Life on board the *Apollo* was a bizarre mixture of an educational cruise, being on the *Bounty* with Captain Bligh, and a version of the movie farce 'Carry on Cruising'. An inexperienced crew on a large ship can wreak havoc and the *Apollo* was no exception. Bungled navi- gation, incompetent and ill-trained youngsters cooped up together, it was potentially a recipe for disaster.
Ron solved the problem by making his crew into slaves. Crews mutiny, but not slaves. Penalties were draconian. 'Chain-lockering' was introduced by Hubbard as a punishment. McMaster remembers once being asked by the Master at Arms to come and help her, He pulled up the wedge from the chain-locker, a dank and unhealthy part of the ship into which offenders were flung without food as a punish- ment. Out crawled a little girl who turned out to be a deaf-mute who had been unable to write her name and had incurred the Commodore's wrath. The bilges were another favourite punishment cell (known as 'in the tanking'). Another penalty was being made to climb the dizzy heights to the crow's nest and stay there for a whole watch. But by far the most used (and abused) of the bully-boy tactics was 'overboarding' - Captain Hubbard's version of walking the plank. It originated in Melila when Dutchman Otto Roos, then Senior Auditor, had let a line slip as the *Apollo* was making a botched berthing. Roos is now a rich businessman. His macho manner and tough-guy approach meant that he was rarely on the side of those who were bullied. He discovered the traumatic effects of overboarding on some and declares that he ordered it stopped forthwith. But it didn't prevent McMaster being put over- board four times. The fifth and last time was on 5 November 1969. It was the last straw and when he went ashore he vowed to quit. A young lady chaplain had come to fetch McMaster from the hold because Hubbard wanted to present him with something on the poop deck to 'honour all he had done'. He says he knew right away it was a Judas kiss and Hubbard accused him of betrayal. His daughter Diana 1 (who occupied a senior position on *Apollo*) read out a list of 'high crimes' which McMaster says were all lies, and then eight burly Scientologists flung him overboard. He broke his shoulder in the fall.
1 One of Hubbard's seven children by his three marriages. (The daughter of Mary Sue.)
59 RELIGION INC.
Otto Roos has written a diary of those years on board ship. It is peppered with org-speak, but it is a fascinating insight into the period which is now idealized by Scientologists as a golden period when Ron was developing his higher tech and sailing around the Mediterranean discovering archaeological sites where he had lived in his past lives.
Extracts from Roos' diary have been widely circulated among the independent movement, since he is now among the Suppressive Persons and 'squirrels'. Here are some extracts from the Flying Dutchman's log:
'I was not all innocent and sweetness and light. Far from it. I had decided there were only two kinds of people there: those who got into the tanks and those who put them in, and that I was not going to get in, no way!...Having myself as a child experienced the atrocities of war, when many of my friends hadn't, I wasn't going down into those tanks. Rusty old tanks, way below in the ship, filthy bilge water, no air except via oxygen tubes, and hardly sitting height, in which sinners were put from 24 hours to a week, day and night, to hammer rust off the insides with Masters of Arms checking outside to hear if the hammering con- tinued, and occasional food out of a bucket. This was like the concentration camps of my childhood days....
'I would also have refused the crow's nest, which meant spend- ing 4 hours in the nest and 4 hours on deck, alternating for some 84 hours. The nest, a tiny bucket at the top of the mast, too small to sit or lie in, gets cold at night. One of our SPs (named O'Keefe) had a fear of heights and virtually had to be winched up there and down again every 4 hours.
'The severe "unreasonability" started in earnest in September '67 when Non-Existence included no right to food, and Ray Thacker, huddled in a corner, would be avoided by all and occasionally thrown a crust of bread....
'The Flag Orders at the time (instructions from HQ) usually dealt in "smashing THEM" (our "enemies") and smashing them we did, if not our enemies at least ourselves and most of our port relations.
'To say that LRH could not have known about this, can only be answered by "How could he not have?" on a little ship and holding all the comm. lines, after *originating* the policies. One walks around on a ship and looks. LRH has never been renowned for an inability to look.
60 LIFE ON THE OCEAN WAVE '...There was continued data about SMERSH (from James Bond books), the "Enemy", bankers, psychiatrists, newspapers, port officials, etc. Port flaps were all "their" doing. Our unreasonable (and very often unseamanlike and very unpro- fessional) methods had "nothing to do with it"....
'The billion-year contract was signed of our "free will' (and some Swedes, who objected, were immediately "beached" [sent away], "never to be given upper-level materials", and "declared"). "Beaching" I have seen many times and it did not im- prove port relations. A beachee, put ashore with his passport and no money (except his Sea Org "pay" sometimes) to make his way home, would go to his Consulate for help and have some explaining to do. Another way to bring on the "enemy".
'Nobody ever *dared* say anything about these things and risk losing his OT levels for "making the Commodore wrong".
'Our lives were completely mapped out 24 hours a day, *per- sonal* lives exactly prescribed, especially 2D [relations with the opposite sex]...The day started with "Musters", sing-songing KSW, followed by a mantra of "LRH, LRH, LRH", after which work, work, work, for little or no pay...' Roos was by now a Class XII auditor, the top rank, and was auditing Hubbard himself, a dangerous task which proved his undoing.1 The Commodore had some bad readings on the meter which were duly noted by Roos, but Hubbard would not accept these. The relationship which had flourished with LRH calling Otto up to his cabin to bounce ideas off him, deteriorated rapidly. Hubbard yelled and screamed to see his folders (which is not allowed). When Roos refused, Hubbard sent some 'hefty guys' to collect them and became even more agitated when he saw some meter-reads which did not fit in with either his 'tech' or his self-image. When Mary Sue Hubbard declared that LRH did not 'have such reads', Roos knew his number was up. MSH had previously been an ally and had ripped up the results of several 'Comm Evs' called on Roos for his sexual activities. He had been astute in avoiding super- vision up to this point. Apart from LRH/MSH he had no seniors and only once had fallen foul of Hubbard when he refused a posting to run the new advanced org in Scotland and was put on pot-scrubbing duties as a penance. McMaster was the great 'tech man' and was not a senior post holder. He therefore had no hold over Roos either. Indeed, 1 The auditing of members of LRH's family was case supervised by Ron himself.