Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

'I arrived back on board at about four o'clock in the afternoon and took the papers straight to LRH,
who was having tea in the main dining-room with the ship's officers. He was delighted to see me
and very pleased to get the new registration, but as he was reading through the papers his eye
caught something and he started to frown. I felt the familiar terror rising. "Did you notice this?" he
said, pointing to the name of the ship on the papers. I looked and saw the "s" had been missed out
and it was spelled "Royal Scotman". I began to stammer an apology, but he suddenly smiled,
grabbed my hand and began pumping it. "Double congratulations," he said. "Now the ship has a
new name as well."' He instantly ordered painters to black out the second 's' in the name on the
bows, stern, lifeboats and lifebelts.
The following day, the Royal Scotman applied for clearance to sail to Brest in north-west France, for
repairs. The port authorities in Southampton had no powers to detain a vessel registered in Sierra
Leone and the ship sailed at dusk, raising the Sierra Leonese flag and banging into the fenders in
the inner harbour on her way out into Southampton Water. It was to be a hair-raising maiden
voyage for the Sea Org's flagship, as Hana Eltringham recounted:
'We sailed out of the channel that evening into an awful storm. The engine room was in a very bad
condition; the main engines were not running very well and neither were the generators and
because the paint was so dirty in the engine room you couldn't follow which were the water lines
and which were the fuel lines. Half-way between Southampton and Brest, one of the generators
conked out.
'I was on bridge watch as officer of the deck. We were between three to five miles off the north-west
tip of France and I could see ahead, on the port side, the buoys marking the rocky coastline going
south. But as we came around to try and get into the estuary towards Brest I noticed that the redflashing
buoys were swinging across the bows of the ship and I realized we were caught in a rip
tide and were being pushed towards the rocks.
'The ship started to wallow very badly and each time she went over she took longer to recover.
Although she had stabilizers, she went from a five degree roll to almost a twenty-five degree roll
and on the last roll to port she staggered. We were all hanging on to the bridge and at that moment
the old man [Hubbard] began screaming at Bill Robertson, the navigator, "Get us on a course out of
here! Get us on a course out of here!" He was really bellowing. The ship started to stagger around,
very slowly and painfully. It was scary. I was terrified and I think LRH was too, the way he was
screaming and holding on to the bridge and glaring at us.
'Once we had got out of it and were about ten miles off the coast steering south, he took the entire
bridge watch into the cabin just behind the bridge and told us that due to what had happened and
the ship being at risk and not truly seaworthy he had decided not to go into Brest, even though it
would be defying orders. We were going to continue south down to the Mediterranean. The way he
was telling us was like he was convincing us it was the right thing to do. He went over and over it, to
make sure we understood. Then he entered what had happened in the log book, a two- or threepage
entry explaining the reasons for not going into Brest, and we all signed it.
'The following day there was another near catastrophe. We were planning to put into Gibraltar to
meet up with the Avon River. It was about five or five-thirty in the afternoon and getting dark as we
approached the Gibraltar Strait. We were in the northernmost lane entering the Med and we could
see there was a storm brewing. The storm came up quickly and the sea was very wild and as we
were battling to control the ship the oil lines from the bridge to the engine room lost pressure and
the hydraulic steering on the bridge gave way.