MV Joyita

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MV Joyita was a merchant vessel from which 25 passengers and crew mysteriously disappeared in the South Pacific in 1955.

Contents

[edit] Vessel description and history

[edit] Vessel construction

The 69-foot (21 m) wooden ship was built in 1931 as a luxury yacht by the Wilmington Boat Works in Los Angeles, California for movie tycoon Roland West.

[edit] U.S. Navy service in World War II

In 1941, she was commandeered by the United States Navy and taken to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii to be outfitted as a patrol boat. She was used by the Navy in the South Pacific campaign during World War II.

[edit] Private purchase

Dr. Katharine Luomala, a professor at the University of Hawaii, bought the ship in 1952 and chartered the boat to her friend, Captain Thomas H. "Dusty" Miller, a British-born sailor living in Samoa. Miller used the ship as a trading and fishing charter boat.

[edit] The incident at sea

[edit] Overdue and disappeared

About 5:00 AM on October 3, 1955, the Joyita left Samoa's Apia harbor bound for the Tokelau Islands, about 270 miles (430 km) away. The boat was scheduled to leave on the noon tide the previous day, but her departure was delayed for an unknown reason. She was carrying 16 crew members and 9 passengers, including a government official, a doctor (Alfred "Andy" Denis Parsons, a WWII surgeon on his way to perform an amputation), a copra buyer, and two children. Her cargo consisted of medical supplies, lumber, empty oil drums, and various foodstuffs. The voyage was expected to take between 41 and 48 hours. She was scheduled to return with a cargo of copra. The Joyita was scheduled to arrive in the Tokelau Islands on October 5. On October 6, a message from Fakaofo Port reported that the ship was overdue. No ship or land based operator reported receiving a distress signal from the crew. A search and rescue mission was launched and, from October 6-12, the Royal New Zealand Air Force covered nearly 100,000 square miles (260,000 km²) of ocean during its search, but no sign of the Joyita or any of her passengers or crew were found.

[edit] Sighted off-course without passengers or crew

Five weeks later, on November 10, Gerald Douglas, captain of the merchant ship Tuvalu, enroute from Suva to Funafuti sighted the Joyita more than 600 miles (1,000 km) from its scheduled route. The ship was partially submerged and there was no trace of any of the passengers or crew; four tons of cargo were also missing. The recovery party noted that the radio was discovered tuned to 2182 kHz, the international marine radiotelephone distress channel.

[edit] Maritime inquiry and theories

A subsequent inquiry found that the vessel was in a poor state of repair, but determined that the fate of the passengers and crew was "inexplicable on the evidence submitted at the inquiry". The Fiji Times and Herald quoted at the time from an "impeccable source" to the effect that the Joyita had passed through a fleet of Japanese fishing boats during its trip and "had observed something the Japanese did not want them to see." Others theorize that modern sea pirates attacked the vessel, killed the 25 passengers and crew (and cast their bodies into the ocean), and stole the missing four tons of cargo.

[edit] The Joyita mystery

The Joyita is sometimes referred to as the "Mary Celeste of the South Pacific" and has been the subject of several books and documentaries offering explanations that range from rational and conventional to supernatural and paranormal.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

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