The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, Richard Astro Read Free Book Online Page A

a portable typewriter, drawing board, and T-square. There is a long narrow space for rolled charts and maps. Closed, this compact and complete box is forty-four inches long by eighteen by eighteen; loaded, it weighs between three and four hundred pounds. It was designed to rest on a low table or in an unused bunk. Its main value is compactness, completeness, and accessibility. We took it aboard the Western Flyer. There was no table for it to rest on. It did not fit in a bunk. It could not be put on the deck because of moisture. It ended up lashed to the rail on top of the deckhouse, covered with several layers of tarpaulin and roped on. Because of the roll of the boat it had to be tied down at all times. It took about ten minutes to remove the tarpaulin, untie the lashing line, open the cover, squeeze down between two crates of oranges, read the title of the wanted book upside down, remove it, close and lash and cover the box again. But if there had been a low table or a large bunk, it would have been perfect.

    For many little errors like this, we have concluded that all collecting trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them. Some of the greatest difficulty lies in the fact that previous collectors have never set down the equipment taken and its success or failure. We propose to rectify this in our account.

    The library contained all the separates then available on the Panamic and Gulf fauna. Primary volumes such as Johnson and Snook, Ricketts and Calvin, Russell and Yonge, Flattely and Walton, Keep’s West Coast Shells, Fisher’s three-volume starfish monograph, the Rathbun brachyuran monograph, Schmitt’s Marine Decapod Crustacea of California, Fraser’s Hydroids, Barnhart’s Marine Fishes of Southern California, Coast Pilots for the whole Pacific Coast; charts, both large and small scale, of the whole region to be covered.

    The camera equipment was more than adequate, for it was never used. It included a fine German reflex and an 8-mm. movie camera with tripod, light meters, and everything. But we had no camera-man. During low tides we all collected; there was no time to dry hands and photograph at the collecting scene. Later, the anesthetizing, killing, preserving, and labeling of specimens were so important that we still took no pictures. It was an error in personnel. There should be a camera-man who does nothing but take pictures.

    Our collecting material at least was good. Shovels, wrecking- and abalone-bars, nets, long-handled dip-nets, wooden fish-kits, and a number of seven-cell flashlights for night collecting were taken. Containers seemed to go endlessly into the hold of the Western Flyer. Wooden fish-kits with heads; twenty hard-fir barrels with galvanized hoops in fifteen- and thirty-gallon sizes; cases of gallon jars, quart, pint, eight-ounce, five-ounce, and two-ounce screw-cap jars; several gross of corked vials in four chief sizes, 100x33 mm., six-dram, four-dram, and two-dram sizes. There were eight two-and-a-half-gallon jars with screw caps. And with all these we ran short of containers, and before we were through had to crowd those we had. This was unfortunate, since many delicate animals should be preserved separately to prevent injury.

    Of chemicals, we put into the boat a fifteen-gallon barrel of U.S.P. formaldehyde and a fifteen-gallon barrel of denatured alcohol. This was not nearly enough alcohol. The stock had to be replenished at Guaymas, where we bought ten gallons of pure sugar alcohol. We took two gallons of Epsom salts for anesthetization and again ran out and had to buy more in Guaymas. Menthol, chromic acid, and novocain, all for relaxing animals, were included in the chemical kit. Of preparing equipment, there were glass chiton plates and string, lots of rubber gloves, graduates, forceps, and scalpels. Our binocular microscope, Bausch & Lomb A.K.W., was fitted with a twelve-volt light, but on the rolling boat the light was so