When I saw that headline in the New Zealand news site, I felt fairly sure this would be about the boat, Joyita, and it was. I read a book about this, mentioned below, a few years ago.
The news item began:
Nearly 57 years after 25 people vanished from a boat in the South Pacific, a memorial service – the first for the missing – is to be held at Parliament tomorrow.
Around 250 people, including family of the dead from around the world, will be present to commemorate the strange story of the MV Joyita, which disappeared on a voyage that began on October 3, 1955, from Apia in Samoa, then under New Zealand rule, to the colony of Tokelau.
The waterlogged boat was found five weeks later in Fiji waters, but there was no sign of the 25 people aboard.
The fate of the passengers and crew has never been determined and as Police Conduct Authority investigator Luther Toloa puts it, they have "has simply withered into the backblocks of New Zealand history.”
The book I read was by David Wright and I found a little about this saying: New Zealand author David Wright has extensively researched the saga and written a book in which he concludes Joyita’s fate was explainable, and that all the facts were there for the inquiry members to see. Joyita’s salvagers reported obvious engine trouble, and it was clear by the evidence that the vessel had come to grief at night.
Wright’s conclusion is that Joyita rapidly took on water through a corroded pipe in the engine’s cooling system. In the hours of darkness the passengers and crew took the decision to abandon ship, but only after sending out a distress call that was never heard. Wright believes that Miller himself was forced off at gunpoint, as there was evidence firearms were missing from the vessel.
Adrift in liferafts the passengers and crew of Joyita were at the mercy of the endless seas of the mid-Pacific Ocean, where they perished.
I saw quite a bit of the book actually on the internet but couldn’t seem to get to his conclusion. David Wright was soon to marry one of the people he contacted for the book who also had relatives on the ship which he felt completed a circle. The Joyita was a 22 metre boat, in poor condition but according to the skipper ‘unsinkable’ and it was still floating happily when found. Because its owner and captain Dusty Miller was in poor financial straits I think there were suggestions that he had sabotaged his own boat; if so he didn’t make much of a job of getting the profits.
The boat had connections with 1930s actress Thelma Todd who died at the age of 30. She spent time on the Joyita and it was rumoured the first captain of the Joyita had murdered her. Her death was by carbon monoxide poisoning, whether accidental, by suicide or murder doesn’t seem to have been decided.
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