The Log from the Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

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.

In time of peace in the modern world, if one is thoughtful and careful, it is rather more difficult to be killed or maimed in the outland places of the globe than it is in the streets of our great cities, but the atavistic urge toward danger persists and its satisfaction is called adventure. However, your adventurer feels no gratification in crossing Market Street in San Francisco against the traffic. Instead he will go to a good deal of trouble and expense to get himself killed in the South Seas. In reputedly rough water, he will go in a canoe; he will invade deserts without adequate food and he will expose his tolerant and uninoculated blood to strange viruses. This is adventure. It is possible that his ancestor, wearying of the humdrum attacks of the saber-tooth, longed for the good old days of pterodactyl and triceratops.

Hitler marched into Denmark and into Norway, France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost—we didn’t know it, but we knew the daily catch of every boat within four hundred miles. It was simply a directional thing; a man has only so much. And so it was with the chartering of a boat. The owners were not distrustful of us; they didn’t even listen to us because they couldn’t quite believe we existed. We were obviously ridiculous.

The idea was no shock to Tony Berry; he had chartered to the government for salmon tagging in Alaskan waters and was used to nonsense. Besides, he was an intelligent and tolerant man. He knew that he had idiosyncrasies and that some of his friends had. He was willing to let us do any crazy thing that we wanted so long as we (1) paid a fair price, (2) told him where to go, (3) did not insist that he endanger the boat, (4) got back on time, and (5) didn’t mix him up in our nonsense. His boat was not busy and he was willing to go.

We did not know what our crew thought of the expedition but later, in the field, they became good collectors—a little emotional sometimes, as when Tiny, in outrage at being pinched, declared a war of extermination on the whole Sally Lightfoot species, but on the whole collectors of taste and quickness.

And if the lines were coiled and the cables greased and the little luxury of deer horns nailed to the crow‘s-nest, there was no need to see that owner either. There were deer horns on many of the crow’s-nests, and when we asked why, we were told they brought good luck. Out of some ancient time, they brought good luck to these people, most of them out of Sicily, the horns grown sturdily on the structure of their race. If you ask, “Where does the idea come from?” the owner will say, “It brings good luck, we always put them on.” And a thousand years ago the horns were on the masts and brought good luck, and probably when the ships of Carthage and Tyre put into the harbors of Sicily, the horns were on the mastheads and brought good luck and no one knew why. Out of some essential race soul the horns come, and not only the horns, but the boats themselves, so that to a man, to nearly all men, a boat more than any other tool he uses is a little representation of an archetype. There is an “idea” boat that is an emotion, and because the emotion is so strong it is probable that no other tool is made with so much honesty as a boat.

Some have said they have felt a boat shudder before she struck a rock, or cry when she beached and the surf poured into her. This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul. His spirit and the tendrils of his feeling are so deep in a boat that the identification is complete. It is very easy to see why the Viking wished his body to sail away in an unmanned ship, for neither could exist without the other; or, failing that, how it was necessary that the things he loved most, his women and his ship, lie with him and thus keep closed the circle. In the great fire on the shore, all three started at least in the same direction, and in the gathered ashes who could say where man or woman stopped and ship began?

When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our species. If we used the same smug observation on ourselves that we do on hermit crabs we would be forced to say, with the information at hand, “It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individual to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind. It is not known whether this be caused by a virus, some airborne spore, or whether it be a species reaction to some meteorological stimulus as yet undetermined.” Hope, which is another species diagnostic trait—the hope that this may not always be—does not in the least change the observable past and present. When two crayfish meet, they usually fight. One would say that perhaps they might not at a future time, but without some mutation it is not likely that they will lose this trait. And perhaps our species is not likely to forgo war without some psychic mutation which at present, at least, does not seem imminent. And if one place the blame for killing and destroying on economic insecurity, on inequality, on injustice, he is simply stating the proposition in another way.

Tex, our engineer, was caught in the ways of the harbor. He was born in the Panhandle of Texas and early he grew to love Diesel engines. They are so simple and powerful, blocks of pure logic in shining metal. They appealed to some sense of neat thinking in Tex. He might be sentimental and illogical in some things, but he liked his engines to be true and logical. By an accident, possibly alcoholic, he came to the Coast in an old Ford and sat down beside the Bay, and there he discovered a wonderful thing. Here, combined in one, were the best Diesels to be found anywhere, and boats. He never recovered from his shocked pleasure. He could never leave the sea again, for nowhere else could he find these two perfect things in one. He is a sure man with an engine. When he goes below he is identified with his engine. He moves about, not seeing, not looking, but knowing. No matter how tired or how deeply asleep he may be, one miss of the engine jerks him to his feet and into the engine-room before he is awake, and we truly believe that a burned bearing or a cracked shaft gives him sharp pains in his stomach.

Tony has one great passion; he loves rightness and he hates wrongness. He thinks speculation a complete waste of time. To our sorrow, and some financial loss, we discovered that Tony never spoke unless he was right. It was useless to bet with him and impossible to argue with him. If he had not been right, he would never have opened his mouth. But once knowing and saying a truth, he became infuriated at the untruth which naturally enough was set against it. Inaccuracy was like an outrageous injustice to him, and when confronted with it, he was likely to shout and to lose his temper. But he did not personally triumph when his point was proven.

We come now to a piece of equipment which still brings anger to our hearts and, we hope, some venom to our pen. Perhaps in self-defense against suit, we should say, “The outboard motor mentioned in this book is purely fictitious and any resemblance to outboard motors living or dead is coincidental.” We shall call this contraption, for the sake of secrecy, a Hansen Sea-Cow—a dazzling little piece of machinery, all aluminum paint and touched here and there with spots of red.

Recently, industrial civilization has reached its peak of reality and has lunged forward into something that approaches mysticism. In the Sea-Cow factory where steel fingers tighten screws, bend and mold, measure and divide, some curious mathematick has occurred. And that secret so long sought has accidentally been found. Life has been created. The machine is at last stirred. A soul and a malignant mind have been born. Our Hansen Sea-Cow was not only a living thing but a mean, irritable, contemptible, vengeful, mischievous, hateful living thing. In the six weeks of our association we observed it, at first mechanically and then, as its living reactions became more and more apparent, psychologically. And we determined one thing to our satisfaction. When and if these ghoulish little motors learn to reproduce themselves the human species is doomed. For their hatred of us is so great that they will wait and plan and organize and one night, in a roar of little exhausts, they will wipe us out. We do not think that Mr. Hansen, inventor of the Sea-Cow, father of the outboard motor, knew what he was doing.

Whereas the forms that are familiar to us are the results of billions of years of mutation and complication, life and intelligence emerged simultaneously in the Sea-Cow. It is more than a species. It is a whole new redefinition of life. We observed the following traits in it and we were able to check them again and again: 1. Incredibly lazy, the Sea-Cow loved to ride on the back of a boat, trailing its propeller daintily in the water while we rowed. 2. It required the same amount of gasoline whether it ran or not, apparently being able to absorb this fluid through its body walls without recourse to explosion. It had always to be filled at the beginning of every trip. 3. It had apparently some clairvoyant powers, and was able to read our minds, particularly when they were inflamed with emotion. Thus, on every occasion when we were driven to the point of destroying it, it started and ran with a great noise and excitement. This served the double purpose of saving its life and of resurrecting in our minds a false confidence in it. 4. It had many cleavage points, and when attacked with a screwdriver, fell apart in simulated death, a trait it had in common with opossums, armadillos, and several members of the sloth family, which also fall apart in simulated death when attacked with a screwdriver. 5. It hated Tex, sensing perhaps that his knowledge of mechanics was capable of diagnosing its shortcomings. 6. It completely refused to run: (a) when the waves were high, (b) when the ...

In Mexico, certain good friends worked to get us the permits; the consul-general in San Francisco wrote letters about us, and then finally, through a friend, we got in touch with Mr. Castillo Najera, the Mexican ambassador to Washington. To our wonder there came an immediate reply from the ambassador which said there was no reason why we should not go and that he would see the permits were issued immediately. His letter said just that. There was a little sadness in us when we read it. The ambassador seemed such a good man we felt it a pity that he had no diplomatic future, that he could never get anywhere in the world of international politics. We understood his letter the first time we read it. Clearly, Mr. Castillo Najera is a misfit and a rebel. He not only wrote clearly, but he kept his word. The permits came through quickly and in order. And we wish here and now to assure this gentleman that whenever the inevitable punishment for his logic and clarity falls upon him we will gladly help him to get a new start in some other profession.

The moment or hour of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human experience, for it has in it a warm sadness without loss. People who don’t ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection at leave-taking. We said good-by again and again and still could not bring ourselves to cast off the lines and start the engines. It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist.

going. A curious sea-lion came out to look us over, a tawny, crusty old fellow with rakish mustaches and the scars of battle on his shoulders. He crossed our bow too and turned and paralleled our course, trod water, and looked at us. Then, satisfied, he snorted and cut for shore and some sea-lion appointment. They always have them, it’s just a matter of getting around to keeping them.

The telephone rang and his city editor said that the decomposed body of a sea-serpent was washed up on the beach at Moss Landing, half-way around the Bay. Jimmy was to rush over and get pictures of it. He rushed, approached the evil-smelling monster from which the flesh was dropping. There was a note pinned to its head which said, “Don’t worry about it, it’s a basking shark. [Signed] Dr. Rolph Bolin of the Hopkins Marine Station.” No doubt that Dr. Bolin acted kindly, for he loves true things; but his kindness was a blow to the people of Monterey. They so wanted it to be a sea-serpent. Even we hoped it would be.

important when you aren’t going far.” If Tony loved the truth for itself, he was more than counterbalanced by Sparky and Tiny. They have little faith in truth, or, for that matter, in untruth. The police who had overseen their growing up had given them a nice appreciation of variables; they tested everything to find out whether it were true or not. In a like manner they tested the compass for a weakness they suspected was in it. And if Tony should say, “You are way off course,” they could answer, “Well, we didn’t hit anything, did we?”

Clavigero says of its naming, “The origin of this name is not known, but it is believed that the conqueror, Cortés, who pretended to have some knowledge of Latin, named the harbor, where he put in, ‘Callida fornax’ because of the great heat which he felt there; and that either he himself or some one of the many persons who accompanied him formed the name California from these two words. If this conjecture be not true, it is at least credible.”

Was it a wonder that we collected furiously; spent every low-tide moment on the rocks, even at night? And in the times between low tides we kept the bottom nets down and the lines and dip-nets working. When the charter was up, we would be through. How different it had been when John Xantus was stationed in this very place, Cape San Lucas, in the sixties. Sent down by the United States Government as a tidal observer, but having lots of time, he collected animals for our National Museum. The first fine collections of Gulf forms came from Xantus. And we do not feel that we are injuring his reputation, but rather broadening it, by repeating a story about him. Speaking to the manager of the cannery at the Cape, we remarked on what a great man Xantus had been. Where another would have kept his tide charts and brooded and wished for the Willard Hotel, Xantus had collected animals widely and carefully. The manager said, “Oh, he was even better than that.” Pointing to three little Indian children he said, “Those are Xantus’s great-grandchildren,” and he continued, “In the town there is a large family of Xantuses, and a few miles back in the hills you’ll find a whole tribe of them.” There were giants in the earth in those days. We wonder what modern biologist, worried about titles and preferment and the gossip of the Faculty Club, would have the warmth and breadth, or even the fecundity for that matter, to leave a “whole tribe of Xantuses.” We honor this man for all his activities. ...

Man reacts peculiarly but consistently in his relationship with Sally Lightfoot. His tendency eventually is to scream curses, to hurl himself at them, and to come up foaming with rage and bruised all over his chest. Thus, Tiny, leaping forward, slipped and fell and hurt his arm. He never forgot nor forgave his enemy. From then on he attacked Lightfoots by every foul means he could contrive (and a training in Monterey street fighting had equipped him well for this kind of battle). He hurled rocks at them; he smashed at them with boards; and he even considered poisoning them. Eventually we did catch a few Sallys, but we think they were the halt and the blind, the simpletons of their species. With reasonably well-balanced and non-neurotic Lightfoots we stood no chance.

There doesn’t seem to be a true aphrodisiac; there are excitants like cantharides, and physical aids to the difficulties of psychic traumas, like yohimbine sulphate; there are strong protein foods like bêche-de-mer and the gonads of sea-urchins, and the much over-rated oyster; even chiles, with their irritating qualities, have some effect, but there seems to be no true aphrodisiac, no sweet essence of that goddess to be taken in a capsule. A certain young person said once that she found sexual intercourse an aphrodisiac; certainly it is the only good one. So many people are interested in this subject but most of them are forced to pretend they are not. A man, for his own ego’s sake, must, publicly at least, be over-supplied with libido. But every doctor knows so well the “friend of the client” who needs help. He is the same “friend” who has gonorrhea, the same “friend” who needs the address of an abortionist. This elusive friend—what will we not do to help him out of his difficulties; the nights we spend sleepless, worrying about him! He is interested in an aphrodisiac; we must try to find him one. But the damiana we brought back for our “friend” possibly just now is in the hands of the customs officials in San Diego. Perhaps they too have a friend. Since we suggested the qualities of damiana to them, it is barely possible that this fascinating liquor has already been either devoted to a friend or even perhaps subjected to a stern course of investigation under laboratory c...

Verrill, in The Actinaria of the Canadian Arctic Expeditions, broke out in protest. He cries, “Prof. McMurrich has endeavored to restore for this species a name (senilis) used by Linnaeus for a small indeterminable species very imperfectly described in 1761.... The description does not in the least apply to this species. He described the thing as the size of the last joint of a finger, sordid, rough, with a sub-coriaceous tunic. Such a description could not possibly apply to this soft and smooth species ... but it would be mere guesswork to say what species he had in view.... Moreover, aside from this uncertainty, most modern writers have rejected most of the Linnaean names of actinians on account of their obscenity or indecency. All this confusion shows the impossibility of fixing the name, even if it were not otherwise objectionable. It should be forgotten or ignored, like the generic names used by Linnaeus in 1761, and by some others of that period, for species of Actinia. Their indecent names were usually the Latinized forms of vulgar names used by fishermen, some of which are still in use among the fishermen of our own coasts, for similar things.” This strange attempt to “clean up” biology will have, we hope, no effect whatever. We at least have kept our vulgar sense of wonder. We are no better than the animals; in fact in a lot of ways we aren’t as good. And so we’ll let the book fall as it may.

Above beyond transcending

Lebensraum,

The space or territory a group or nation believes it needs for its natural development

Again we tried to start the Sea-Cow—and then rowed back to the Western Flyer. There we complained so bitterly to Tex, the engineer, that he took the evil little thing to pieces. Piece by piece he examined it, with a look of incredulity in his eyes. He admired, I think, the ingenuity which could build such a perfect little engine, and he was astonished at the concept of building a whole motor for the purpose of not running. Having put it together again, he made a discovery. The Sea-Cow would run perfectly out of water—that is, in a barrel of water with the propeller and cooling inlet submerged. Placed thus, the Sea-Cow functioned perfectly and got good mileage.

We carried no cook and dishwasher; it had been understood that we would all help. But for some time Tex had been secretly mutinous about washing dishes. At the proper times he had things to do in the engine-room. He might have succeeded in this crime, if he had ever varied his routine, but gradually a suspicion grew on us that Tex did not like to wash dishes. He denied this vigorously. He said he liked very much to wash dishes. He appealed to our reason. How would we like it, he argued, if we were forever in the engine-room, getting our hands dirty? There was danger down there too, he said. Men had been killed by engines. He was not willing to see us take the risk. We met his arguments with a silence that made him nervous. He protested then that he had once washed dishes from west Texas to San Diego without stopping, and that he had learned to love it so much that he didn’t want to be selfish about it now. A circle of cold eyes surrounded him. He began to sweat. He said that later (he didn’t say how much later) he was going to ask us for the privilege of washing all the dishes, but right now he had a little job to do in the engine-room. It was for the safety of the ship, he said. No one answered him. Then he cried, “My God, are you going to hang me?” At last Sparky spoke up, not unkindly, but inexorably. “Tex,” he said, “you’re going to wash ‘em or you’re going to sleep with ’em.” Tex said, “Now just as soon as I do one little job there’s nothing I’d rather do than wash fo...

The pattern of a book, or a day, of a trip, becomes a characteristic design. The factors in a trip by boat, the many-formed personality phases all shuffled together, changing a little to fit into the box and yet bringing their own lumps and corners, make the trip. And from all

It is amazing how the strictures of the old teleologies infect our observation, causal thinking warped by hope. It was said earlier that hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. The slave hopes for freedom, the weary man for rest, the hungry for food. And the feeders of hope, economic and religious, have from these simple strivings of dissatisfaction managed to create a world picture which is very hard to escape. Man grows toward perfection; animals grow toward man; bad grows toward good; and down toward up, until our little mechanism, hope, achieved in ourselves probably to cushion the shock of thought, manages to warp our whole world. Probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called “the future,” this shock-absorber, hope, had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live. And out of this therapeutic poultice we build our iron teleologies and twist the tide pools and the stars into the pattern. To most men the most hateful statement possible is, “A thing is because it is.” Even those who have managed to drop the leading-strings of a Sunday-school deity are still led by th...

And in saying that hope cushions the shock of experience, that one trait balances the directionalism of another, a teleology is implied, unless one know or feel or think that we are here, and that without this balance, hope, our species in its blind mutation might have joined many, many others in extinction.

Man is the only animal whose interest and whose drive are outside himself. Other animals may dig holes to live in; may weave nests or take possession of hollow trees. Some species, like bees or spiders, even create complicated homes, but they do it with the fluids and processes of their own bodies. They make little impression on the world. But the world is furrowed and cut, torn and blasted by man. Its flora has been swept away and changed; its mountains torn down by man; its flat lands littered by the debris of his living. And these changes have been wrought, not because any inherent technical ability has demanded them, but because his desire has created that technical ability. Physiological man does not require this paraphernalia to exist, but the whole man does. He is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him. This is beautifully demonstrated by a thing doctors know —that when a man loses his possessions a very common result is sexual impotence.

the place to look for his mutation would be in the direction of his drive, or in other words in the external things he deals with. And here we can indeed readily find evidence of mutation. The industrial revolution would then be indeed a true mutation, and the present tendency toward collectivism, whether attributed to Marx or Hitler or Henry Ford, might be as definite a mutation of the species as the lengthening neck of the evolving giraffe. For it must be that mutations take place in the direction of a species drive or preoccupation. If then this tendency toward collectivization is mutation there is no reason to suppose it is for the better.

Some time ago a Congress of honest men refused an appropriation of several hundreds of millions of dollars to feed our people. They said, and meant it, that the economic structure of the country would collapse under the pressure of such expenditure. And now the same men, just as honestly, are devoting many billions to the manufacture, transportation, and detonation of explosives to protect the people they would not feed.

And nothing bloody changes.

Perhaps it is all a part of the process of mutation and perhaps the mutation will see us done for. We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time. And it is strange and sad and again symptomatic that most people, reading this speculation which is only speculation, will feel that it is a treason to our species so to speculate.

collecting

holothurian

Sea cucumber

In one of the sea-cucumbers we found a small commensal fish25 which lived well inside the anus. It moved in and out with great ease and speed, resting invariably head inward. In the pan we ejected this fish by a light pressure on the body of the cucumber, but it quickly returned and entered the anus again. The pale, colorless appearance of this fish seemed to indicate that it habitually lived there. It is interesting to see how areas

With marine fauna, as with humans, priority and possession appear to be vastly important to survival and dominance. But sometimes it is found that the very success of an animal is its downfall. There are examples where the available food supply is so exhausted by the rapid and successful reproduction that the animal must migrate or die. Sometimes, also, the very by-products of the animals’ own bodies prove poisonous to a too great concentration of their own species.

It is difficult, when watching the little beasts, not to trace human parallels. The greatest danger to a speculative biologist is analogy. It is a pitfall to be avoided—the industry of the bee, the economics of the ant, the villainy of the snake, all in human terms have given us profound misconceptions of the animals. But parallels are amusing if they are not taken too seriously as regards the animal in question, and are downright valuable as regards humans.

There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success. A man—a viewing-point man—while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term “good” with “weak survival quotient” and the term “bad” with “strong survival quotient.” Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other an...

It is said so often and in such ignorance that Mexicans are contented, happy people. “They don’t want anything.” This, of course, is not a description of the happiness of Mexicans, but of the unhappiness of the person who says it. For Americans, and probably all northern peoples, are all masses of wants growing out of inner insecurity. The great drive of our people stems from insecurity. It is often considered that the violent interest in little games, the mental rat-mazes of contract bridge, and the purposeful striking of little white balls with sticks, comes from an inner sterility.

We find we like this cash-and-carry bribery as contrasted with our own system of credits. With us, no bargain is struck, no price named, nothing is clear. We go to a friend who knows a judge. The friend goes to the judge. The judge knows a senator who has the ear of the awarder of contracts. And eventually we sell five carloads of lumber. But the process has only begun. Every member of the chain is tied to every other. Ten years later the son of the awarder of contracts must be appointed to Annapolis. The senator must have traffic tickets fixed for many years to come. The judge has a political lien on your friend, and your friend taxes you indefinitely with friends who need jobs. It would be simpler and cheaper to go to the awarder of contracts, give him one-quarter of the price of the lumber, and get it over with. But that is dishonest, that is a bribe. Everyone in the credit chain eventually hates and fears everyone else. But the bribe-bargain, having no enforcing mechanism, promotes mutual respect and a genuine liking. If the accepter of a bribe cheats you, you will not go to him again and he will soon have to leave the public service.

How can you say to a people who are preoccupied with getting enough food and enough children that you have come to pick up useless little animals so that perhaps your world picture will be enlarged?

But there had to be a story, for everyone asked us. One of us had once taken a long walking trip through the southern United States. At first he had tried to explain that he did it because he liked to walk and because he saw and felt the country better that way. When he gave this explanation there was unbelief and dislike for him. It sounded like a lie. Finally a man said to him, “You can’t fool me, you’re doing it on a bet.” And after that, he used this explanation, and everyone liked and understood him from then on. So with these men we developed our story and stuck to it thereafter. We were collecting curios, we said. These beautiful little animals and shells, while they abounded so greatly here as to be valueless, had, because of their scarcity in the United States, a certain value. They would not make us rich but it was at least profitable to take them.

While we were anchored at Espíritu Santo Island a black yacht went by swiftly, and on her awninged after-deck ladies and gentlemen in white clothing sat comfortably. We saw they had tall cool drinks beside them and we hated them a little, for we were out of beer. And Tiny said fiercely, “Nobody but a pansy’d sail on a thing like that.” And then more gently, “But I’ve never been sure I ain’t queer.”

We regarded ourselves in the mirror with the long contemplative coy looks of chorus girls about to go on stage. What we found was not good, but it was the best we had. Heaven knows what we expected to find in La Paz, but we wanted to be beautiful for it.

We have so often admired the literary style and quality of the Coast Pilot that it might be well here to quote from it. In the first place, the compilers of this book are cynical men. They know that they are writing for morons, that if by any effort their descriptions can be misinterpreted or misunderstood by the reader, that effort will be made. These writers have a contempt for almost everything. They would like an ocean and a coastline unchanging and unchangeable ; lights and buoys that do not rust and wash away; winds and storms that come at specified times; and, finally, reasonably intelligent men to read their instructions. They are gratified in none of these desires.

And although we were infested and crawling with very poor people and children, we lost nothing; and this in spite of the fact that there were little gadgets lying about that any one of us would have stolen if we had had the chance. The guards simply kept our visitors out of the galley and out of the cabin. But we do not think they prevented theft, for in other ports where we had no guard nothing was stolen.

And as always when one is collecting, we were soon joined by a number of small boys. The very posture of search, the slow movement with the head down, seems to draw people. “What did you lose?” they ask. “Nothing.” “Then what do you search for?” And this is an embarrassing question. We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another, as this young man searches for a warm light in his wife’s eyes and that one for the hot warmth of fighting. These little boys and young men on the tide flat do not even know that they search for such things too. We say to them, “We are looking for curios, for certain small animals.”

There is a small ghost shrimp which lives on these flats, an efficient little fellow who lives in a burrow. He moves very rapidly, and is armed with claws which can pinch painfully. He retires backward into his hole, so that to come at him from above is to invite his weapons. The little boys solved the problem for us. We offered ten centavos for each one they took. They dug into the rubble and old coral until they got behind the ghost shrimp in his burrow, then, prodding, they drove him outraged from his hole. Then they banged him good to reduce his pinching power. We refused to buy the banged-up ones—they had to get us lively ones. Small boys are the best collectors in the world. Soon they worked out a technique for catching the shrimps with only an occasionally pinched finger, and then the ten-centavo pieces began running out, and an increasing cloud of little boys brought us specimens. Small boys have such sharp eyes, and they are quick to notice deviation. Once they know you are generally curious, they bring amazing things. Perhaps we only practice an extension of their urge. It is easy to remember when we were small and lay on our stomachs beside a tide pool and our minds and eyes went so deeply into it that size and identity were lost, and the creeping hermit crab was our size and the tiny octopus a monster. Then the waving algae covered us and we hid under a rock at the bottom and leaped out at fish. It is very possible that we, and even those who probe space with e...