The Log from the Sea of Cortez Read Online Free PDF Page B

as follows:
     
    The Sea of Cortez

    By John Steinbeck
With a scientific appendix comprising materials for a source-book
on the marine animals of the Panamic Faunal Province
By Edward F. Ricketts

     
    Steinbeck objected vigorously, telling Covici that “this book is the product of the work and thinking of both of us and the setting down of the words is of no importance.... I not only disapprove of your plan—but forbid it.”

     
    The book was originally published as Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research by John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, with copyright in both authors’ names. In 1951, the narrative portion of the book was published separately by Viking as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, with Steinbeck’s preface “About Ed Ricketts.” This Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition is based on the text of the 1951 publication; Steinbeck’s “About Ed Ricketts” has been moved to the back matter as an appendix to the main text.



INTRODUCTION

    The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there. Why is an expedition to Tibet undertaken, or a sea bottom dredged? Why do men, sitting at the microscope, examine the calcareous plates of a sea-cucumber, and, finding a new arrangement and number, feel an exaltation and give the new species a name, and write about it possessively? It would be good to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the “services to science” platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds so that they will not know what we are doing.

    We have a book to write about the Gulf of California. We could do one of several things about its design. But we have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and a sea; its duration a six weeks’ charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits—our own without reservation.

    We made a trip into the Gulf; sometimes we dignified it by calling it an expedition. Once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and that is a better-sounding and a more exciting name. We stopped in many little harbors and near barren coasts to collect and preserve the marine invertebrates of the littoral. One of the reasons we gave ourselves for this trip—and when we used this reason, we called the trip an expedition—was to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and to record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced. That plan was simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth. But we did tell the truth to ourselves. We were curious. Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny. We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes—we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. The oneness of these two might take its contribution from both. For example: the Mexican sierra has “XVII-15-IX” spines in the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colors pulsing and his tail beating the air, a whole new relational externality has come into