The Log from the Sea of Cortez

by Steinbeck, John; Astro, Richard

  If you steer toward an object, you cannot perfectly and indefinitely steer directly at it. You must steer to one side, or run it down; but you can steer exactly at a compass point, indefinitely. That does not change. Objects achieved are merely its fulfillment. In going toward a headland, for example, you can steer directly for it while you are at a distance, only changing course as you approach. Or you may set your compass course for the point and correct it by vision when you approach. The working out of the ideal into the real is here—the relationship between inward and outward, microcosm to macrocosm. The compass simply represents the ideal, present but unachievable, and sight-steering a compromise with perfection which allows your boat to exist at all.

  In the development of navigation as thought and emotion—and it must have been a slow, stumbling process frightening to its innovators and horrible to the fearful—how often must the questing mind have wished for a constant and unvarying point on the horizon to steer by. How simple if a star floated unchangeably to measure by. On clear nights such a star is there, but it is not trustworthy and the course of it is an arc. And the happy discovery of Stella Polaris—which, although it too shifts very minutely in an arc, is constant relatively—was encouraging. Stella Polaris will get you there. And so to the crawling minds Stella Polaris must have been like a very goddess of constancy, a star to love and trust.

  What we have wanted always is an unchangeable, and we have found that only a compass point, a thought, an individual ideal, does not change—Schiller’s and Goethe’s Ideal to be worked out in terms of reality. And from such a thing as this, Beethoven writes a Ninth Symphony to Schiller’s Ode to Joy.

  A tide pool has been called a world under a rock, and so it might be said of navigation, “It is the world within the horizon.”

  Of steering, the external influences to be overcome are in the nature of oscillations; they are of short or long periods or both. The mean levels of the extreme ups and downs of the oscillations symbolize opposites in a Hegelian sense. No wonder, then, that in physics the symbol of oscillation, √-1, is fundamental and primitive and ubiquitous, turning up in every equation.

  6

  MARCH 12

  In the morning we had come to the Santa Barbara Channel and the water was slick and gray, flowing in long smooth swells, and over it, close down, there hung a little mist so that the sea-birds flew in and out of sight. Then, breaking the water as though they swam in an obscure mirror, the porpoises surrounded us. They really came to us. We have seen them change course to join us, these curious animals. The Japanese will eat them, but rarely will Occidentals touch them. Of our crew, Tiny and Sparky, who loved to catch every manner of fish, to harpoon any swimming thing, would have nothing to do with porpoises. “They cry so,” Sparky said, “when they are hurt, they cry to break your heart.” This is rather a difficult thing to understand; a dying cow cries too, and a stuck pig raises his protesting voice piercingly and few hearts are broken by those cries. But a porpoise cries like a child in sorrow and pain. And we wonder whether the general seaman’s real affection for porpoises might not be more complicated than the simple fear of hearing them cry. The nature of the animal might parallel certain traits in ourselves—the outrageous boastfulness of porpoises, their love of play, their joy in speed. We have watched them for many hours, making designs in the water, diving and rising and then seeming to turn over to see if they are watched. In bursts of speed they hump their backs and the beating tails take power from the whole body. Then they slow down and only the muscles near the tails are strained. They break the surface, and the blow-holes, like eyes, open and gasp in air and then close like eyes before they submerge. Suddenly they seem to grow tired of playing; the bodies hump up, the incredible tails beat, and instantly they are gone.

  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 krew 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 fish
ing 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 tortoiseshell 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 wanted 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-lobsters6; 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 h
ad 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-lobsters9 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.