page_title: MV Joyita
section_title: Disappearance
hierarchical_section_title: MV Joyita / Disappearance
caption_attribution_description: Suomi: Moottorilaiva Joyita rantaan hinattuna 1955 katoamisen jälkeen. English: MV Joyita towed on shore after found drifted 1955 partially submerged and listing heavily to port side.
context_page_description: MV Joyita was a merchant vessel from which 25 passengers and crew mysteriously disappeared in the South Pacific in October 1955. She was found adrift with no one aboard.
  The ship was in very poor condition, with corroded pipes and a radio which, while functional, had a range of only about 2 miles because of faulty wiring. However, the extreme buoyancy of the ship made sinking nearly impossible. Investigators were puzzled as to why the crew had not remained on board and waited for help.
context_section_description: About 5:00 AM on 3 October 1955, Joyita left Samoa's Apia harbour bound for the Tokelau Islands, about 270 miles (430 km) away.  The boat had been scheduled to leave on the noon tide the previous day but her departure was delayed because her port engine clutch failed. Joyita eventually left Samoa on one engine. She was carrying sixteen crew members and nine passengers, including a government official, a doctor (Alfred "Andy" Denis Parsons, a World War II surgeon on his way to perform an amputation), a copra buyer, and two children. Her cargo consisted of medical supplies, timber, 80 empty 45 gallon (200 l) 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. Joyita was scheduled to arrive in the Tokelau Islands on 5 October. On 6 October, 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 6 to 12 October, Sunderlands of the Royal New Zealand Air Force covered a probability area of nearly 100,000 square miles (260,000 km²) of ocean, but no sign of Joyita or any of her passengers or crew was found.
  Five weeks later, on 10 November, Gerald Douglas, captain of the merchant ship Tuvalu, en route from Suva to Funafuti, sighted Joyita more than 600 miles (970 km) west from her scheduled route, drifting north of Vanua Levu.  The ship was partially submerged and listing heavily (her port deck rail was awash) 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.
  Barnacle growth high above the usual waterline on the port side showed that Joyita had been listing heavily for some time.
  There was some damage to the superstructure. Her flying bridge had been smashed away and the deckhouse had light damage and broken windows. A canvas awning had been rigged on top of the deckhouse behind the bridge.
  Joyita carried a dinghy and three Carley liferafts, but all were missing. She did not carry enough lifejackets for everyone on board.
  The starboard engine was found to be covered by mattresses, while the port engine's clutch was still partially disassembled, showing that the vessel was still running on only one engine.
  An auxiliary pump had been rigged in the engine room, mounted on a plank of wood slung between the main engines. However, it had not been connected.
  The radio on board was tuned to the international distress channel, but when the equipment was inspected, a break was found in the cable between the set and the aerial. The cable had been painted over, obscuring the break. This would have limited the range of the radio to about 2 miles (3.2 km).
  The electric clocks on board (wired into the vessel's generator) had stopped at 10:25 and the switches for the cabin lighting and navigation lights were on, implying that whatever had occurred happened at night. The ships' logbook, sextant, mechanical chronometer and other navigational equipment, as well as the firearms Miller kept in the boat, were missing.
  A doctor's bag was found on deck, containing a stethoscope, a scalpel, and four lengths of blood-stained bandages.
  There was still fuel in Joyita's tanks; from the amount used, it was calculated she made some 243 miles (391 km) before the vessel was abandoned, probably within 50 miles (80 km) of Tokelau. The leak had probably started after 9 p.m. on the second night of the voyage, with nine hours of darkness ahead.
  Although Joyita was found with her bilges and lower decks flooded, her hull was sound. When she was moored back in harbour at Suva, investigators heard the sound of water entering the vessel. It was found that a pipe in the raw-water circuit of the engine's cooling system had failed due to galvanic corrosion, allowing water into the bilges. The first the crew would have known about the leak was when the water rose above the
caption: Wreck seen from port side
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