Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

  We went up on the bridge, and as we passed this leadsman he said, “Hello.” We stopped and talked to him a few moments before we realized that that was the only English word he knew. The Japanese captain was formal, but very courteous. He spoke neither Spanish nor English; his business must all have been done through an interpreter. The Mexican fish and game official stationed aboard was a pleasant man, but he said that he had no great information about the animals he was overseeing. The large shrimps were Penaeus stylirostris, and one small specimen was P. californiensis.

  The shrimps inspected all had the ovaries distended and apparently, as with the Canadian Pandalus, this shrimp had the male-female succession. That is, all the animals are born male, but all become females on passing a certain age. The fish and game man seemed very eager to know more about his field, and we promised to send him Schmitt’s fine volume on Marine Decapod Crustacea of California and whatever other publications on shrimps we could find.

  We liked the people on this boat very much. They were good men, but they were caught in a large destructive machine, good men doing a bad thing. With their many and large boats, with their industry and efficiency, but most of all with their intense energy, these Japanese will obviously soon clean out the shrimps of the region. And it is not true that a species thus attacked comes back. The disturbed balance often gives a new species ascendancy and destroys forever the old relationship.

  In addition to the shrimps, these boats kill and waste many hundred of tons of fish every day, a great deal of which is sorely needed for food. Perhaps the Ministry of Marine had not realized at that time that one of the good and strong food resources of Mexico was being depleted. If it has not already been done, catch limits should be imposed, and it should not be permitted that the region be so intensely combed. Among other things, the careful study of this area should be undertaken so that its potential could be understood and the catch maintained in balance with the supply. Then there might be shrimps available indefinitely. If this is not done, a very short time will see the end of the shrimp industry in Mexico.

  We in the United States have done so much to destroy our own resources, our timber, our land, our fishes, that we should be taken as a horrible example and our methods avoided by any government and people enlightened enough to envision a continuing economy. With our own resources we have been prodigal, and our country will not soon lose the scars of our grasping stupidity. But here, with the shrimp industry, we see a conflict of nations, of ideologies, and of organisms. The units of the organisms are good people. Perhaps we might find a parallel in a moving-picture company such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The units are superb—great craftsmen, fine directors, the best actors in the profession—and yet due to some overlying expediency, some impure or decaying quality, the product of these good units is sometimes vicious, sometimes stupid, sometimes inept, and never as good as the men who make it. The Mexican official and the Japanese captain were both good men, but by their association in a project directed honestly or dishonestly by forces behind and above them, they were committing a true crime against nature and against the immediate welfare of Mexico and the eventual welfare of the whole human species.

  The crew helped us back into our skiff, handed our buckets of specimens down to us, and cast us off. And Tony, who had been cruising slowly about, picked us up in the Western Flyer. We had taken perhaps a dozen pompano as specimens when hundreds were available. Sparky was speechless with rage that we had brought none back to eat, but we had forgotten that. We set our course southward toward Estero de la Luna—a great inland sea, the borders of which were dotted lines on our maps. Here we expected to find a rich estuary fauna. In the scoop between Cape Arco and Point Lobos there is a fairly shallow sea which makes a deep ground-swell. It was Tiny up forward who noticed the great numbers of manta rays and suggested that we hunt them. They were monsters, sometimes twelve feet between the “wing” tips. We had no proper equipment, but finally we rigged one of the arrow-tipped harpoons on a light line. This harpoon was a five-inch bronze arrow slotted on an iron shaft. After the stroke, the arrow turns sideways in the flesh and the shaft comes out and floats on its wooden handle. The line is fastened to the arrow itself.

  The huge rays cruised slowly about, the upturned tips of the wings out of water. Sparky went to the crow‘s-nest, where he could look down into the water and direct the steersman. A hundred feet from one of the great fish we cut the engine and coasted down on it. It lay still on the water. Tiny poised prettily on the bow. When we were right on it, he drove the harpoon into it. The monster did not flurry, it simply faded for the bottom. The line whistled out to its limit, twanged like a violin string, and parted. A curious excitement ran through the boat. Tex came down and brought out a one-and-one-half-inch hemp line. He ringed this into a new harpoon-head, and again Tiny took up his position, so excited that he had his foot in a bight of the line. Luckily, we noticed this and warned him. We coasted up to another ray—Tiny missed the stroke. Another, and he missed again. The third time, his arrow drove home, the line sang out again, two hundred feet of it. Then it came to the end where it was looped over a bitt, vibrated for a moment, and parted. The breaking strain of this rope was enormous. But we were doing it all wrong and we knew it. A ton and a half of speeding fish is not to be brought up short. We should have thrown a keg overboard with the line and let the fish fight the keg’s buoyancy until exhausted. But we were not equipped. Tiny was almost hysterical by this time. Tex brought a three-inch line with an extremely high breaking strain. We had no more arrow harpoons. Tex made his hawser fast to a huge trident spear. When he finished, the assembly was so heavy that one man could hardly lift it. This time, Tex took the harpoon. He did not waste his time with careless strokes; he waited until the bow was right over one of the largest rays, then drove his spear down with all his strength. The heavy hawser ran almost smoking over the rail. Then it came to the bitt and struck with a kind of groaning cry, quivered, and went limp. When we pulled the big harpoon aboard, there was a chunk of flesh on it. Tiny was heart-broken. The wind came up now and so ruffled the water that we could not see the coasting monsters any more. We tried to soothe Tiny.

  “What could we do with one if we caught it?” we asked.

  Tiny said, “I’d like to pull it up with the boom and hang it right over the hatch.”

  “But what could you do with it?”

  “I’d hang it there,” he said, “and I’d have my picture taken with it. They won’t believe in Monterey I speared one unless I can prove it.”

  He mourned for a long time our lack of foresight in failing to bring manta ray equipment. Late into the night Tex worked, making with file and emery stone a new arrow harpoon, but one of great size. This he planned to use with his three-inch hawser. He said the rope would hold fifteen to twenty tons, and this arrow would not pull out. But he never had a chance to prove it; we did not see the rays in numbers any more.

  We came to anchorage that night south of Lobos light and about five miles from the entrance to Estero de la Luna. In this shallow water Tony did not like to go closer for fear of stranding. It was a strange and frightening night, and no one knew why. The water was glassy again and the deck soaked with humidity. We had a curious feeling that a stranger was aboard, some presence not seen but felt, a dark-cloaked person who was with us. We were all nervous and irritable and frightened, but we could not find what frightened us. Tex worked on the Sea-Cow and got it to running perfectly, for we wanted to use it on the long run ashore in the morning. We had checked the tides in Guaymas; it was necessary to leave before daylight to get into the estuary for the low tide. In the night, one of us had a nightmare and shouted for help and the rest of us were sleepless. In the darkness of the early morning, only two of us got up. We dressed quietly and got our breakfast. The light on Lobos Point was flashing to the north of us. The decks were soaked with dew. Climbing down to the skiff, one of us fell and wrenched his leg. True to form, the Sea-Cow would not start. We set off rowin
g toward the barely visible shore, fixing our course by Lobos Light. A little feathery white shape drifted over the water and it was joined by another and another, and very soon a dense white fog covered us. The Western Flyer was lost and the shore blotted out. With the last flashing of the Lobos light we tried to judge the direction of the swell to steer by, and then the light was gone and we were cut off in this ominous glassy water. The air turned steel-gray with the dawn, and the fog was so thick that we could not see fifteen feet from the boat. We rowed on, remembering to quarter on the direction of the swells. And then we heard a little vicious hissing as of millions of snakes, and we both said, “It’s the cordonazo.” This is a quick fierce storm which has destroyed more ships than any other. The wind blows so that it clips the water. We were afraid for a moment, very much afraid, for in the fog, the cordonazo would drive our little skiff out into the Gulf and swamp it. We could see nothing and the hissing grew louder and had almost reached us.

  It seems to be this way in a time of danger. A little chill of terror runs up the spine and a kind of nausea comes into the throat. And then that disappears into a kind of dull “what the hell” feeling. Perhaps this is the working of some mind-to-gland-to-body process. Perhaps some shock therapy takes control. But our fear was past now, and we braced ourselves to steady the boat against the impact of the expected wind. And at that moment the bow of the skiff grounded gently, for it was not wind at all that hissed, but little waves washing strongly over an exposed sand-bar. We climbed out, hauled the boat up, and sat for a moment on the beach. We had been badly frightened, there is no doubt of it. Even the sleepy dullness which follows the adrenal drunkenness was there. And while we sat there, the fog lifted, and in the morning light we could see the Western Flyer at anchor offshore, and we had landed only about a quarter of a mile from where we had intended. The sun broke clear now, and true to form when there was neither danger nor much work the Sea-Cow started easily and we rounded the sand-hill entrance of the big estuary. Now that the sun was up, we could see why there were dotted lines on the maps to indicate the borders of the estero. It was endless—there were no borders. The mirage shook the horizon and draped it with haze, distorted shapes, twisted mountains, and made even the bushes seem to hang in the air. Until every foot of such a shore is covered and measured, the shape and extent of these estuaries will not be known.

  Inside the entrance of the estuary a big canoe was anchored and four Indians were coming ashore from the night’s fishing. They were sullen and unsmiling, and they grunted when we spoke to them. In their boat they had great thick mullet-like fish, so large that it took two men to carry each fish. They must have weighed sixty to one hundred pounds each. These Indians carried the fish through an opening in the brush to a camp of which we could see only the smoke rising, and they were definitely unfriendly. It was the first experience of this kind we had had in the Gulf. It wasn’t that they didn’t like us—they didn’t seem to like each other.

  The tide was going down in the estuary, making a boiling current in the entrance. Biologically, the area seemed fairly sterile. There were numbers of small animals, several species of large snails and a number of small ones. There were burrowing anemones 79 with transparent, almost colorless tentacles spread out on the sand bottom. And there were the flower-like Cerianthus in sand-tubes everywhere. On the bottom were millions of minute sand dollars of a new type, brilliant light green and having holes and fairly elongate spines. Farther inside the estuary we took a number of small heart-urchins and a very few larger ones. On the sand bottoms there were large burrows, but dig as we would, we could never find the owners. They were either very quick or very deep, but even under water their burrows were always open and piles of debris lay about the entrances. Some large crustacean, we thought, possibly of the fiddler crab clan.

  The commonest animal of all was the enteropneust, an “acorn-tongued” worm presumably about three feet long that we had found at San Lucas Cove and at Angeles Bay. There were hundreds of their sand-castings lying about. We were not convinced that with all our digging we had got the whole animal even once (and the specialist subsequently confirmed our opinion with regret!).

  Deep in the estuary we took several large beautifully striped Tivela-like clams and a great number of flat pearly clams. There were hundreds of large hermit crabs in various large gastropod shells. We found a single long-armed sand-burrowing brittle-star which turned out to be Ophiophragmus marginatus, and our listing of it is the only report on record since Lütken, in Denmark, erected the species from Nicaraguan material nearly a hundred years ago. In the uneasy footing of the sand, every stick and large shell and rock was encrusted with barnacles; even one giant swimming crab carried a load of barnacles on his back.

  The wind had been rising a little as we collected, rippling the water. We cruised about in the shallows trying to see the bottom. There were great numbers of sand sharks darting about, but the bottom was clean and sterile and not at all as well populated as we would have supposed. The mirage grew more and more crazy. Perhaps these sullen Indians were bewildered in such an uncertain world where nothing half a mile away could maintain its shape or size, where the world floated and trembled and flowed in dream forms. And perhaps the reverse is true. Maybe these Indians dream of a hard sharp dependable world as an opposite of their daily vision.

  We had not taken riches in this place. When the tide turned we started back for the Western Flyer. Perhaps the Sea-Cow too had been frightened that morning, for it ran steadily. But the tide was so strong that we had to help it with the oars or it would not have been able to hold its own against the current. It took two hours of oars and motor to get back to the Western Flyer.

  We felt that this had not been a good nor a friendly place. Some quality of evil hung over it and infected us. We were not at all sorry to leave it. Everyone on board was quiet and uneasy until we pulled up the anchor and started south for Agiabampo, which was, we thought, to be our last collecting station.

  It was curious about this Estero de la Luna. It had been a bad place—bad feelings, bad dreams, and little accidents. The look and feel of it were bad. It would be interesting to know whether others have found it so. We have thought how places are able to evoke moods, how color and line in a picture may capture and warp us to a pattern the painter intended. If to color and line in accidental juxtaposition there should be added odor and temperature and all these in some jangling relationship, then we might catch from this accident the unease we felt in the estero. There is a stretch of coast country below Monterey which affects all sensitive people profoundly, and if they try to describe their feeling they almost invariably do so in musical terms, in the language of symphonic music. And perhaps here the mind and the nerves are true indices of the reality neither segregated nor understood on an intellectual level. Boodin remarks the essential nobility of philosophy and how it has fallen into disrepute. “Somehow,” he says, “the laws of thought must be the laws of things if we are going to attempt a science of reality. Thought and things are part of one evolving matrix, and cannot ultimately conflict.” 80

  And in a unified-field hypothesis, or in life, which is a unified field of reality, everything is an index of everything else. And the truth of mind and the way mind is must be an index of things, the way things are, however much one may stand against the other as an index of the second or irregular order, rather than as a harmonic or first-order index. These two types of indices may be compared to the two types of waves, for indices are symbols as primitive as waves. The first wave-type is the regular or cosine wave, such as tide or undulations of light or sound or other energy, especially where the output is steady and unmixed. These waves may be progressive—increasing or diminishing—or they can seem to be stationary, although deeply some change or progression may be found in all oscillation. All terms of a series must be influenced by the torsion of the first term and by the torsion of the end, or change, or stoppage of the series. Such waves as these may be predictable as the tide is.
The second type, the irregular for the while, such as graphs of rainfall in a given region, falls into means which are the functions of the length of time during which observations have been made. These are unpredictable individually; that is, one cannot say that it will rain or not rain tomorrow, but in ten years one can predict a certain amount of rainfall and the season of it. And to this secondary type mind might be close by hinge and “key-in” indices.

  We had had many discussions at the galley table and there had been many honest attempts to understand each other’s thinking. There are several kinds of reception possible. There is the mind which lies in wait with traps for flaws, so set that it may miss, through not grasping it, a soundness. There is a second which is not reception at all, but blind flight because of laziness, or because some pattern is disturbed by the processes of the discussion. The best reception of all is that which is easy and relaxed, which says in effect, “Let me absorb this thing. Let me try to understand it without private barriers. When I have understood what you are saying, only then will I subject it to my own scrutiny and my own criticism.” This is the finest of all critical approaches and the rarest.

  The smallest and meanest of all is that which, being frightened or outraged by thinking outside or beyond its pattern, revenges itself senselessly; leaps on a misspelled word or a mispronunciation, drags tricky definition in by the scruff of the neck, and, ranging like a small unpleasant dog, rags and tears the structure to shreds. We have known a critic to base a vicious criticism on a misplaced letter in a word, when actually he was venting rage on an idea he hated. These are the suspicious ones, the self-protective ones, living lives of difficult defense, insuring themselves against folly with folly—stubbornly self-protective at too high a cost.