page_title: Early life of L. Ron Hubbard
section_title: Puerto Rican Mineralogical Expedition
hierarchical_section_title: Early life of L. Ron Hubbard / Expeditions / Puerto Rican Mineralogical Expedition
caption_attribution_description: Aerial view of w:en:Luquillo, Puerto Rico.
context_page_description: L. Ron Hubbard was the inventor of Dianetics and founder of Scientology. Born in Tilden, Nebraska in March 1911, Hubbard grew up with his family in Helena, Montana. He was unusually well-traveled for a young man of his time due to his father's frequent relocations in connection with his service in the United States Navy. He lived in a number of locations in the United States and traveled to Guam, the Philippines, China, and Japan. He enrolled at George Washington University in 1930 to study civil engineering, but dropped out in his second year. While at GWU, he organized an expedition to the Caribbean for fellow students which looms large in his official biography but was a flop according to contemporary accounts. He subsequently spent time in Puerto Rico panning for gold, before returning to the United States, marrying his pregnant girlfriend, and embarking on a career as a "penny-a-word" writer.
  The Church of Scientology depicts Hubbard in hagiographic terms.
context_section_description: After leaving university, Hubbard is said to have carried out a further expedition to Puerto Rico. It is described by a 1959 biography as having been undertaken to "blow off steam by leading an expedition into Central America  [sic]". An account published in Mission into Time states "Conducting the West Indies Minerals Survey, he made the first complete mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico. This was pioneer exploration in the great tradition, opening up a predictable, accurate body of data for the benefit of others. Later, in other, less materialistic fields, this was to be his way many, many times over." The Church of Scientology claims that Hubbard's father "had long dreamed of augmenting his Lieutenant's pay with a mining venture and a bit of investment capital from like-minded officers" and dispatched Hubbard to the Puerto Rican hinterland where he "sluiced inland rivers and crisscrossed the island in search of elusive gold." While there, Hubbard "conducted much ethnological work amongst the interior villages and native hillsmen".
  The expedition's existence has been questioned by Hubbard's unofficial biographers. Miller states that neither the United States Geological Survey nor the Puerto Rican Department of Natural Resources have records of any such expedition. Hubbard stayed on Puerto Rico from November 1932 to mid-February 1933. According to Miller, Hubbard went there for an entirely different purpose. Harry Ross Hubbard sent a letter to the Navy Department on October 13, 1932, in which he requested a passage for his son to San Juan to "place his services at the disposal of the American Red Cross in their relief work on that island." Three weeks earlier, Puerto Rico had been hit by the 1932 San Ciprian hurricane and suffered catastrophic damage. The storm killed 225 people, injured 3,000 more, and left over 100,000 people homeless. Hubbard traveled to the island aboard the USS Kittery, arriving on November 4. It is unclear whether he contributed to the Red Cross relief effort, though in a 1957 lecture he said that he had been "a field executive with the American Red Cross in the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster."
  At some point during his short stay on the island, he appears to have done some work for a Washington D.C. firm called West Indies Minerals Incorporated. A letter dated February 16, 1933 describes Hubbard as the company's "field representative" who accompanied the letter's author on a survey of a small property near the town of Luquillo, Puerto Rico. According to his own account, Hubbard spent much of his time prospecting unsuccessfully for gold. A photograph published in Hubbard's book Mission into Time shows him using a gold pan alongside the caption "Sluicing with crews on Corozal River '32" and an article in the August 18, 1933 Washington Daily News describes Hubbard as having "left here last year for Antilles, West Indies, in search of gold so that he might return and marry the girl he met shortly before his departure". In 1935, Hubbard wrote in Adventure magazine,
  Harboring the thought that the Conquistadores might have left some gold behind, I determined to find it ... 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 ...
  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.
  He married the girl in question, Margaret "Polly" Grubb, on April 13, 1933. Chronically short of money, he turned to full-time fiction writing to support himself and his new wife; six of his pieces were published commercially during 1932 to 1933 as he embarked on a literary career that made him a somewhat well-known figure in the world of pulp magazine fiction.
caption: Luquillo, Puerto Rico, near where Hubbard is said to have carried out the "West Indies Mineralogical Survey" in 1932
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