The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free

the second part, a phyletic catalog describing the animals collected, prefaced by a series of notes on preparing specimens. At the same time, it was believed that the material for the narrative came from two journals, one kept by Steinbeck, the other by Ricketts. Both assumptions are inaccurate. There were two journals, but neither was kept by Steinbeck. Rather, they were kept by Ricketts and by Tony Berry, the owner and captain of the purse seiner which Steinbeck and Ricketts chartered for the trip. And while Steinbeck referred to Berry’s log for matters of fact (chiefly dates and times), he composed the narrative chiefly from Ricketts’s journal. Indeed, in a joint memorandum which the authors wrote to Covici in August 1941, they set the record straight:
     
     
     
    Originally a journal of the trip was to have been kept by both of us, but the record was found to be a natural expression of only one of us. This journal was subsequently used by the other chiefly as a reminder of what had actually taken place, but in several cases parts of the original field notes were incorporated into the final narrative, and in one case a large section was lifted verbatim from other unpublished work. This was then passed back to the other for comment, completion of certain chiefly technical details, and corrections. And then the correction was passed back again.
     
     
    In this memorandum to Covici, the authors dismiss the notion that Sea of Cortez is two books. Instead, they insist, “the structure is a collaboration, but mostly shaped by John. The book is the result.”
     
    The phyletic catalog is a comprehensive and remarkably readable account of marine life in the gulf, though it is not as complete as Between Pacific Tides, because it is based on a single collecting trip rather than on a decade of study and research. What is unusual about it as a work of science, however, is that it focuses on common rather than on rare forms of marine life—since, note Ricketts and Steinbeck, they, “more than the total of all rare forms, [are] important in the biological economy.” The Log portion of the book is a fascinating series of accounts of the lifestyle of the Indians of the gulf, and discussions of birth and death, navigation and history, and even the scientific method itself. Among the best sections are those in which the writers ridicule science that is cut off from the real concerns of human life. They label such scientists as “dryballs” who create out of their own crusted minds “a world wrinkled with formaldehyde.” Above all, though, the Log is a celebration of the holistic vision the authors shared, and in accordance with their “reverence” for the ideas of Allee and Ritter, this is depicted in terms more mystical and intuitive than scientific. “It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious,” they note in one of the most compelling passages in the book, “most of the mystical outcrying, which is one of the 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.” The narrative as a whole is the record of scientific discovery intermingled with explorations into philosophy, “bright with sun and wet with sea water,” and “the whole crusted over with exploring thought.”
     
    In “About Ed Ricketts,” Steinbeck recalls that “very many conclusions Ed and I worked out together through endless discussion and reading and observation and experiment.” They had a game, he notes, “which we playfully called speculative metaphysics. It was a sport of lopping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and bushy. We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality.” Indeed, notes Steinbeck, “we worked together, and so closely that I