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Searching for the Spirits of the Sea of Cortez
- Steinbeck Studies
- University of Idaho Department of English
- Volume 15, Number 2, Fall 2004
- pp. 5-14
- 10.1353/stn.2004.0036
- Article
- Additional Information
Steinbeck Studies 15.2 (2004) 5-14
[Access article in PDF]
Searching for the Spirits of the Sea of Cortez
William Gilly
Click for larger view | Figure 1 |
Click for larger view | Figure 2 |
John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts departed from Monterey, California, on 11 March 1940 aboard the Western Flyer, a wooden sardine purse seiner, to undertake their celebrated expedition to the Sea of Cortez. Sixty-four years later, on 26 March 2004, a core team composed of two Stanford University scientists, a photographer, an environmental journalist, a captain, and a cook set out on their own eight-week expedition to this magical place. Their vessel, the Gus-D, was an old wooden trawler remarkably similar to the Western Flyer in size and appearance. The following is an adapted log entry made by the chief scientist of the 2004 expedition, which summarizes events during the period of 4-7 May.
7 MAY 2004: It is Friday night, a week after arriving at Puerto Peñasco, a place that is trying to be a second-generation Cabo San Lucas tourist trap, and by most signs is succeeding. After all the intertidal life we had examined on the first half of the trip, Puerto Peñasco seemed dreary and devoid of true life. Now we are at anchor in the bay at another populated spot, San Carlos, just north of Guaymas in Sonora. The night air is balmy, with a perfect gentle breeze, and the darkness keeps me from seeing all the sailboats anchored around. If I don't look to my right, I cannot see any of the lights from so many luxury houses just a few hundred yards away. A beach on which squat a half dozen crude fishermen's shacks lies another hundred yards astern. There is no electricity there, so there are no lights—a stark juxtaposition of two worlds. [End Page 7]
This last week has been so remote and removed that I feel the trappings of civilization gnashing their teeth again, much as in Puerto Peñasco, even though there are no banana boats here to tow tourists around. I want to be back drifting in the silent starry gyre of the San Pedro Martir basin. Not much sleep during the last two or three nights—working from dawn till midnight, swirling and drifting in an ethereal, misty dream world where mysterious and wonderful things happened unexpectedly and regularly.
Isla San Pedro Martir is about halfway across the Gulf at the southern end of the mid-riff islands. From the distance it looks jagged and harsh, and on the east end it seems as if a gigantic chunk of the island has just fallen off and landed in the sea—there is a huge cavity in the mountain that must be one half-mile wide. We did not go closer—large sperm whales were guarding the access, lounging at the surface for 10 or 15 minutes with the dorsal fin exposed, some in pairs, and then showing their flukes and sounding. Their forward-directed spout was unmistakable, and several were sticking a large portion of their heads out of the water. I had never seen a sperm whale before, and this was one reason for coming here. But the sperm whales were hanging out for another reason. The jumbo Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), their favorite food, was here in abundance. It was squid heaven.
We had come there guided by a series of satellite images of surface chlorophyll production taken a few days before and e-mailed to the boat via satellite phone by a graduate student at Stanford. The satellite images revealed an intense tidal upwelling event centered near Isla San Pedro Martir, then moving west. We wanted to find the front of this high-productivity zone, which was also marked by a sharp temperature transition. Such places are ephemeral, and you will not find them on any map. But they are where all the life is—plankton, fish, squid, and whales. In fact, the entire food chain driving a regional ecosystem...
