Deciding that formal study had nothing more to offer, L. Ron Hubbard left college in the depths of the Depression, again taking his quest to learn about life out into the world. He said of this period, “. . . my writing financed research and this included expeditions which were conducted in order to investigate primitive peoples to see if I could find a common denominator of existence which would be workable.”
He directed two expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition, a two-and-a-half month, 5,000-mile voyage aboard the four-masted schooner, Doris Hamlin, and the West Indies Mineralogical Expedition, which completed the first mineralogical survey of the island of Puerto Rico under US rule. Upon his return to the United States, and with scientific grants few and far between, he began to write his way to fame and fortune, supporting his research by becoming one of the most popular writers of the 1930s.
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