In 1962, a young Hunter S. Thompson set off on a journey around South America. Still a few years away from his Hell’s Angels fame, he was at this point a relatively inexperienced journalist attempting to get some big-time bylines. He’d managed to get a few pieces published in 1960 and ’61 but his big breakthrough came when he began sending reports from South America to the editors at the National Observer, a publication started in February of 1962.

From South America, he wrote humorously and insightfully and even had a few of his (censored) dispatches published when his editor recognised that with Hunter it was often the letters that were where the genius lay. Much of this writing later appeared in the collection The Great Shark Hunt and you can read the originals at the Internet Archive.

His time with the National Observer was pivotal in his career, helping push him into the spotlight and allowing him to move on to bigger and better things; however, during his South America trip, he wrote for another publication–his hometown paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal. This is how I described it in High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism:

In an amusing piece of reporting, titled “Beer Boat Blues,” he describes the journey toward the equator on a boat laden with booze, both Thompson and the crew emptying bottle after bottle in an attempt to slake their thirst. It is quite typical of his reporting at this point. It starts with a sentence that intrigues the reader (“There is a bit of beer shortage here, but nobody really cares except the merchants.”), tells the story of his own comical adventures in a strange place, focuses on big issues through the stories of individuals, and ends with a witty remark. He observes that it is cheaper for the barge owner to allow the sailors to steal his beer than to hire guards, who would invariably pilfer his supplies, too.

I saw someone post on Facebook a few weeks (or months?) ago, saying that they had stumbled across a copy of this article and what a rare find it was. That made me dig up my clipping from the High White Notes archives, and I thought I’d share it here for anyone interested in Hunter Thompson’s early work…

You can see a massive list of Thompson’s writing here.