for collecting.

  We went to the bouldery beach and took some snails new to us and two echiuroids. But nothing on or under the rocks was different from the Tiburón animals. The water was warm here and it was soupy with shrimps, of which we took a number in a dip-net. We made a quick survey of the area, for darkness was coming. As soon as it was dark we began to hear strange sounds in the water around the Western Flyer—a periodic hissing and many loud splashes. We went to the deckhouse and turned on the searchlight. The bay was swarming with small fish, apparently come to eat the shrimps. Now and then a school of six- to ten-inch fish would drive at the little fish with such speed and in such numbers that they made the sharp hissing we had heard, while farther off some kind of great fish leaped and splashed heavily. Without a word, Sparky and Tiny got out a long net, climbed into the skiff, and tried to draw their net around a school of fish. We shouted at them, asking what they would do with the fish if they caught them, but they were deaf to us. The numbers of fish had set off a passion in them—they were fishermen and the sons of fishermen—let businessmen dispose of the fish; their job was to catch them. They worked frantically, but they could not encircle a school, and soon came back exhausted.

  Meanwhile, the water seemed almost solid with tiny fish, one and one-half to two inches long. Sparky went to the galley and put the biggest frying pan on the fire and poured olive oil into it. When the pan was very hot he began catching the tiny fish with the dip-nets, a hundred or so in each net. We passed the nets through the galley window and Sparky dumped them into the frying pan. In a short time these tiny fish were crisp and brown. We drained, salted, and ate them without any cleaning at all and they were delicious. Probably no fresher fish were ever eaten, except perhaps by the Japanese, who are said to eat them alive, and by college boys, who are photographed doing it. Each fish was a curled, brown, crisp little bite, delicate and good. We ate hundreds of them. Afterwards we went back to the usual night practice of netting the pelagic animals which came to the light. We took shrimps and larval shrimps, numbers of small swimming crabs, and more of the transparent fish. All night the hissing rush and splash of hunters and hunted went on. We had never been in water so heavily populated. The light, piercing the surface, showed the water almost solid with fish—swarming, hungry, frantic fish, incredible in their voraciousness. The schools swam, marshaled and patrolled. They turned as a unit and dived as a unit. In their millions they followed a pattern minute as to direction and depth and speed. There must be some fallacy in our thinking of these fish as individuals. Their functions in the school are in some as yet unknown way as controlled as though the school were one unit. We cannot conceive of this intricacy until we are able to think of the school as an animal itself, reacting with all its cells to stimuli which perhaps might not influence one fish at all. And this larger animal, the school, seems to have a nature and drive and ends of its own. It is more than and different from the sum of its units. If we can think in this way, it will not seem so unbelievable that every fish heads in the same direction, that the water interval between fish and fish is identical with all the units, and that it seems to be directed by a school intelligence. If it is a unit animal itself, why should it not so react? Perhaps this is the wildest of speculations, but we suspect that when the school is studied as an animal rather than as a sum of unit fish, it will be found that certain units are assigned special functions to perform; that weaker or slower units may even take their places as placating food for the predators for the sake of the security of the school as an animal. In the little Bay of San Carlos, where there were many schools of a number of species, there was even a feeling (and “feeling” is used advisedly) of a larger unit which was the interrelation of species with their interdependence for food, even though that food be each other. A smoothly working larger animal surviving within itself—larval shrimp to little fish to larger fish to giant fish—one operating mechanism. And perhaps this unit of survival may key into the larger animal which is the life of all the sea, and this into the larger of the world. There would seem to be only one commandment for living things: Survive! And the forms and species and units and groups are armed for survival, fanged for survival, timid for it, fierce for it, clever for it, poisonous for it, intelligent for it. This commandment decrees the death and destruction of myriads of individuals for the survival of the whole. Life has one final end, to be alive; and all the tricks and mechanisms, all the successes and all the failures, are aimed at that end.

  26

  April 5

  WE SAILED in the morning on the short trip to Guaymas. It was the first stop in a town that had anything like communication since we had left San Diego. The world and the war had become remote to us; all the immediacies of our usual lives had slowed up. Far from welcoming a return, we rather resented going back to newspapers and telegrams and business. We had been drifting in some kind of dual world—a parallel realistic world; and the preoccupations of the world we came from, which are considered realistic, were to us filled with mental mirage. Modern economies; war drives; party affiliations and lines; hatreds, political, and social and racial, cannot survive in dignity the perspective of distance. We could understand, because we could feel, how the Indians of the Gulf, hearing about the great ant-doings of the north, might shake their heads sadly and say, “But it is crazy. It would be nice to have new Ford cars and running water, but not at the cost of insanity.” And in us the factor of time had changed: the low tides were our clock and the throbbing engine our second hand.

  Now, approaching Guaymas, we were approaching an end. We planned only two or three collecting stations beyond, and then the time of charter-end would be crowding us, and we would have to run for it to be back when the paper said we would. The charter at least fixed our place in time. And already our crew was trying to think of ways to come back to the Gulf. This trip had been like a dreaming sleep, a rest from immediacies. And in our contacts with Mexican people we had been faced with a change in expediencies. Perhaps—even surely—these people are expedient, but on some other plane than our ordinary one. What they did for us was without hope or plan of profit. We suppose there must have been some kind of profit involved, but not the kind we are used to, not of material things changing hands. And yet some trade took place at every contact —something was exchanged, some unnamable of
great value. Perhaps these people are expedient in the unnamables. Maybe they bargain in feelings, in pleasures, even in simple contacts. When the Indians came to the Western Flyer and sat timelessly on the rail, perhaps they were taking something. We gave them presents, but it is sure they had not come for presents. When they helped us, it was with no idea of material payment. There were material prices for material things, but one couldn’t buy kindness with money, as one can in our country. It was so in every contact, and they were so used to the spiritual transaction that they had difficulty translating material things into money. If we wanted to buy a harpoon, there was difficulty immediately. What was the price? An Indian had paid three pesos for the harpoon several years ago. Obviously, since that had been paid, that was the price. But he had not yet learned to give time a money value. If he had to go three days in a canoe to get another harpoon, he could not add his time to the price, because he had never thought of time as a medium of exchange. At first we tried to explain the feeling we all had that time is a salable article, but we had to give it up. Time, these Indians said, went on. If one could stop time, or take it away, or hoard it, then one might sell it. One might as well sell air or heat or cold or health or beauty. And we thought of the great businesses in our country—the sale of clean air, of heat and cold, the scrabbling bargains in health offered over the radio, the boxed and bottled beauty, all for a price. This was not bad or good, it was only different. Time and beauty, they thought, could not be captured and sold, and we knew they not only could be, but that time could be warped and beauty made ugly. And again it was not good or bad. Our people would pay more for pills in a yellow box than in a white box—even the refraction of light had its price. They would buy books because they should rather than because they wanted to. They bought immunity from fear in salves to go under their arms. They bought romantic adventure in bars of tomato-colored soaps. They bought education by the foot and hefted the volumes to see that they were not short-weighted. They purchased pain, and then analgesics to put down the pain. They bought courage and rest and had neither. And they are vastly amused at the Indian who, with his silver, bought Heaven and ransomed his father from Hell. These Indians were far too ignorant to understand the absurdities merchandising can really achieve when it has an enlightened people to work on.

  One can go from race to race. It is coming back that has its violation. As we feel greatness, we feel that these people are very great. It seems to us that the repose of an Indian woman sitting in the gutter is beyond our achievement. But even these people wish for our involvement in temporal and material things. Once we thought that the bridge between cultures might be through education, public health, good housing, and through political vehicles—democracy, Nazism, communism—but now it seems much simpler than that. The invasion comes with good roads and high-tension wires. Where those two go, the change takes place very quickly. Any of the political forms can come in once the radio is hooked up, once the concrete highway irons out the mountains and destroys the “localness” of a community. Once the Gulf people are available to contact, they too will come to consider clean feet more important than clean minds. These are the factors of civilization and their paths, good roads, high-voltage wires, and possibly canned foods. A local 110-volt power unit and a winding dirt road may leave a people for a long time untouched, but high-voltage operating day and night, the network of wires, will draw the people into the civilizing web, whether it be in Asiatic Russia, in rural England, or in Mexico. That Zeitgeist operates everywhere, and there is no escape from it.

  Again, this is not to be considered good or bad. To us, a little weary of the complication and senselessness of a familiar picture, the Indian seems a rested, simple man. If we should permit ourselves to remain in ignorance of his complications, then we might long for his condition, thinking it superior to ours. The Indian on the other hand, subject to constant hunger and cold, mourning a grandfather and set of uncles in Purgatory, pained by the aching teeth and sore eyes of malnutrition, may well envy us our luxury. It is easy to remember how, when we were in the terrible complication of childhood, we longed for easy and uncomplicated adulthood. Then we would have only to reach into our pockets for money, then all problems would be ironed out. The ranch-owner had said, “There is no poverty in your country and no misery. Everyone has a Ford.”

  We arrived early at Guaymas, passed the usual tests of customs, got our mail at the consulate, and then did the various things of the port. Some of those things are amusing, but they are out of drawing for this account. Guaymas was already in the pathway of the good highway; it was no longer “local.” At La Paz and Loreto the Gulf and the town were one, inextricably bound together, but here at Guaymas the railroad and the hotel had broken open that relationship. There were gimcracks for tourists everywhere. This is no criticism of the change, but Guaymas seems to us to be outside the boundaries of the Gulf. We had good treatment there, met charming people, did good and bad things, and left with reluctance.

  27

  April 8

  WE SAILED out on Monday, a little tattered and a little tired. Captain Corona, pilot and shrimp-boat owner, who had been kind and hospitable to us, piloted us out and stopped one of his incoming boats for us to inspect. It was a poor small boat, and had not much of a catch of shrimps. Everyone in this neighborhood had complained of the Japanese shrimpers who were destroying the shrimp fisheries. We determined to pay them a visit on the next day. The moment we dropped the pilot, just outside of Guaymas, the Gulf was local again and part of the design it had put in our heads. The mirage was over the land and the sea was very blue. We sailed only a short distance and dropped our anchor in a little cove opposite the Pajaro Island light. That night we caught a number of fish that looked and felt like catfish. Tex skinned them and prepared them, and we did not eat them. A little gloom hung over all of us; Sparky and Tiny had fallen in love with Guaymas and planned to go back there and live forever. But Tex and Tony were gloomy and a little homesick.

  We were awakened well before daylight by the voices of men paddling out for the day’s fishing, and it was with some relief that we pulled up our anchor and started out to continue the work we had come to do. The day was thick with haze, the sun came through it hot and unpleasant, and the water was oily and at the same time choppy. The sticky humidity was on us.

  In about an hour we came to the Japanese fishing fleet. There were six ships doing the actual dredging while a large mother ship of at least 10,000 tons stood farther offshore at anchor. The dredge boats themselves were large, 150 to 175 feet, probably about 600 tons. There were twelve boats in the combined fleet including the mother ship, and they were doing a very systematic job, not only of taking every shrimp from the bottom, but every other living thing as well. They cruised slowly along in echelon with overlapping dredges, literally scraping the bottom clean. Any animal which escaped must have been very fast indeed, for not even the sharks got away. Why the Mexican government should have permitted the complete destruction of a valuable food supply is one of those mysteries which have their ramifications possibly back in pockets it is not well to look into.

  We wished to go aboard one of the dredge boats. Tony put the Western Flyer ahead of one of them, and we dropped the skiff over the side and got into it. It was not a friendly crew that looked at us over the side of the iron dredge boat. We clung to the side, almost swamping the skiff, and passed our letter from the Ministry of Marine aboard. Then we hung on and waited. We could see the Mexican official on the bridge reading our letter. And then suddenly the atmosphere changed to one of extreme friendliness. We were helped aboard and our skiff was tied alongside.

  The cutting deck was forward, and the great dredge loads were dumped on this deck. Along one side there was a long cutting table where the shrimps were beheaded and dropped into a chute, whether to be immediately iced or canned, we do not know. But probably they were canned on the mother ship. The dredge was out when we came aboard, but soon the cable drums began to turn, bringin
g in the heavy purse-dredge. The big scraper closed like a sack as it came up, and finally it deposited many tons of animals on the deck—tons of shrimps, but also tons of fish of many varieties: sierras; pompano of several species; of the sharks, smooth-hounds and hammer-heads; eagle rays and butterfly rays; small tuna; catfish; puerco—tons of them. And there were bottom-samples with anemones and grass-like gorgonians. The sea bottom must have been scraped completely clean. The moment the net dropped open and spilled this mass of living things on the deck, the crew of Japanese went to work. Fish were thrown overboard immediately, and only the shrimps kept. The sea was littered with dead fish, and the gulls swarmed about eating them. Nearly all the fish were in a dying condition, and only a few recovered. The waste of this good food supply was appalling, and it was strange that the Japanese, who are usually so saving, should have done it. The shrimps were shoveled into baskets and delivered to the cutting table. Meanwhile the dredge had gone back to work.

  With the captain’s permission, we picked out several representatives of every fish and animal we saw. A stay of several days on the boat would have been the basis of a great and complete collection of every animal living at this depth. Even going over two dredgeloads gave us many species. The crew, part Mexican and part Japanese, felt so much better about us by now that they brought out their treasures and gave them to us: bright-red sea-horses and brilliant sea-fans and giant shrimps. They presented them to us, the rarities, the curios which had caught their attention.

  At intervals a high, chanting cry arose from the side of the ship and was taken up and chanted back from the bridge. From the upper deck a slung cat-walk extended, and on it the leadsman stood, swinging his leadline, bringing it up and swinging it out again. And every time he read the markers he chanted the depth in Japanese in a high falsetto, and his cry was repeated by the helmsman.