Western Flyer: Steinbeck, Ricketts, and the Sea of Cortez

Photo: Scott Perry

John Steinbeck

A mud-covered fishing boat sits on concrete blocks in the back of the Boat Haven boatyard in Port Townsend, Washington. Her brass fittings are turning green and her wooden railings twisting with decay.  Occasionally, a tourist will find his or her way to her side, touch her hull, and take a picture. If this were just any old boat, it would probably be scrapped.  But this boat is the Western Flyer, one of the most famous fishing boats in nonfiction literature.  In the spring of 1940, John Steinbeck and biologist Eddie Ricketts took the Western Flyer on a 4,000 mile, six-week expedition down the coast of California and into the Gulf of California, also known as Sea of Cortez.  Steinbeck documented the journey in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, his only major non-fiction work in addition to the better-known Travels with Charlie.

Ed Ricketts

After the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck was exhausted by the attention and controversy the book had generated.  To get away, he and Ricketts decided to charter a boat and take it on an extended marine sampling expedition into the Sea of Cortez.  After a few weeks of refusals by the sardine fisherman of Monterey, they found the three-year-old purse seiner, Western Flyer, built by Tacoma’s Western Boat Building Co. in 1937.  Captain Tony Berry agreed to the charter provided they pay a fair price, told him where to go, and didn’t endanger the boat.    They hired a crew, loaded the boat with sampling equipment, and, on March 11th, 1940 pushed out of Monterey Bay and headed south.  Here is a description of the Western Flyer from The Log from the Sea of Cortez:

Western Flyer in better days

“She was seventy-six feet long with a twenty-five-foot beam; her engine, a hundred and sixty-five horsepower direct reversible Diesel, drove her at ten knots.  Her deckhouse had a wheel forward, then combination master’s room and radio room, then bunkroom, very comfortable, and behind that the galley.  After the galley, a large hatch gave into the fish-hold, and after the hatch was the big turn-table and roller of the purse-seiner.  She carried a twenty-foot skiff and a ten-foot skiff.  Her engine was a thing of joy, spotlessly clean, the moving surfaces shining and damp with oil and the green paint fresh and new on the housings.  The engine-room floor was clean and all the tools polished and hung in their places. One look into the engine-room inspired confidence in the master.  We had seen other engines in the fishing fleet and this perfection on the Western Flyer was by no means a general thing.”

The Log describes each stop on the expedition and, in great detail, the samples collected.  For example, on the southern end of Espiritu Santo Island “the dominant species on this beach was a sulphury cucumber, a dark, almost black-green holothurian which looks as though it were dusted in sulphur…Easily the second most important animal of this shore in point of quantity was the brittle-star.  We had read of their number in the Gulf and here they were, mats and clusters of them, giants under rocks.  It was simple to pick up a hundred at a time in black, twisting, squirming knots…We found three species of urchins, approximately ten different kinds of crabs, four of shrimps, a number of anemones of various types, a great number of worms, including our enemy Eurythoe, which seems to occur everywhere in the Gulf, several species of naked mollusks, and a good number of peanut worms.” 

The route of Steinbeck and Ricketts
 expedition on Western Flyer
 in the Spring of 1940

Now, this could make pretty dull reading - if it wasn’t for what happens next.  Their observations in the tide pools of Baja and on the deck of the Western Flyer are used to launch into thoughtful ruminations on philosophy, religion, politics, a holistic view of nature, and the human condition.  For example, as the crew bemoans the wastefulness of a Japanese shrimping trawler, Steinbeck writes “To each group, of course, there must be waste – the dead fish to man, the broken pieces to gulls, the bones to some, and scales to others – but to the whole, there is no waste.  The great organism, Life, takes it all and uses it all…And in a sense there is no over-production, since every living thing has its niche, a posteriori, and God, in a real, non-mystical sense, sees every sparrow fall and every cell utilized.  What is called over-production even among us in our manufacture of articles is only over-production in terms of a status quo, but in the history of the organism, it may well be a factor or a function in some great pattern of change or repetition.  Perhaps some cells, even intellectual ones, must be sickened before others can be well.  And perhaps with us these production climaxes are the therapeutic fevers which cause a rush of curative blood to the sickened part.  Our history is as much a product of torsion and stress as it is of unilinear drive.  It is amusing that at any given point of time we haven’t the slightest idea of what is happening to us.  The present wars and ideological changes of nervousness and fighting seem to have direction, but in a hundred years it is more than possible it will be seen that the direction was quite different from the one we supposed.  The limitation of the seeing point in time, as well as in space, is a warping lens.”

The Log expounds a view that all of life is interconnected and interdependent three decades before the world seemed to find its environmental consciousness.   The concept is taken far beyond earth, our time, and our understanding of reality.  “It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical out-crying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.  This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein.  Each of them in his own tempo and with this own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things – plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time.  It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”

After each of these philosophical musings, the narrative returns to the deck of the Western Flyer as it rocks in the warm waters of the Sea of Cortez.  The reader gets a vivid sense of time and place with Steinbeck’s description of the relentless sun and tide, the deep blue of the water, the fecundity and strangeness of life in the tide pools, the sleepy isolation of the tiny Gulf towns, and the Mexican peasants who sit in their little boats and float alongside the Western Flyer.   The reader, like the crew, is sad and somewhat disappointed when the journey is almost over as the Western Flyer rounds Cabo San Lucas into the Pacific Ocean to head home.  “The Western Flyer hunched into the great waves toward Cedros Island, the wind blew off the tops of the whitecaps, and the big guy wire, from bow to mast took up its vibration like the low pipe on a tremendous organ.  It sang its deep note into the wind.”

A year after the voyage, Steinbeck and Ricketts published Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research.  The book combines narratives from both of their journals as well as Ricketts’ detailed catalog of the species they’d found.  Although critical reviews were favorable, the book failed to find an audience.  Ricketts was killed in 1948 when his car was hit by a train while crossing train tracks.  Steinbeck was deeply affected by the death of his friend.  He revised the book, removed the scientific catalog, retained the narrative derived from their journals, and added a preface ‘About Ed Ricketts’, a eulogy to his friend.  The revised book was published in 1951 as The Log from the Sea of Cortez under Steinbeck’s name alone.  This time, the book was well received and it remains an important part of Steinbeck’s oeuvre.

But what about the Western Flyer?  Bob Enea, nephew of 1940 Skipper Tony Berry, tried to find the old boat but it seemed to have disappeared.  After years of searching, Enea found the Western Flyer in 1986 in Anacortes, WA, owned by a salmon fisherman named Ole Knudson.  It had been renamed ‘Gemini’ and worked for several decades on salmon runs in the Bering Sea.  The Western Flyer Project, headed by Enea, announced that they had found the Western Flyer and planned to bring it back to Monterey.  Then, after years of negotiation with Knudson, the group was shocked to find themselves outbid by Gerry Kehoe, a Salinas, CA business man who planned to make the Western Flyer the centerpiece of a boutique hotel.  The boat would float in an indoor lagoon with restaurant seating on the deck and surrounding “docks”.  Enea was furious at the notion of the legendary boat becoming a tourist attraction.  He wanted the boat back in Monterey where it could be restored and displayed.

Western Flyer (aka Gemini) sinks a second time in 2013.

On Sept. 24, 2012, the Western Flyer sank at its mooring into Puget Sound.   Several environmental agencies immediately descended on the site, raised the boat, patched the hole, removed the remaining diesel fuel, and charged Kehoe for the recovery.  But on Jan 12, 2013, it sank again and remained on the bottom for almost six months.  In July 2013, it was raised and transported to the Port Townsend boatyard where it sits today, covered in muck.  “Kehoe bought the boat and pretty much destroyed it," said Enea. "The electrical systems and engine are ruined. The salt water has probably eaten away the mahogany in the galley."  Given that it was no longer seaworthy, Kehoe planned to cut the boat up and truck it overland to his hotel in Salinas.

In February 2015, an Orange County, CA geologist named John Gregg bought the Western Flyer from Kehoe for $1,000,000. Gregg, a life-long Steinbeck fan who first read The Log from the Sea of Cortez when he was 10 years old, bought the boat as a personal endeavor rather than as an investment.  Monterey historians and Steinbeck fans breathed a sigh of relief.  Gregg plans a $2M restoration of the boat at Port Townsend with the assistance of Allen Petrich, the grandson of Martin Petrich who built the Western Flyer back in 1937.  The restoration could take as long as two years.  Then it will return to Monterey where it will be used as a floating classroom in the harbor and out to sea where her big guy wire may once again sing its deep note into the wind.

Steve Chawkins, “A dispute over the boat from ‘Sea of Cortez’”, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 18,2013.

Kirk Johnson, “Salvaging Steinbeck’s vessel from a little-known berth.” New York Times, May 25, 2014.

Dennis Taylor, “Former Steinbeck boat coming back to Monterey County – in one form or another.” Monterey Herald July 12, 2013.

Hutchison, Patrick, “A New Life for the Boat Immortalized by John Steinbeck.”  Seattle Weekly News, Mar. 18, 2015.

Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1951.