22 - The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)

Summary

Harry Gilroy.

“Steinbeck's Living Sea.”

New York Times Book Review, 100

(16 September 1951), 6.

At a time when readers are interested in authors who go down to the sea, and come up again with good tales, in sails John Steinbeck as scientist-deckhand on a collecting expedition in the Gulf of California. His journal of these activities will be new to many of his usual audience, but this Log appeared in 1941 as part of The Sea of Cortez, a joint effort of the novelist and Edward F. Ricketts, the biologist of the collecting trip. Then Steinbeck was sandwiched between hundreds of pages of notes about dreadful little marine animals, with the result that only 3,000 customers had the nerve to take the book from the store. Now the biology text has been dropped and Steinbeck has added an entertaining profile of Ricketts.

The best part of this newly unveiled work of the novelist presents sharply evocative descriptions of the sea and the approaches to shore, plus some interesting accounts of the scuttling, flopping, sucking, stabling, poisoning creatures that were taken on the beaches. To go from Monterey Bay to the hot, dangerous, seldom sailed waters of the Gulf, Steinbeck and Ricketts chartered a seventy-six-foot, Diesel-powered fish trawler. They visited numerous old settlements and timeless bays.

Steinbeck makes the reader feel the relief of coming from the rolling seas inside the sheltering capes and jetties. The local authorities troop aboard, all in their rarely worn uniforms and displaying their ceremonious.45 automatics.