Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [52]
Chamberlin was one of a number of followers who believed Hubbard did most of his early OT research under the influence of drugs, as well as, perhaps, Jameson Irish whiskey, which Chamberlin recalled he'd drunk liberally at Saint Hill. In one oft-quoted 1967 letter to his wife, Hubbard admitted it: "I'm drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys."
In Las Palmas, Hubbard eventually sobered up. "I don't think that Hubbard did any drugs after 1967," said Chamberlin. Indeed, those who joined Hubbard in the late 1960s say they never saw Hubbard intoxicated at all. "When I was with LRH, only twice in eight years on the ship did I see him take a drink of alcohol, and it was whiskey to warm up after a storm," said one of Hubbard's former aides, Karen Gregory.* "I never saw LRH take drugs. And I had access to all of his drawers, his closets. I never saw anything."
By the end of 1967, Hubbard had recruited many more people to join the Sea Organization, as it was now called. They were a motley crew: of the fifty or so volunteers who'd sailed to Las Palmas on either the Enchanter or the Avon River, and the additional twenty Scientologists who left England several months later on the Royal Scotsman, almost no one could sail a ship. But that didn't seem to faze Hubbard. He convinced his devotees that they had sailed before—if not in this life, then in a previous one.
One young Scientologist, Hana Eltringham, a South African nurse who'd joined the Sea Organization as a "great adventure," later recalled her terror at being put in command of the Avon River in 1968. To remedy this fear, Hubbard put the twenty-two-year-old Eltringham on the E-meter and ordered her to recall the last time she'd been captain of a ship. "My first thought was, this is ridiculous," she said. "Then I started to get vague impressions of a time in some past life when I was a captain of a ship and there was a storm at sea ... It was very real, not an imaginary thing at all." By the end of her session, she said, she felt calmer. "I went up on deck and felt the fear and terror in my stomach just disappear. I suddenly felt very able, very competent to tackle anything that came along."
While learning the ropes, Hubbard's Sea Organization (like members of the Pubs Org, as Jeff Hawkins recalled) became test subjects for Hubbard's ethics conditions. The whole series of awards and punishments was instituted, including the wearing of heavy chains or rags to signify a degraded state. Crew members who were punished for a particularly low ethics condition found themselves condemned to a few days, or even weeks, in a dark chain locker in the bowels of the ship.
By the latter part of 1968, the Sea Organization had arrived in Corfu, where Hubbard decided to give his ships heroic new names —the pedestrian-sounding Avon River, Enchanter, and Royal Scotman were rechristened the Athena, the Diana, and the Apollo, in honor of their Greek hosts. Of the three, the latter ship became Hubbard's flagship, also simply called "Flag." This ship became the setting for a particularly draconian punishment called overboarding, whereby errant Scientologists—be they Sea Org members or visitors who'd come to take a course aboard the Apollo and had somehow disappointed the Commodore (as Hubbard now was called)—were thrown into the Mediterranean. Hubbard or one of his immediate subordinates would initiate the ritual with a chant from the captain's deck: "We commit your sins and errors to the deep and trust you will rise a better thetan."
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