“Just as Ian Fleming drew from his real experience in British Intelligence to create James Bond, Ai! Pedrito! is based on a true story, but in this case it was comedy.” —L. Ron Hubbard
To which we might add: that true story is just as enthralling as the fictional, and tells volumes about the life of an author who knew of what he wrote. All begins in 1932 when, among other adventures later to figure in his celebrated stories, a twenty-one-year-old (and significantly red-haired) L. Ron Hubbard set out for a then still remote Puerto Rico to conduct that island’s first complete mineralogical expedition under United States’ protectorship. There, in the literal “wake of conquistadors,” and on the “hunting ground of pirates,” he sluiced many an inland river for traces of alluvial gold. He also
