Cargo of Coffins (13 page)

Mex:
Mexican peso; in 1732 it was introduced as a trade coin with China and was so popular that China became one of its principal consumers. Mexico minted and exported pesos to China until 1949. It was issued as both coins and paper money.

milréis:
(Portuguese) a former Brazilian monetary unit.

Morocco:
a country of northwest Africa on the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The French established a protectorate over most of the region in 1912, and in 1956 Morocco achieved independence as a kingdom.

Mt. Cépéron:
a mountain in Cayenne, a seaport and the capital of French Guiana. On this mount stands Fort St. Michel, the marine barracks, the signal station and the lighthouse.

peerages:
books listing the titles of nobility in various countries, the members of nobility and information about their families.

Pernambuco:
state in northeastern Brazil.

Pico:
Pico de Papagaio (Parrot’s Peak), a mountain peak located at the mouth of the Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The bay is flanked by Pico de Papagaio on one side and by Pão de Açúcar (Sugar Loaf) on the other.

pip:
something extraordinary of its kind.

put in
or
put into:
to enter a port or harbor, especially for shelter, repairs or provisions.

queer:
to ruin or thwart.

salade:
a light, late medieval helmet with a brim flaring in the back to protect the neck, sometimes fitted with a visor.

Scheherazade:
the female narrator of
The Arabian Nights,
who during one thousand and one adventurous nights saved her life by entertaining her husband, the king, with stories.

Schoenauer:
Mannlicher-Schoenauer; a rifle introduced in 1903 that proved very popular with big-game hunters worldwide. Its main feature was the use of a magazine that automatically rotated the rounds into the feeding position while the gun was being fired.

schooner:
a fast sailing ship with at least two masts and with sails set lengthwise.

screw:
a ship’s propeller.

set:
in the card game of bridge, to defeat an opponent.

Shanghai:
city of eastern China at the mouth of the Yangtze River, and the largest city in the country. Shanghai was opened to foreign trade by treaty in 1842 and quickly prospered. France, Great Britain and the United States all held large concessions (rights to use land granted by a government) in the city until the early twentieth century.

“sleeping giant”:
the northeast face of the peak Gávea in Rio de Janeiro that has a carving of an ancient face resembling that of the Sphinx in Egypt.

Sparks:
radioman; traditionally nicknamed
Sparks
or
Sparky,
stemming from the early use of transmitters that produced sparks to radiate energy, the means by which radio signals were transmitted.

SS:
steamship.

stanchion:
an upright bar, post or frame forming a support or barrier.

Sugar Loaf:
Pão de Açúcar (Sugar Loaf), a mountain peak located at the mouth of the Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Its name is said to refer to its resemblance to the traditional shape of a concentrated refined loaf of sugar. The bay is flanked by Pico de Papagaio (Parrot’s Peak) on one side and by Pão de Açúcar (Sugar Loaf) on the other.

ticket:
a certifying document, especially a captain’s or pilot’s license.

transom:
transom seat; a kind of bench seat, usually with a locker or drawers underneath.

trick:
1. (cards) in bridge, four cards played in sequence, one by each player at the table in a clockwise rotation. The high card is the winner. 2. a period or turn of duty, as at the helm of a ship.

tricolor:
the French national flag, consisting of three equal vertical bands of blue, white and red.

Tropic of Capricorn:
southern tropic; one of the five major parallels of latitude, it lies approximately 23½ degrees south of the equator. It marks the most southerly latitude at which the sun can appear directly overhead.

twenty-five-twenty:
.25-20; a rifle cartridge approximately .25 inch in diameter, originally having a powder charge of 20 grains, which is the source of its name. This size rifle was used for hunting small game.

weigh anchor:
take up the anchor when ready to sail. Also used figuratively.

wing:
bridge wing; a narrow walkway extending outward from both sides of a pilothouse to the full width of a ship.

L. Ron Hubbard in the
Golden Age of
Pulp Fiction

I
n writing an adventure story
a writer has to know that he is adventuring
for a lot of people who cannot.
The writer has to take them here and there
about the globe and show them
excitement and love and realism.
As long as that writer is living the part of an
adventurer when he is hammering
the keys, he is succeeding with his story.

Adventuring is a state of mind.
If you adventure through life, you have a
good chance to be a success on paper.

Adventure doesn’t mean globe-trotting,
exactly, and it doesn’t mean great deeds.
Adventuring is like art.
You have to live it to make it real.

— L. Ron Hubbard

L. Ron Hubbard
and American
Pulp Fiction

B
ORN
March 13, 1911, L. Ron Hubbard lived a life at least as expansive as the stories with which he enthralled a hundred million readers through a fifty-year career.

Originally hailing from Tilden, Nebraska, he spent his formative years in a classically rugged Montana, replete with the cowpunchers, lawmen and desperadoes who would later people his Wild West adventures. And lest anyone imagine those adventures were drawn from vicarious experience, he was not only breaking broncs at a tender age, he was also among the few whites ever admitted into Blackfoot society as a bona fide blood brother. While if only to round out an otherwise rough and tumble youth, his mother was that rarity of her time—a thoroughly educated woman—who introduced her son to the classics of Occidental literature even before his seventh birthday.

But as any dedicated L. Ron Hubbard reader will attest, his world extended far beyond Montana. In point of fact, and as the son of a United States naval officer, by the age of eighteen he had traveled over a quarter of a million miles. Included therein were three Pacific crossings to a then still mysterious Asia, where he ran with the likes of Her British Majesty’s agent-in-place for North China, and the last in the line of Royal Magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. For the record, L. Ron Hubbard was also among the first Westerners to gain admittance to forbidden Tibetan monasteries below Manchuria, and his photographs of China’s Great Wall long graced American geography texts.

Upon his return to the United States and a hasty completion of his interrupted high school education, the young Ron Hubbard entered George Washington University. There, as fans of his aerial adventures may have heard, he earned his wings as a pioneering barnstormer at the dawn of American aviation. He also earned a place in free-flight record books for the longest sustained flight above Chicago. Moreover, as a roving reporter for
Sportsman Pilot
(featuring his first professionally penned articles), he further helped inspire a generation of pilots who would take America to world airpower.

L. Ron Hubbard, left, at Congressional Airport, Washington, DC, 1931, with members of George Washington University flying club.

Immediately beyond his sophomore year, Ron embarked on the first of his famed ethnological expeditions, initially to then untrammeled Caribbean shores (descriptions of which would later fill a whole series of West Indies mystery-thrillers). That the Puerto Rican interior would also figure into the future of Ron Hubbard stories was likewise no accident. For in addition to cultural studies of the island, a 1932–33 LRH expedition is rightly remembered as conducting the first complete mineralogical survey of a Puerto Rico under United States jurisdiction.

There was many another adventure along this vein: As a lifetime member of the famed Explorers Club, L. Ron Hubbard charted North Pacific waters with the first shipboard radio direction finder, and so pioneered a long-range navigation system universally employed until the late twentieth century. While not to put too fine an edge on it, he also held a rare Master Mariner’s license to pilot any vessel, of any tonnage in any ocean.

Capt. L. Ron Hubbard in Ketchikan, Alaska, 1940, on his Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition, the first of three voyages conducted under the Explorers Club Flag.

Yet lest we stray too far afield, there is an LRH note at this juncture in his saga, and it reads in part:

“I started out writing for the pulps, writing the best I knew, writing for every mag on the stands, slanting as well as I could.”

To which one might add: His earliest submissions date from the summer of 1934, and included tales drawn from true-to-life Asian adventures, with characters roughly modeled on British/American intelligence operatives he had known in Shanghai. His early Westerns were similarly peppered with details drawn from personal experience. Although therein lay a first hard lesson from the often cruel world of the pulps. His first Westerns were soundly rejected as lacking the authenticity of a Max Brand yarn (a particularly frustrating comment given L. Ron Hubbard’s Westerns came straight from his Montana homeland, while Max Brand was a mediocre New York poet named Frederick Schiller Faust, who turned out implausible six-shooter tales from the terrace of an Italian villa).