Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

gentle coaching of his mother.
In October, the Hubbards had an opportunity to take a recreational trip to China on the USS Gold
Star, the ship that had brought May and Ron to Guam in the summer of 1927. Neither of them had
much liked the ship, but the prospect of ten days' sight-seeing in Peking outweighed any
reservations they might have had about another voyage. Hub warned his son that he would only be
allowed to accompany them on condition that he continued his studies while the ship was at sea.
Ron readily agreed.
On 6 October, thirty families reported on board the USS Gold Star for transportation to the China
ports and return. Like the other officers on the excursion, Lieutenant Hubbard signed on for
'temporary duty' - he was Assistant to the Supply Officer. As previously, Ron kept a log of the trip,
using one of the accounts books that his father could always provide. 'It is a delightful sensation',
he scrawled in an early entry, 'to once more experience the pounding of engines below me and to
hear the swish of a dark-blue sea outside our port.' At the bottom of the page was a world-weary,
elegiac postscript: 'Another boat caught. Is ever thus?'
After a stop in Manila, which he reported as being like 'Guam plus XXX and a few trimmings', they
sailed north towards the China coast. Ron was reluctantly confined to a desk in Cabin 9, claiming
good progress with his studies.
The Gold Star re-fuelled with coal at Tsingtao, a busy port on the Shantung Peninsula only recently
returned to China after being occupied for some years, first by the Germans, then the Japanese.
Ron took the trouble to research Tsingtao's history and concluded that the Chinese, with all their
corruption, were unworthy heirs to their own territory inasmuch as they had failed to profit from the
efforts of Germany and Japan to clean up their country. 'A Chinaman can not live up to a thing,' he
wrote, 'he always drags it down.' On 30 October he noted thankfully: 'We have left Tsingtao forever, I
hope.'
On the following day the Gold Star anchored off T'ang-ku, from where its passengers took a train to
Peking.[1] Like American tourists the world over, they made sure they got at least a glimpse of all
the sights, which Ron described as 'rubberneck stations'. He was decidedly unimpressed by
Peking's historical and religious architectural heritage.