MASTER MARINER

Licensed to captain vessels of any size, on any ocean, L. Ron Hubbard has a long and distinguished association with things nautical. To cite but a few points of interest, there was his service at the helm of hard-pressed expeditionary vessels, his command of warships through the Second World War, and his training of famously competent crews.

In a very real sense, however, it all began when a sixteen-year-old Ron stepped aboard a Guam to Seattle-bound USS Nitro for a first view of service at sea. The Nitro was a no-frills, battle-ready troop transport regularly plying between Asiatic stations (where Ron’s father was based as a US Naval officer) and the Pacific Northwest, and Ron had only received passage aboard the Nitro as the able-bodied son of a naval officer.

Only two years after his first taste of salt-washed decks and sun-bleached sails, L. Ron Hubbard served as an officer — helmsman and supercargo — aboard the Marianna Maru, a 200-ton twin-masted coastal schooner plying the China coast. And then he went on to head the two-and-a-half month Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition aboard the four-masted schooner, Doris Hamlin, in the summer of 1932.

With several explorations now under his belt, in 1940 Captain Hubbard was elected a member of the Explorers Club, and carried its flag on the Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition aboard the 32-foot ketch Magician, charting previously unrecorded hazards and coastlines for the US Navy Hydrographic Office. He also conducted experiments which led to the development of LORAN (the LOng RAnge radio Navigation system.)

Throughout his years he returned again and again to the sea, commanding vessels in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during World War II. In the late 1960s he captained vessels throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean until 1975.

“I loved the sea,” L. Ron Hubbard once remarked, “I loved steamers and sailboats and surf and sailors. And I yearned and strained to the sea, always the sea, for it is a lovely, vicious lonely thing. In its limitless variety I had a sort of home.”