When eventually asked what he learned in Asia, L. Ron Hubbard would significantly reply, “I learned enough to know that Man did not know everything there was to know about life.”

His first voyage to the Far East commenced in 1927, aboard a steam-turbine President Madison departing from San Francisco’s Embarcadero. His course was a roundabout one through China and Japan to Guam’s Agana harbor, where his father served with the Asiatic Fleet. The second, commencing a year later, returned him to Guam aboard the USS Henderson and then to the China coast aboard a working schooner dubbed the Mariana Maru.

Initial notes from his Asian travels were breezy. Notwithstanding rough seas to Hawaii, his colors remained “flying through pitch and roll,” while he marveled at a fire room, “so hot the plates were red and the oil fire white.” A relatively unspoiled Honolulu also proved enthralling, while initial impressions of Japan left him similarly intrigued—if slightly wary with a “frenzy of modernization,” and ominous destroyers in Yokohama Bay. His impressions from the China coast, however, were another matter entirely.

To a very real extent, the China of the 1920s was still a medieval China. For all the communists professed in the way of reform, much of the nation still lay under the sway of warlords. Nor had slavery, foot-binding or opium consumption been abolished. And as Mr. Hubbard soon discovered, an aching blanket of poverty covered all. His dark and mesmerizing descriptions from this time include references to kneeling prisoners awaiting the ax, coolie songs like death chants and the knowing glances of yellow-robed monks.

Upon his return to the China mainland in 1928, the view was just as occasionally grim. By the same token, however, it was also through this second Asian venture that he made his way deep into Manchuria’s Western Hills and beyond—to break bread with Mongolian bandits, share campfires with Siberian shamans and befriend the last in the line of magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. Then, too, he became one of the first Westerners after Marco Polo to gain entrance into forbidden Tibetan lamaseries, and otherwise drank deep from what he aptly termed “The airy spiralings and dread mysteries of India.”

An entirely different tone, however, marked L. Ron Hubbard’s passage through Guam—a sense of not merely moving east, but moving into another wholly alien realm. Officially described as “an unorganized territory of small extent,” Guam essentially served as a United States naval refueling station as of 1900. Those originally peopling the island, the Chamorros, were of Indonesian stock, and are believed to have landed by outrigger in successive migratory waves. His initial impressions tell of seemingly haunted lagoons, and a forest “which is a deep green in a contrast to the sky and sea. Though it is not hard to penetrate, a thousand mysteries seem to surround it.”

On Guam, too, Mr. Hubbard’s adventures were many, including the exploration of cliff-side caves to disabuse local villagers of a devil named Tadamona. He likewise hacked new roads through jungles with a Filipino crew and signed on as an English instructor in a native school, inevitably running afoul of local governors for teaching beyond prescribed curricula. While as a darkroom apprentice in a local studio, Mr. Hubbard honed his photographic skills to a genuinely professional standard, capturing images of island life later purchased by National Geographic.