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test his dream, and again like his own young Henry Morgan, he proposed to do that with a voyage. If Panama, that fabled Spanish treasure port, was the “Cup of Gold” for the aspiring seventeenth-century buccaneer, then surely New York City, America’s vibrant capital of the arts, was an equivalent Grail for the aspiring twentieth-century writer. Somehow, Steinbeck persuaded his long-suffering father to buy him a $100 tourist-class ticket for travel by freighter from San Francisco to New York. In Cup of Gold , Robert Morgan also finds the courage to let his son go, and the novel contains this insight into a father’s hope:
    “Why do men like me want sons?” he wondered. “It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance with life; like a new bag of coins at the table after your fortune is gone. Perhaps the boy is doing what I would have done had I been brave enough in years past. Yes, . . . I am glad this boy finds it in his power to vault the mountains and stride about the world.”
STEINBECK’S PASSAGE TO PANAMA
    On November 1, 1925, Steinbeck left San Francisco on board the Katrina Luckenbach , a 449-foot-long steamship with twin screws, four turbines, and the modern conveniences of electric lights and wireless. With a black hull, red boot-topping, and buff ventilators, Katrina was not a passenger liner, but a working freighter owned by the Luckenbach company. She carried about forty crew members and had space for only a few passengers in her two-story deckhouse. Thanks to boyhood summers at his family’s cottage on the Pacific shore, Steinbeck had the sea in his blood. “The water slapping smooth hulls was a joy to him to the point of pain,” he wrote of Henry Morgan. On the waterfront, “He felt that he had come home again to a known, loved place . . .” At one point during his Stanford years, Steinbeck had even tried to run away to sea and work a passage to China, but could not find a shipboard job. Now he was outward bound on his first voyage. As a tugboat towed Katrina out of the harbor and her foreign crew hustled about the deck, Steinbeck must have felt some of the excitement he ascribes to Henry Morgan as the Bristol Girl casts off: “They were starting for the Indies—the fine, far Indies where boys’ dreams lived.”
    Katrina was actually bound first to Panama, Morgan’s “Cup of Gold.” She cruised down the coasts of California, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica at a top speed of 13½ knots (about 15 miles per hour). This leisurely pace gave Steinbeck time to observe birds and marine life such as the storm petrels and flying fish described in Cup of Gold . He also had time to get to know the vessel’s crew. Perhaps, like Henry Morgan, he found “wise, kind men . . . [who] taught him what they could,” not only about the working of the ship, but about “songs of death and mutiny and blood in the sea,” “the peculiar clean swearing of sailors,” and tales “of wonders seen and imagined.” At least one sailor, resembling the treacherous Tim in Cup of Gold , found a way to part a naïve young man from his money. In a 1937 interview about his voyage to New York, Steinbeck told Joseph Henry Jackson that “On the way he learned to his astonishment that plain, ordinary, unloaded dice could be controlled if one knew how. The discovery came to him through the medium of a large and very black sailor and was slightly expensive, but at least it was something to know.”
    Steinbeck’s voyage on Katrina also gave him time to form a friendship with a young, California-born artist named Mahlon Blaine. Like Steinbeck, Blaine was headed for New York to seek his fortune. Specializing in the fantastic, the surreal, the sensuous, and even the satanic (illustrations for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tanar of Pellucidar ,