61 pages • 2-hour read
The Log From The Sea of Cortez
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Key Figures
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck begins the book as a major American writer who had already famously explored class conflict, economic insecurity, and institutional failure in the interwar United States. That experience shapes how he frames the expedition on a human level and how he thinks about writing a scientific journal. For Steinbeck, the voyage is an escape from a world which seems to be “going to hell” (7). The prospect of another World War makes him crave the solitude and escapism of a voyage dedicated to science.
Once afloat, he documents a separate order of attention and time, which gives the book its dual status as literature and field log. The narrative is unembellished when it needs to be and generous with procedural detail because the work must be reusable by others. Steinbeck’s prior training in depicting social settings also carries into his ecological placement of people in their own systems of value and exchange, such as when he writes of Gulf communities and Indigenous peoples and their different understanding of time and value.
Across the voyage, Steinbeck takes on the role of a naturalist. He adopts the methods of a working collector and makes them visible on the page. His scenes repeatedly end in specimen washing, sorting, labeling, preservation, and the clerical labor that allows a field day to be reconstructed by a scientist who did not sail. He spells out station choice, gear, exposures, and associations with the same patience he once gave to dialogue and setting, suggesting a blending of his identities as writer and scientist. This new identity is informed by his good friend, Ed Ricketts, and Steinbeck’s adjustment to the life of a scientist suggests his great respect for his friend.
By the end, Steinbeck has fused writer and field worker into one identity. This makes him ideally suited to compose the Appendix and to preserve a record of Ed Ricketts. Steinbeck states that his eulogy “will have to be true or it can’t work” (228); that standard matches the clarity of the field log and extends it to a partner who has become a central figure in modern American natural history. The eulogy is also a controlled self-placement. They worked together, Steinbeck writes, “so closely that [he does] not know in some cases who started which line of speculation” (256), illustrating how their characters blurred into one another.
Ed Ricketts
Ed Ricketts is the expedition’s model of scientific investigation. He sets the agenda, establishes the process of collection and recording, and shows the party how to convert a tide pool into reusable knowledge. Ed’s “scientific interest was essentially ecological and holistic” (264)—Ed is interested in the big picture, not the anomalies, which explains why the voyage is interested in studying ecology as a whole rather than novel flora or fauna. The method is slow, communal, and careful, taking up many hours of each day.
Ricketts is also the crew’s living check on inference, as shown by Steinbeck’s move toward Ricketts’s theories of nonteleological thinking and the experiences aboard the Japanese fishing boat. Ricketts trains the crew to operate under these constraints. As others adopt them, he seems to recede into a collective “we,” not because he is absent, but because the party is now doing science in his manner. Steinbeck begins to take on Ed Ricketts’s views and methods as his own, blurring Ed into his own perspective as evidence of Ed’s status as a man, a friend, and a teacher.
The Appendix adds the human range that the shipboard journal necessarily compresses. As befitting a eulogy which seeks to celebrate his humanity, the Ricketts of the Appendix appears as an exacting professional and an idiosyncratic person whose habits and preferences matter because they explain what he built and how he taught. Ed’s “laboratory practice was immaculate” (265), though his living quarters were in a constant state of disarray. Steinbeck records Ed as a moral, sincere figure, someone who believes in empathy and preaches it to others even at his own expense. This is consistent with Ed’s work in the Sea of Cortez and his dedication to doing his part on the team: Ed hates to get his head wet, for example, but still steps into the sea to collect samples. His “very highly developed” (264) sense of smell becomes an instrument for identifying animals and foods, as does his desire to taste everything. The Appendix recounts drink, music, generosity, and a complex erotic history not to produce gossip, but to insist that a working scientist is a person in a community whose strengths, contradictions, and loyalties shaped a generation of readers and students.
Steinbeck finally writes Ricketts into the history of science by giving him both a durable intellectual profile and a public afterlife. He says directly what he is trying to do, in that he has “tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead” (272). Steinbeck then anchors that talent to a record of method and accomplishment, a record which is evident in the popularity of Ed’s lab and The Log from the Sea of Cortez. The Appendix declares that Ricketts’s work should be remembered because it integrates careful field practice, disciplined inference, and a public stance that treats knowledge as a common good. The journal shows the practice in action.
Tiny
Tiny functions as a representative seaman and as an individual whose preferences and errors shape what the expedition can do. Early scenes present him at characteristic stations of work. Along with his friend Sparky, he fishes from the bow of the ship while keeping watch from the crow’s nest. He rows hard, argues while rowing, and is the person on the wheel when tempers rise. At sea, he is also a voice for the working fisherman’s view of waste and use, which allows the narrative to introduce ecological clarifications without leaving the human deck, such as when Tiny “inveighed against the waste of fish by the Japanese” (217), which leads to a response about the macrocosm in which “there is no waste” (218) because every loss at one trophic level becomes resource at another.
In these scenes, Tiny is not a caricature. He is a working hand whose perspective is required to keep the log accurate about the human forces that make and destroy ecosystems. His focus—the immediate moment, the contrast between traditional fishing methods and the industrial Japanese approach—contrasts with the more holistic, nonteleological view of scientists such as Ed Ricketts. By having both perspectives present on the boat, Steinbeck can create a better picture of the full scope of opinion and understanding.
As the narrative progresses, Tiny becomes more than an archetype, with his own ambitions and frustrations. His desire to spear a manta does not come from scientific curiosity, but from proof of prowess, for example, showing his human desire to be respected. When the crew points out that they could not process such an animal, he answers that he does not care about scientific processing, only about being able to tell people at home what he has accomplished. The book records his motive without mockery and then returns to the work at hand.
The text also records how fear and caution move through a small crew. On a glassy, humid night before a long estuary run, the men feel a presence on board. Before dawn, they enter thick fog and mistake the hiss of waves on a bar for the onset of a destructive wind. These episodes do not assign superstition to any one man, instead acknowledging a shared susceptibility to uncertainty that any boat crew must manage. Steinbeck explicitly avoids turning Tiny’s energy and lore into detachable stories, suggesting that Tiny’s life story is “one of the most decoratively disreputable sagas” (108) he has heard and stating that it belongs to the tradition of American literature. Since theirs is a scientific voyage, however, he declines to include it.
By the end of the voyage, Tiny’s character reflects the growing companionship that has come from the crew spending so much time together. The people on board have adapted to one another’s tendencies because the work requires predictable roles and the trip has made a unit of them. Tiny is just as much a part of the crew as Steinbeck, Ed, or Tony. Tiny’s insistence on speed, trophies, and proof becomes part of the known system. The closing sequence after the last station intensifies this sense of shared practice. The crew “stowed and lashed equipment, set the corks in hundreds of glass tubes” and “screwed tight the caps of jars” (221) before committing to the run home. The human list and the specimen list now read the same way. Both tell the reader what kind of labor made the record possible. By the end of the story, the reader has come to understand that—just like all the elements in the ecosystems which have been documented—Tiny is just as important a part of the crew as everyone else.
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