Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

urging Hana Eltringham to somehow get the repair work completed as he needed her urgently.
One evening the radio operator told Hana that LRH wanted to speak to her alone; she was to clear
the bridge and close the doors. 'I did what I as told,' she said, 'and as I picked up the radio I could
hear him sobbing openly. He was weeping with frustration over what was going on on the Royal
Scotman. He said the new Captain was so incompetent that he had had to take over and he
couldn't cope any longer. It shook me like nothing else could. He was my everything. I loved him like
a father or a brother, he was part of my family. I really loved him that much I would have done
anything for him and there he was weeping over the radio and pleading with me to do everything in
my power to get my ship to sea to join him. "I need you to take over as Captain," he said. I was
bewildered. I didn't think I was capable of doing it but I knew I would have to try. Part of his brilliance
was that he motivated you to do extraordinary things.'
Two days later, when the bridge blocking the harbour was opened in an emergency, the Avon River
made a dash for the open sea with her engine repairs still incomplete. She got as far as Barcelona
before the piston rings blew again. She re-fuelled and limped down to Valencia, where more
repairs were undertaken, then a radio message arrived ordering Hana to meet the Royal Scotman
in Bizerte.
The old trawler arrived at the Tunisian port a few hours before the Royal Scotman. John McMaster,
who had been away on a promotional tour and had re-joined the Avon River in Valencia, watched
the arrival of the Sea Org's flagship in Bizerte. 'I'll never forget it,' he said. 'We had been warned over
the radio that she was coming and about the time she was due a cruise ship from the Lloyd
Tristina line came in to the river. She was like a beautiful swan, gliding in, coming alongside and
docking effortlessly. Perfect! Then our rust bucket chunters in making a huge noise and begins
manoeuvring too far out. Someone throws a line from the deck without the faintest hope of reaching
the dock and the rope splashes into the water. It was almost twilight and I could hear Fatty's voice
coming across the water. He was standing on the bridge screaming: "I've been betrayed, the
bastards have betrayed me again!" The Arabs waiting on the dock to take the lines must have
wondered what the hell was going on.'[4]
When Royal Scotman was eventually moored, Hubbard's first act was to place the Avon River in a
condition of 'liability' for taking so long to catch up with him. He refused to speak to Hana
Eltringham and had no desire to hear how she had risked arrest by slipping out of the strike-bound
harbour in Marseilles in order to join him, or how she had sailed more than five hundred miles with
steam pouring out of the hatches and the engines threatening to seize up at any moment. 'There
was no more talk of me becoming Captain of the Royal Scotman,' Hana said.
Beset by traitors and incompetents, Hubbard felt obliged to introduce new punishments for erring
Sea Org personnel. Depending on his whim, offenders were either confined in the dark in the chain
locker and given food in a bucket, or assigned to chip paint in the bilge tanks for twenty-four or fortyeight
hours without a break. A third variation presented itself when Otto Roos, a young Dutchman,
dropped one of the bow-lines while the Royal Scotman was being moved along the dock. Purple
with rage, Hubbard ordered Roos to be thrown overboard.
No one questioned the Commodore's orders. Two crew members promptly grabbed the Dutchman
and threw him over the side. There was an enormous splash when he hit the water, a moment of
horror when it seemed that he had disappeared and nervous speculation that he might have hit the
rubbing strake as he fell. But Roos was a good swimmer and when he climbed back up the
gangplank, dripping wet, he was surprised to find the crew still craning anxiously over the rails on
the other side of the ship.