The Ship That Couldn't Sink — and the 25 People Who Vanished From It
On November 10, 1955, the crew of the merchant ship Tuvalu sighted something strange in the swells north of Fiji: a small white motor vessel listing hard to port, her decks awash, drifting with no one at the helm. She was the Joyita, five weeks overdue on a routine island run. Of the 25 people who had sailed aboard her, not one was ever seen again.
The Joyita had left Apia, in what was then Western Samoa, on October 3, bound for the Tokelau Islands some 270 miles away — a two-day passage. Aboard were 16 crew and 9 passengers, among them a government doctor carrying medical supplies, under captain Thomas "Dusty" Miller, a British-born seaman who knew the vessel intimately. When she failed to arrive, Royal New Zealand Air Force planes swept nearly 100,000 square miles of ocean and found nothing.
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