Chapter 1 explains the practical design of the 1940 expedition. The authors argue that an expedition should be bounded by forecasts of “start, direction, ports of call, and return” (5). While tides, weather, food, medicine, and vessel choice can be estimated, all remains “subject to accident” (5). Available literature on the Gulf is thin and inconsistent; the Coast Pilot and the writing of a Jesuit priest named Clavigero provide the clearest cautions. The Gulf itself is “a long, narrow, highly dangerous body of water” (5) but Steinbeck insists that the voyage has “no urge toward adventure” (6).

Chartering a suitable purse seiner in Monterey proves difficult because owners focus exclusively on sardine fishing. They hire Anthony “Tony” Berry, captain of the Western Flyer. The Western Flyer is described in technical detail, and its crew includes Tex Travis, Sparky Enea, and Tiny Colletto. Provisions are extensive. The team’s compact library box, carefully engineered, proves impractical aboard and has to be lashed to the deckhouse, illustrating the broader lesson that “all collecting trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them” (10). The library includes key monographs, reprints, charts, and Coast Pilots.

Camera gear is “more than adequate” (11) but the men will largely steer clear of taking photographs. The ship is overcrowded with collecting tools and containers. Chemical stocks include formaldehyde, alcohol, and relaxants; alcohol and Epsom salts run short and will be later replenished at Guaymas. A binocular microscope requires adaptation due to the boat’s motion. The medical kit is comprehensive; the medicinal whiskey vanishes at departure, yet “no one [is] ill on the whole trip” (12) so this is overlooked.

Observing the Monterey fleet, Steinbeck argues that boats bear their owners’ character, while customs like mounting deer horns for luck persist from older cultures. He believes that “there is an ‘idea’ boat that is an emotion” (13) and builders embed ancestral memory in boats’ construction. People instinctively test hulls by knocking, suggesting a deep, unconscious knowledge. The identification is reciprocal, as “a man builds the best of himself into a boat” (13) and “man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul” (14). Due to this identification, the destruction of ships can seem like murder.

Steinbeck widens his narrative to the natural world. Humans classify tide pool animals dispassionately, yet rarely apply the same method to themselves. Steinbeck suggests that, if humans were examined in a scientific manner, that “one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens” (15) is a periodic collective violence that destroys both individuals and their works. Explanations that reduce war to economics or injustice only reinforce this trait. Steinbeck does not see humans changing this nature without a fundamental “psychic mutation” (15) which does not seem imminent. The “murder trait” (16) in the human species is, Steinbeck writes, as regular and observable as the species’ sexual habits.

Before departure, the crew spends time on the Monterey pier watching purse seiners and talking with one another. Tex is the engineer. He loves Diesel engines as “blocks of pure logic in shining metal” (17). Tex knows his engines so intimately that “one miss of the engine jerks him to his feet and into the engine-room before he is awake” (17). Tony Berry is the master and part owner of the ship. He is a cautious navigator who trusts fixed truths like the leadline, Navy charts, and the Coast Pilot. He dislikes variables and takes “no chances he could avoid, for his boat and his life and ours [are] no light things for him to tamper with” (18).

They next address equipment, focusing on an outboard motor they bring for the skiff. The outboard motor is a source of great anger. Referred to as the “Sea-Cow,” the outboard motor is intended to ease their journeys ashore, up estuaries, and along coves, but it works so rarely and so inopportunely that the Sea-Cow seems to be consciously antagonistic toward the crew. It starts only when they are ready to destroy it, falls apart “in simulated death” (19) when attacked with a screwdriver, seems to hate Tex, and completely refuses to run in rough water, wind, night or fog, or for distances over 200 yards. By contrast, on calm, sunny, easy days it starts at a touch and will not stop. At the end of the voyage, they do not destroy the motor. Instead, they repaint it and sell it. Steinbeck regrets that they did not rid the world of this “mechanical cancer” (20).

Steinbeck details final preparations, permits, the sardine fiesta, and departure from Monterey. The expedition is makeshift, with no permanent laboratory, dark-room, or tanks for keeping animals alive. The hatch cover serves as laboratory and aquarium; barrels of alcohol and formaldehyde are lashed on deck; an ineffective seawater refrigerator ends up cooling beer since “it is unwise to drink unboiled water, and boiled water isn’t any good” (21). An oxygen cylinder is secured to the rail. Watches are organized so everyone is needed to take the wheel at some point during the day or night.

With Mexico facing an election, the crew seeks permits to avoid delays by officials. The US State Department declines to help. Through contacts, Ambassador Castillo Najera helps to secure permits immediately. They arrive quickly, with seals that even a nonreader would recognize as authoritative. The permits denote the crew as “men without politics or business interests” (23). Monterey’s sardine-season fiesta fills Sunday, involving a pier barbecue, decorations, and a boat parade. The Western Flyer is dressed with bunting; the crew enters contests but wins nothing.

On March 11th, many visitors delay sailing until afternoon. Finally, the guests are ejected, lines cast off, and the boat clears the breakwater with streamers still flying. They pass Cabrillo Point’s bell buoy, head south before a strong north wind, and observe pelicans flying in formation and a scarred sea lion pacing them. Coffee boils in the galley, a smell lingers on the boat for the rest of the voyage. That evening, the crew discusses sea monsters. They see “a basking shark” (27). Crewmen like Tiny Colletto still report seeing the Old Man of the Sea, an optical illusion which Steinbeck suggests is imprinted in the human conscious.

Evening falls as the wind drops and the tall waves remain. A few porpoises approach, look at the boat, and move off. Watches change. The crew eats their first meal aboard. They put on heavier coats and linger by the helmsman’s bench, staying near “the little light on the compass card” (31) and the running lights. They pass Point Sur, where the sea changes to a faster groundswell. From the wheel, the small flag at the peak swings across the horizon and the men try, but fail, to keep it covering a star. Tony’s close feel for the boat shows as he senses yaw and corrects before it happens. Steering proves tense for the less experienced, especially with Tony silently observing. Fatigue makes it easy to forget which way to turn the wheel and the wake reveals any error. They keep to a compass course through the night, adjusting by sight only when approaching land. Steinbeck thinks about the history of human navigation and the importance of Stella Polaris in guiding navigators, calling the star “a very goddess of constancy, a star to love and trust” (33).

The Western Flyer enters the Santa Barbara Channel amid slick gray swells and low mist. Porpoises change course to surround the boat; Tiny and Sparky refuse to harm the porpoises because “they cry to break your heart” (34). The mist lifts, leaving oily signs of sardines and gull feathers. A Japanese liner passes and they rock in its wake. After a long day, they pass the lights of Los Angeles; the San Pedro searchlights sweep the sea. Before daylight, they follow harbor lights into San Diego. All around them, Steinbeck writes, “war bustled” (35), with planes overhead and silent submarines being prepared to join World War II. There seems to be no war for the crew of the Western Flyer, however, as their seabound world is removed from the theater of war.

They refuel, take water and ice, and load last perishables like bread, eggs, and fresh meat. Tied to the pier through a day and a night, they get haircuts and eat steaks while strangers visit the deck. Quiet men on the pier ask about the destination and one man waits to cast off the lines so he can take part. South of the Mexican border, the water turns deep ultramarine, which the fishermen call “tuna water” (36).

By Friday, they are off Point Baja, among sea turtles and flying fish. Sparky and Tiny set trolling lines with feathered squid and looped inner tubes to catch tuna. Sharing a watch, they often veer off-course when both leave the wheel to land a fish. Returning, they may invent a new heading rather than wake the master. When Tony points out the error, their defense is that the boat “didn’t hit anything” (37).

By midafternoon, the Western Flyer is off Magdalena Bay in light fog and smooth water. Flying fish lift from the bow and skim away, sometimes followed by the searchlight. Sea turtles appear and Tiny, standing at the bow, harpoons one. They haul aboard a tortoiseshell turtle and it struggles in pain. Remorseful, Tiny decapitates it, but the body remains active and “a large quantity of very red blood poured from the trunk of the neck” (39) During dissection, they preserve hydroids and find two pelagic crabs tucked near the tail. Opening the body, they discover the digestive tract packed with bright-red rock lobsters; the gullet is lined with hard points whose motion grinds food. They remove the heart to a jar of salt water, where it pulses for hours and responds to touch a day later. Tiny swears off turtles. Attempts to cook the meat fail and efforts to clean and keep the shell also fail; it is thrown away.

That night, they cross a school of bonito. The crew catches five of the fish, attempts to make photographs of the shifting patterns as they writhe, and then eats fried fillets. Two small northern flying fish are netted. The smooth tuna water holds abundant life: Gray porpoises, turtles, scattered jumping tuna, and pelagic rock lobsters. On March 16th, about 70 miles north of Point Lázaro, they encounter masses of red rock lobsters. They idle the engine, dip-net specimens into white pans, take some of the only “good moving pictures” (41) on the trip, note that the animals wriggle rather than swim, then kill them in fresh water and preserve them in alcohol, which removes the color.

At 2 AM, the Western Flyer passes Point Lázaro in conditions that are “only reasonably rough” (42). Before dawn, the crew encounters a dense swarm of red langustina and stops to net many. A skipjack strikes the trolling line and is eaten for breakfast. Later, they catch two small, gold-colored dolphins.

Approaching Cape San Lucas at night, they find the harbor dark. Sounding with a leadline, they anchor in eight fathoms near a beach and breathe the first “land smell” since leaving port (43) and it brings with it a powerful emotional nostalgia. Morning reveals a tuna cannery and a few houses. The Coast Pilot’s pier light is explained, since “the light burns only in the daytime” (43). While waiting for clearance, they read Clavigero on the cape and reflect on names. On the pirate-like beach behind the Friars, they notice a pile of rotting hammerhead sharks with their livers removed. Officials arrive at noon, armed and formal yet courteous; coffee, rum, and a ritual of exchanging prized matches accompany the clearing. Gunfire cracks on the cliffs as locals shoot cormorants that drive baitfish from the cannery pier.

The party launches the Sea-Cow, which fails to run, though spinning the flywheel helps them reach shore. They carry wrecking bars, fish kits, jars, and many glass tubes. The exposed rocks prove “ferocious with life” (49), yielding Sally Lightfoots (a type of crab), periwinkles, barnacles, Purpura, limpets, serpulids, Heliaster kubiniji, urchins wedged in crevices, dark gorgonians, bryozoa, flatworms, flat crabs, large sea cucumbers, anemones, purple encrusting and erect white calcareous sponges, tunicates, cones, murexes, a red tectibranch, hydroids, and a red pentagonal starfish. The Sally Lightfoots evade every trap; Tiny slips, injures his arm, and vows revenge. They return to the boat, lay out pans of seawater, sort specimens by families, and begin preservation.