Originally published 10 May 1993
On the afternoon of March 11, 1940, the Western Flyer, a 76-foot fishing boat, prepared to leave Monterey harbor in California. The boat was chartered by a writer who would later win the Nobel prize for literature, and his best friend, a marine biologist.
The bon voyage celebration with friends and relations lasted most of the day. The stock of whiskey laid aboard against the possibility of a “medical emergency” was consumed. Empty beer cans tinkled against the hull. As the boat at last made its way past the breakwater to the open sea, it trailed a wake of floating bottles.
The writer was John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and other American classics. His friend was Ed Ricketts, a man of wide learning and prodigious intellect who operated a marine biological supply laboratory. Also aboard were the writer’s wife, official cook for the voyage; Tony Berry, captain of the Western Flyer; and the crew, Tex, Tiny, and Sparky.
So began an expedition that would produce a remarkable scientific document: Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, a “leisurely journal of travel and research,” with a scientific appendix (as voluminous as the journal) comprising an annotated catalog of the marine animals of the Panamic Faunal Province.
The Western Flyer spent nearly a month in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. All day, every day the two friends collected specimens, sorted, pickled, stored, and described. At night, under glittering stars, they discussed life, love, sex, and the meaning of the universe.
The purpose of the voyage was to study the relationship of the marine animals to their habitats and to each other. Today we would say that Steinbeck and Ricketts studied the faunal ecology of the region, although at that time the word ecology (or the idea of ecology) was not in vogue. They collected more than 550 different species of animals, almost 10 percent of which had not been previously described.
Steinbeck was not merely the scribe of the expedition; he was also the driving force behind the science. Years before, while a student at Stanford University, Steinbeck and his sister Mary enrolled for the summer quarter at Hopkins Marine Station, a Stanford research facility on the Pacific coast, where he studied zoology. The course was taught by C. V. Taylor, of the Zoology Department at the University of California at Berkeley, who was a disciple of the “organismic” philosophy of Berkeley zoologist William Emerson Ritter. Ritter believed that nature was an unbreakable web, and that animals could only be properly understood as parts of the whole. The human animal, too, was inextricably part of the web.
As Steinbeck and Ricketts waded in hip boots through the tide pools of the Baja Peninsula and Mexican mainland coast, they never lost sight of the “organismic” nature of their work. They knew that they had made themselves part of the faunal system they were studying, and that by studying the fauna they better understood themselves.
The literary critic Edmund Wilson once criticized Steinbeck for “animalizing” humans in his stories. Wrote Wilson: “Mr. Steinbeck does not have the effect, as Lawrence or Kipling does, of romantically raising the animals to the stature of human beings, but rather of assimilating the human beings to animals.” But, of course, Steinbeck neither humanized animals or animalized humans; humans and animals were part of a unity that could not be broken. For Steinbeck the writer, human beings were essentially biological creatures.
Sea of Cortez was very much a collaboration between Steinbeck and Ricketts, but it is mostly Steinbeck’s voice we hear in the journal, vigorous, bawdy, lusty, wise. The boat, the people, the history of the Gulf, local legends, the distant war in Europe — they are all there, woven seamlessly into the stories of the animals they collected.
Steinbeck wrote of the animals: “One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air…And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.
He continued: “This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things — plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and the expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time.”
Like Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, the journal from Sea of Cortez is a document that should be read by every biology student — indeed, every science student. It is a powerful affirmation of the humanistic foundations of science, and an antidote to the tendency in science toward fragmentation of both the thing studied and the scientist.
“It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again,” wrote John Steinbeck. Fortified by tequila, Mexican music, and friends both cerebral and earthy, this is what the writer learned in the Sea of Cortez.
Note: For context to Sea of Cortez I am indebted to Jackson J. Benson’s superb biography of Steinbeck.
