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adventurous. No tea-hounds or tourist material need apply.” The goals of the expedition were grand and various—primarily, to make newsreels forFox Movietone and Pathé News, while exploring the pirate haunts of the Caribbean and voodoo rites in Haiti. There were also vague plans to “collect whatever one collectsfor exhibits in museums.”
    “It’s difficult at any age to recognize a messiah in the making,” wrote one of the young men, James S. Free, a journalist who signed on to the expedition. He was twenty-three years old, two years older than Hubbard. They were going to be partners in the adventure, along with Hubbard’s old flying buddy, Phil Browning. “I cannot claim prescient awareness that my soon-to-be business partner possessed the ego and talents that would later develop his own private religion,” Free wrote in a notebook he titled “Preview of a Messiah.”
    Hubbard was living with his parents in Washington, DC, when Free arrived. “Ron introduced me to his mother, whose long light brown hair seemed dark beside the reddish glow of her son’s hair and face,” Free wrote, in one of the few records of the actual relationship between Hubbard and his mother. “I recall little else about her except that like her husband, Navy lieutenant Henry Ross Hubbard, she plainly adored young Ron and considered him a budding genius.”
    Hubbard filled Free in on new developments. Phil Browning, the other partner, had dropped out at the last minute, but he had managed to get the loan of some laboratory equipment from the University of Michigan; meantime, Hubbard was negotiating with a professional cameraman for the anticipated films of the voodoo rites “and that sort of salable material.” Thanks to Free’s efforts to sign up more than twenty new members of the expedition, Hubbard said, “We have enough cash to go ahead.”
    The trip was a calamity from the start. A number of the “buccaneers” who signed up bailed out at the last minute, but fifty-six green collegians with no idea what they were doing clambered aboard the antiquated, four-masted schooner
Doris Hamlin
. The adventure began with the
Doris Hamlin
having to be towed out of Baltimore harbor because of lack of wind. That was almost the endof the expedition,since the tug was pulling toward the sea while the ship was still tied to the dock. Once in the Atlantic, the ship was either becalmed in glassy seas or roiling in high chop. The mainsails blew out in a squall as the expedition steered toward St. Thomas. Seasickness was rampant. At every port, more of the disgusted crew deserted. The only film that was shot was a desultory cockfight in Martinique.
    It soon became evidentthat the expedition was broke. There was no meat or fruit, and the crew was soon reduced to buying their own food in port.Hubbard didn’t have enough money to pay the only professional sailors on the ship—the captain, the first mate, and the cook—so he offered to sell shares in the venture to his crewmates and borrowed money from others. He raised seven or eight hundred dollarsthat way, and was able to set sail from Bermuda, only to become mired in the Sargasso Sea for four days.
    After a meager supper one night,George Blakeslee, who had been brought along as a photographer, had had enough. “I tied a hangman’s noosein a rope and everybody got the same idea,” he wrote in his journal. “So we made an effigy of Hubbard and strung it up in the shrouds. Put a piece of red cloth on the head and a sign on it. ‘Our red-headed _____!’ ” Hubbard stayed in his cabin after that.
    The furious captain wired for money, then steered the ship back to Baltimore, pronouncing the expedition “the worst and most unpleasantI ever made.” Hubbard was not aboard as the “jinx ship,” as it was called in the local press, crept back into its home port. He was last seen in Puerto Rico, slipping off with a suitcase in each hand.
    In some respects, Hubbard discovered himself on that