Grove Koger

As I expand and update my book When the Going Was Good, I’m sharing revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a travel narrative by American author John Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.  

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The Log from the Sea of Cortez: The Narrative Portion of the Book Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck and E.F. Ricketts, 1941, Here Reissued with a Profile “About Ed Ricketts” (New York: Viking, 1951)

The author of The Grapes of Wrath had studied marine biology one summer during college, but it was only in the late 1930s that he found an opportunity to put his interest to practical use, taking on part ownership of a biological laboratory with his friend, professional biologist Ed Ricketts. The two combed the California coast near San Francisco for specimens in 1939, and soon afterward made arrangements to collect along the shores of the Sea of Cortez, known more prosaically as the Gulf of California.

The pair hired the sardine boat Western Flyer out of Monterey, leaving California for the Gulf in March of 1940 and returning some six weeks later. Besides Steinbeck, his wife, Ricketts, and the boat’s owner, the boat carried an engineer and two seamen. In addition to collecting thousands of specimens at twenty-one sites, the group paid several visits to the interior of Baja, observing a seemingly free and easy way of life that Steinbeck found exceedingly attractive. A year after the trip, Steinbeck and Ricketts published a hefty volume pretty evenly divided between straightforward narrative and an enormous “annotated phyletic catalogue” of the marine invertebrates the expedition had collected.

 

As its title and subtitle indicate, The Log from the Sea of Cortez consists of the narrative, or ship’s “log,” from that book. Although the log was Steinbeck’s work, he had drawn heavily upon Ricketts’ journals in writing it; when it appeared separately in 1951, Steinbeck prefaced it with a loving appreciation of his friend, who had died in 1948. The Log is one of Steinbeck’s happiest creations, an account of what seems to have been an idyllic mixture of work, play, earnest talk, and happy drinking. The book also gave Steinbeck an opportunity to develop his holistic ideas about the organismic nature of life, his belief in the inter-relatedness of creation: “The brown Indians and the gardens of the sea, and the beer and the work, they were all one thing and we were that one thing too.” 

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If you’re looking for a good edition of The Log, the 1995 Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by Richard Astro. Other travel works by Steinbeck include Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research: With a Scientific Appendix Comprising Materials for a Source Book on the Marine Animals of the Panamic Faunal Province (1941; with Edward F. Ricketts); A Russian Journal (1948); Once There Was a War (1958); and Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962).

For further information on Steinbeck, I suggest: Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist (U Minnesota P, 1973); Richard Astro and Joel W. Hedgpeth, eds., Steinbeck and the Sea: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the Marine Science Center Auditorium, Newport, Oregon, May 4, 1974 (Oregon St U, Sea Grant College Program, 1975); Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., eds., Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches (U Alabama P, 1997);Warren G. French, John Steinbeck’s Nonfiction Revisited (Twayne, 1996); Tetsumaro Hayashi, ed., Steinbeck’s Travel Literature: Essays in Criticism (Steinbeck Soc of America, English Dept., Ball State U, 1980); and Brian E. Railsback, Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck (U Idaho P, 1995).

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