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BON VOYAGE: Steinbeck, second
from right, and crew.
Courtesy Special Collections
Stanford University Libraries
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A lot of people imitate
John Steinbeck. But they aren’t usually marine
biologists.
Then again, most people aren’t trying to retrace
a boat voyage the celebrated novelist took in 1940.
Steinbeck, who attended Stanford on and off from 1919
to 1925, his wife, Carol, and his friend, marine biologist
Ed “Doc” Ricketts, set off from Monterey,
Calif., for the Gulf of California on a 76-foot sardine
boat. Part fieldwork expedition, part adventure, their
trip is chronicled in Steinbeck and Ricketts’s
1941 book Sea of Cortez.
On March 11th, the 64th anniversary of the original
excursion, a team of scientists and researchers led
by Stanford biological sciences professor William Gilly
will embark on a parallel voyage. They’ll travel
aboard the Gus D, a 73-foot wooden fishing
boat, and plan to stop at many of the same villages,
beaches and remote intertidal habitats that Steinbeck’s
Western Flyer visited.
“The purpose of the new trip is to see how things
have changed,” says Gilly, who is based at Stanford’s
Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, Calif. “I
spend a lot of time down there, and I’ve seen
only one or two places that I suspect haven’t
changed at all.”
It will be difficult to make precise then-and-now comparisons.
Although Ricketts and Steinbeck collected several hundred
marine species on their journey, including about 50
previously unidentified invertebrates, they did not
attempt to conduct an accurate census of marine life
or measure environmental factors such as water temperature,
wind speed or salinity, as their contemporary counterparts
will. But their observations will still prove valuable,
says lecturer emeritus and voyager Chuck Baxter. “If
there are species that they mentioned as being very
abundant and now you don’t see them, you have
a pretty good idea that the reason is because the fauna
has changed.”
Three others will join Gilly and Baxter for the entire
expedition: boat captain Frank Donahue, marine biologist
and photographer Nancy Packard Burnett, ’65, and
Jon Christensen, a journalist and Steinbeck Fellow at
San Jose State who plans to chronicle the trip. Seems
only appropriate to have a writer on board.
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