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the ship. He knew that people regarded him as a homosexual, he said, but that was only
something he told other women on the ship who were after him because he was
Hubbard’s son.
Quentin Hubbard, circa 1973
HUBBARD SET a new course: due west, toward America. The destination was Charleston,
South Carolina. The crew were thrilled that they would be returning to the States, only
to be crestfallen when a message arrived from the Guardian’s Oce, just as the ship was
approaching port, alerting Mary Sue that agents from US Customs, Immigration, Coast
Guard, DEA, and US Marshals were waiting for them to dock, plus 180 IRS agents
waiting to impound the ship. The federal agents had a subpoena to depose Hubbard in a
civil tax case in Hawaii. A Scientologist on shore realized what was happening when he
was blocked from entering the dock area. He sent a pizza to a radio operator with a
message inside to send to the ship. Hubbard was just ve miles oshore, but he suddenly
broadcasted a new course over the radio—due north for Halifax, Nova Scotia—then
turned sharply south and headed to the Bahamas.
Hubbard was sixty-four years old in 1975, as the Apollo began its circumnavigation of
the Caribbean. He weighed 260 pounds. He was still meticulously groomed, but his teeth
and ngers were darkly stained from constant smoking. He was on the run from the
courts, fearful of being discovered, marked by age, and visibly in decline. In Curaçao, he
suffered a small stroke and spent several weeks in a local hospital. It was becoming
clear that life at sea posed a real danger for a man in such frail health. His crew
rationalized his obvious decline by saying that his body was battered by the research he
was undertaking and the volumes of suppression aimed at him. “He’s risking his life for