Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

for transportation to Puerto Rico. Among his fellow passengers were a number of nurses and the
wife of the director of the American Red Cross. While he was still at sea, readers of the November
issue of the Sportsman Pilot were entertained by a second L. Ron Hubbard article, this time about
his escapades as a glider pilot. He described 'the most terrible nightmare I have ever gone
through' - how his glider had folded a wing at four hundred feet, how he had battled to prevent it
going into a spin and how, as he crashed, 'so many wires wrapped themselves about my neck that
I was unable to wear a collar for weeks.' A few weeks later, he modestly added, he set up an
unofficial world record by flying a glider at a speed of eighty miles an hour at a level altitude for a
duration of twelve minutes.
The USS Kittery arrived at Port au Prince, Puerto Rico, on 4 November. The log book records that L.
R. Hubbard left the ship along with his fellow passengers, but by then he had plans other than
volunteer relief work. Somewhere between Norfolk, Virginia, and Port au Prince it seems that Ron
decided to abandon the Red Cross and strike out into the hills in search of the gold he was
convinced must have been left behind on the island by theConquistadores.
He would later claim that he spent at least six months prospecting in Puerto Rico: 'Harboring the
thought that the Conquistadores might have left some gold behind, I determined to find it . . . After a
half year or more of intensive search, after wearing my palms thin wielding a sample pack, after
assaying a few hundred sacks of ore, I came back, a failure.'[18]
It is possible that his real motive was not so much a genuine expectation of striking gold as a
desire to escape the dreary clutches of the Red Cross. As he noted in an article written on his
return to the United States: 'Gold prospecting in the wake of the Conquistadores, on the hunting
grounds of the pirates in the islands which still reek of Columbus is romantic, and I do not
begrudge the sweat which splashed in muddy rivers, and the bits of khaki which have probably
blown away from the thorn bushes long ago.'
Quite how long he spent splashing through muddy rivers was not documented. Certainly at one
point during his short sojourn on the island, he appears to have been employed as a field
representative for a prospecting company called West Indies Minerals and a photograph exists of
him standing disconsolately in a pith helmet, hands in his pockets, watching a party of three or four
labourers digging on a hillside.
But if he was supervising the first mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico, it was a survey destined
never to materialize in any archive. Indeed, it rather seems as if the 'West Indies Minerals Survey'
derived from a trip undertaken, at the insistence of Ron's angry and disappointed father, more as a
penance than an expedition.
1. Deck log, USS Gold Star
2. L. R. Hubbard Service Record Book, US Marine Corps
3. Ibid.
4. Unidentified newspaper clipping
5. Letter from H. R. Hubbard to South Eastern University, 1930
6. Certified airman's file, Federal Aviation Administration, 12 May 1986
7. Ibid.
8. L. R. Hubbard Service Record Book, US Marine Corps
9. Preble County News, 21 July 1983, (reprint of original article)
10. Adventure, 1 October 1935