later, when John Steinbeck and the marine scientist Edward Ricketts made an excursion through the Gulf of California aboard the Western Flyer, a sardine boat fitted out with a laboratory . Sea of Cortez. A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research is the name of the book that compiles the logs of a trip that took place between March 12 and April 13, 1940. Its first edition was divided in two parts: Steinbeck's literary chronicle and his friend Ed Ricketts 's biological findings. What did this trip which involved a well-known novelist and a charismatic researcher who made a living sending pickled organisms to schools and collectors mean? Steinbeck states in his logbook that firstly, they were collecting critters to sell at a good price. He then explains they were actually studying animal behavior and gathering sociobiological data that could help explain human behavior, amongst other things. Finally, the trip 's main goal seems to have been an opportunity for Steinbeck to ponder personal
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matters, delve deeper into the nature of man and gorge himself on images and landscapes which /' would inspire future novels . Regardless of how successful or not the scientific expedition was, the writer came away ' with enough ma. terial for two further books: the log of the trip itself and a story entitled The Pearl, made into a film in 1945, directed by Emilio "El Indio" Fernández. Like Cortés, Steinbeck wrote about things that never happened on his voyage; the fictional element of this was only revealed fifty years later by a Western Flyer crewmember, Sparky Enea. His 1991 book -With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez. A memoir of the Steinbeck/Ricketts Expeditionbrings many things to light: for example, there was a woman aboard-Steinbeck's wifewhom he never mentioned in the first logbook. The ship's crew was made up of sailors who, like all their peers, went looking for women while at port and had their own fears and desires. The plan to film the trip failed because, like Steinbeck's inflatable ratt, the movie camera never worked. A few photographs survive as bare witnesses of the trip and don't quite live up to the eloquence of their literary counterpart: homely, amateur snapshots meant as keepsakes for the crew. In Sparky Enea's text as well as in these inelegant images, the Stein-
beck-Ricketts expedition's true scope is revealed, although Steinbeck's literary treatment of it may show it under a different light. Perhaps because the reader is an accomplice, even if he knows that all literary travelogs are, to a greater or lesser extent, the reinvention of a trip, he expects nothing less than mermaids and cyclops in the eyes of the navigator who has safeIy returned from the Sea of Cortez. Steinbeck himself was fully convinced of this: "When sometimes a true sea-serpent (... ) is found or caught, a shout of triumph will go through the world. 'There, you see,' men will say, '1 knew they were there all the time. I just had a feeling they were there.' Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans ... An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep." What do travelers to Baja California keep finding? An extreme distance and remoteness where men and women are faced with their insignificanee and the arrogance of their civilization; a bodily struggle or embrace with the gods of nature; an aphrodisiacal drink with an aftertaste of damiana; she-fish and devilfish; sunstroke and delirium; a deadly wave; roads that Mexican journalist Fernando Jordán described in 1950 as " ... trails, slow trails that one travels at the pace of contemplation, not the speed of one's vehicle's wheels."