The Ship That Couldn't Sink — and the 25 People Who Vanished From It
On 10 November 1955 the merchant ship Tuvalu came upon a small white vessel drifting in the South Pacific north of the Fijian island of Vanua Levu. She lay three-quarters submerged and heeled hard over to port, her port rail awash, with no hand at the wheel. She was the motor vessel Joyita, five weeks overdue and more than six hundred miles off her course. Captain Gerald Douglas put his men aboard. Of the 25 people who had sailed in her, not one was ever seen again.
The Joyita had been built in 1931 at the Wilmington Boat Works in Los Angeles as a luxury yacht for the film director Roland West, who named her after his wife, the actress Jewel Carmen. Joyita is Spanish for "little jewel." Below her cedar-on-oak decks ran a hull lined with cork. During the Second World War she served the US Navy as the patrol boat YP-108. In that service she ran aground and was repaired, and in the repair her original copper and brass pipework was swapped for galvanised iron. By 1955 she was working the islands under charter to Thomas "Dusty" Miller, a British-born master who had taken her on and knew her intimately.
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