In 1940, John Steinbeck was falling apart. He’d just written The Grapes of Wrath, won a Pulitzer, and basically became the most hated man in California agribusiness. People were burning his books. The FBI was sniffing around. He was exhausted, paranoid, and desperately needed to get out of town.
So, naturally, he rented a 77-foot sardine boat called the Western Flyer, packed it with cases of beer and microscopes, and sailed into the Gulf of California.
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He didn't go alone, though. He took his best friend, Ed Ricketts—a guy who ran a commercial biology lab in Monterey and lived on a diet of classical music and beer shakes. What started as a "leisurely journal of travel and research" turned into something much weirder and more important. If you’ve ever wondered why people still obsess over the Steinbeck Sea of Cortez expedition eighty years later, it’s because it wasn’t just a fishing trip. It was the moment modern ecology was born, wrapped in a hangover and a lot of philosophy.
The Boat That Shouldn't Have Made It
They left Monterey on March 11, 1940. The crew was a motley bunch: Tony Berry the captain, a couple of Italian fishermen, Steinbeck’s wife Carol (who the book conveniently forgets to mention most of the time), and the two leads.
The Western Flyer was a working boat, not a yacht. It smelled like fish and diesel. They spent six weeks hugging the coastline of Baja, stopping at places like Cabo San Lucas long before it was a land of infinity pools and $20 margaritas. Back then, it was a tiny cannery town.
They weren't looking for marlin or trophies. They were looking for the small stuff. Crabs. Sea cucumbers. Strange, pulsing things in tide pools. Ricketts had this revolutionary idea—which seems obvious now but was radical then—that you can’t understand an animal without looking at where it lives and who its neighbors are.
Honestly, they spent a lot of time just being frustrated. Their outboard motor, which they nicknamed the "Sea-Cow," was a total piece of junk. It rarely started, usually broke down when they were miles from the ship, and seemed to possess a malicious soul. Steinbeck’s descriptions of that motor are some of the funniest parts of the book because anyone who’s ever owned a boat knows that specific brand of rage.
What They Actually Found
They collected thousands of specimens. We're talking 550 different species of marine invertebrates. About 40 of them were totally new to science at the time.
But the real "find" was the realization of how fragile the Gulf was. On April 9, near Guaymas, they ran into a Japanese shrimp fleet. They watched the trawlers scrape the bottom of the sea raw, killing everything just to get a few shrimp.
Steinbeck wrote about it with a kind of sickened clarity. He saw the "murder trait" of humans—the way we destroy the very systems we depend on. It was a first-row seat to the beginning of the end for many of those fisheries.
The Confusion Between the Two Books
If you go to a bookstore today, you’ll likely find two different versions of this story, and it’s kinda confusing.
- Sea of Cortez (1941): This is the big daddy. It’s 600 pages. The first half is the narrative, and the second half is a massive, technical "phyletic catalogue" of every creature they found. It’s a beast.
- The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951): This is what most people actually read. After Ed Ricketts died in a tragic train accident in 1948, Steinbeck reissued just the narrative part. He added a beautiful, heartbreaking preface called "About Ed Ricketts" that serves as a eulogy for his friend.
The 1951 version is easier to carry in a backpack, but the 1941 original is the "true" collaboration. It was meant to be a scientific text as much as a story. Critics at the time didn't know what to do with it. Was it a travelogue? A science textbook? A drunk man’s diary?
Why the Steinbeck Sea of Cortez Still Ranks
You’ve probably seen news lately about the Western Flyer coming back to life. It’s a wild story. The boat was sold, renamed Gemini, used for crab fishing in Alaska, sank twice, and was basically rotting in the mud in Washington state.
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A few years ago, a guy named John Gregg bought it for a million dollars and spent millions more restoring it. In 2025, the boat actually returned to the Sea of Cortez for an 85th-anniversary expedition.
It’s now a "floating classroom." Scientists and students are using it to re-survey the same spots Steinbeck and Ricketts visited. They’re finding that some places, like Cabo San Lucas, are almost unrecognizable. Where Steinbeck saw tidal zones "ferocious with life," modern researchers often find sand and empty shells.
Non-Teleological Thinking (Wait, What?)
One of the heavy themes in the Steinbeck Sea of Cortez is something called "non-teleological thinking."
Basically, it’s the idea of looking at "what is" rather than "why it is." Don't ask why a crab eats its neighbor; just observe that it does. It sounds simple, but it’s a way of removing human ego from nature. Steinbeck and Ricketts spent long nights on the deck of the Flyer, drinking beer and arguing about this until the sun came up.
They wanted to see the "toto picture"—the whole thing. The way the stars, the tide, the hermit crabs, and the fishermen were all one giant, interconnected organism.
How to Experience This Today
If you want to follow in their wake, you don't need a 77-foot sardine seiner, but you do need a certain mindset.
- Read the Log first: Don't start with the technical version unless you're a hardcore biologist. Get the Penguin Classics version of The Log from the Sea of Cortez.
- Visit the "Doc" Ricketts Lab: It’s still there on Cannery Row in Monterey. It’s a tiny, unassuming building wedged between tourist traps, but it’s where the whole idea started.
- Go to Loreto or La Paz: These spots in Baja California Sur are still stunning. If you go, bring a copy of the book. Read the chapter about the "Great Cold" or the description of the Sally Lightfoot crabs while you're actually sitting on the rocks. It hits different.
- Support the Foundation: The Western Flyer Foundation is doing the actual work of keeping this legacy alive through "citizen science." They’re literally using the boat to teach kids how to look at the world the way Ed Ricketts did.
The Steinbeck Sea of Cortez expedition wasn't a success in the way 1940s society defined success. The book didn't sell well initially. The science was ignored by academia for years. But today, we realize they were right. Everything is connected. The health of a tide pool in Mexico affects the climate in California.
Actionable Takeaway for Your Next Trip
Next time you're at the beach, don't just look at the sunset. Look down. Find a tide pool. Sit there for twenty minutes without moving. See how the ecosystem resets itself once it forgets you’re there. That’s the "leisurely research" Steinbeck was talking about. It’s not about being a scientist; it’s about being a participant in the world instead of just a spectator.
If you want to dig deeper into the actual science they did, look up the "phyletic catalogue" online. It's a trip to see how many of those 1940s Latin names are still used in 2026. The world has changed, but the "good, kind, sane little animals" of the rocks are still there, clinging on, waiting for us to notice them again.