David Wright: Joyita: Solving the mystery

By JACK LEIGH

A mystery story begs solution, as any reader of the genre would agree. But a final answer to how the 69ft island trader Joyita came to be waterlogged and drifting near Fiji with no sign of its 25 passengers and crew has defied nearly 47 years of speculation.

Now comes a book which by its analysis of all the evidence is probably the last word on the subject - barring some unimagined apparition from the past. It offers no dramatic new information or consummation of clues in the Agatha Christie style. And any promise implicit in its title is cancelled out by a back-cover description of the book as "a careful and fascinating investigation of the known facts". In other words, a rearrangement of deck chairs.

So the chapter titled "What Must Have Happened" still means what might have happened, even though the author has replaced with rational conjecture the red herrings and bizarre theories rife at the time.

The Joyita made a delayed departure because of engine trouble from Apia, Western Samoa, on October 3, 1955, for the Tokelaus on a voyage that should have taken 48 hours. She was spotted five weeks later, listing, half-sunk and deserted 965km off track. Rumours blamed mutiny, murder, piracy, freak sea, explosion, volcanic eruption, collision and deliberate ramming, with the Japanese and Russians implicated in some versions.

The findings of a Commission of Inquiry sitting in Apia were "startling" by contrast, says author Wright. It found the cause to be the run-down condition of the ship's equipment and a serious leak from a broken water-cooling pipe plus failure of pumps (and radio), with the fate of the crew and passengers "inexplicable on the evidence submitted".

There were many points unresolved including what induced Captain Dusty Miller (who believed the ship unsinkable) and all those aboard, to brave the ocean in three flimsy liferafts - if indeed that is what they did. (Unverified but "haunting" reports of shark-savaged lifebelts and the finding of an unidentified raft occurred about the same time.)

It is because of the many unanswered questions that David Wright, whose mother's cousin was aboard the Joyita, was driven to assemble all the available evidence in this book. But attempts to fill gaps with guesswork, however reasonable, tend to throw up new questions.

Fuel levels showed that the engine stopped at about 9pm on the second night out, and Wright says "most witnesses" accepted that the crew must have thrown the ship's cargo overboard to ease its list. Then everyone "must almost certainly" have quit the ship between 9pm and midnight, quickly and all together, for fear it would capsize.

There is reference elsewhere to the effort required if the missing cargo had been stolen. One might similarly ask how much time and effort it would take to manhandle four tons of waterlogged cargo out of a crowded, listing ship at night, in conditions of mounting panic. The agonising truth will never be known.

Most of the people aboard the Los Angeles-built Joyita (which means "little jewel") were Tokelauans. The other passengers included New Zealander Roger Pearless, a district officer, and Irish-born Dr Andy Parsons. In researching this book Wright, an Auckland University lecturer with a strong interest in Irish literature who is related to Pearless, met Gay Parsons, the Irish doctor's daughter, and the couple are soon to be married - a twist which he calls "wonderfully strange".

Much of the book presupposes familiarity with and a prior interest in the story. Readers might have expected a breakthrough but the mystery has become intractable; sealed in tragedy. The brave title "Solving the Mystery" is a false hope, with the admission on page 97 that the 25 missing people "must have had time to come to the sad realisation that nobody would ever know just what had happened to them".

Auckland University Press

$29.95

* Jack Leigh is an Auckland journalist.