THE SHIP THAT WAS FOUND WITH NO CREW OR PASSENGERS- WHERE DID THEY GO?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
The World Unexplained. The World Explained a podcast that explores
the unusual beliefs, conspiracies, customs, rituals, and traditions from around
the world. This is your host, Doctor Carlos.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
You ever heard of the mysterious ship that it was
found with no crew or no passengers. That's right. M
V Yohita y jou joy it A was a merchant
vessel from which twenty five passengers and crew mysteriously disappeared
in the South Pacific in October nineteen fifty five. She

(00:58):
was found adrift with no one on board. The ship
was in very poor condition, with corroded pipes and a
radio which will functional, had a range of only about
two miles. So what was this all about? And then
November tenth, nineteen fifty five, Captain Gerard Douglas of the
merchant ship Tuvala was en route from Suva, the capital

(01:18):
of Fiji, to Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu and the
South Pacific, when he spotted something odd. He saw a
ship drifting out to sea, tipped so heavily to one
side that the port side deck rails were dipping in
and out of the water. There's actually a picture you
can see on a wiki comments. A recovery party was
soon dispatched and the ship was determined to be the

(01:39):
m V Joyita, a cargo and fishing charter vessel. It
was expected to arrive in an island territory of New
Zealand about forty hours later, but never did. They Search
and rescue teams out for six days, and although they
searched one hundred thousand square miles in the Pacific, they
couldn't find it. And now all of a sudden, here
it was. That's a mystery as puzzle people from many

(02:03):
centuries decades, and there's a book that officer's solution has
been called The Mary Celeste of the South Pacific. It
started out MV Joyita started out life in nineteen thirty
one as a pleasure yacht and was built in la
for a film director and named for his wife, actress
Juel Carman, its name meaning little Actress in Spanish. In

(02:25):
nineteen thirty six, it was bought by Milton Beacon and
made numerous tips to Mexico and up to the Golden
Gate International Exposition. In nineteen forty three, ran a ground
and sustained serious damage, but as the Navy was desperate
for boats. It was repaired and returned to service for
World War Two. In nineteen fifty two, the ship passed
to its final owner, Captain Thomas Miller, born in England

(02:47):
and living in Samoa. Captain Miller used the boat for
charter trade, shipping and fishing expeditions, making money off carrying
people and goods around the islands, and then on October third,
nineteen fifty five, that was carrying four tons of cargo
including timber, medical supplies, food, and emptied or oil drums,
and there were sixteen crewmen and nine passengers. Among the

(03:08):
passengers was a doctor by the name of Alfred Dennis Parsons,
a government official, a Copra buyer, and a couple with
two children. There was no sign of any of them
on or around the ship, and the search and rescue
team hadn't seen any trace of them either. As the
recovery team boated the boat, things only got more sinister.

(03:29):
The radio was turned to twenty one to eighty two
killohertz the International Marine Distress Channel, indicating that they had
required help. The port engine clutch and the auxiliary pumper
boat disassembled and unconnected. Meeting. The ship had only been
running on one engine. The clocks were stopped at ten
twenty five and the lights were on. The log book,
sexton and other navigational equipment were all gone, along with

(03:51):
three lifeboats. Finally, there were some eerie signs of possible violence.
The ship's bridge had been smashed by something and covered
with the camp this awning on deck, a doctor's bag
was found open, containing a scalpel, stethoscope and lengths of
bloody bandages. When the Johita was towed back to Suva,
the Maritime inquiry found that there was a clogged drain

(04:13):
in the bilges, meaning that they and the lower decks
were flooded. There were still few in the tank, and
a rough estimate supposed it had completed about two hundred
and forty miles of its journey and was only fifty
miles away from Tokalu when whatever happened happened. It was
also found, though, that the radio was working and there

(04:34):
was an unseen break in the cables which would have
limited the radio's range. The flooded lower decks might have
given the impression of the ship was sinking, hence the
missing lifeboats. However, the ship was never actually in danger
of sinking even with all that water. The cork lining
in the hall, as as all those empty oil drums
in the cargo made it unsinkable. Wet but unsinkable. But

(04:58):
this inquiry and all this stuff doesn't really explain what happened.
Author David G. Wright, whose mother's cousin was one of
those lost, believes that the water in the lower decks
panicked the crew and passengers who believe the boat was sinking,
and made everyone aboard the life craft. Board the life crafts,
including perhaps a reluctant captain whose insistence the boat was
unsinkable when unbelieved. In his book Joyita, Solving the Mystery,

(05:21):
he points to missing firearms that he speculates might have
been used to force Captain Miller into a lifeboat. Another
theory states that Miller might have been injured, hence the
bloody bandages, was unable to explain the unsinkable nature of
the ship, leading everyone else to abandon in fear. What's more,
they may have thought there made a message simply went unanswered,
but unfortunately was never received due to that broken cable.
In nineteen sixty two, a book called the Hoyita Mystery

(05:45):
author Robert Magham ended up buying the remains of the
Hoyita in nineteen sixty two, and suggests a mutiny, a
storm and flooded ship, and an engine two weeks to
get to the destination was maybe just too much for
the crew. After a possible struggle that resulted an injury,
maybe Miller's, the crew decided to abandoned the ship. There's
a lot of other less plausible theories, of course, and

(06:07):
we're not going to go into all those. The question remains,
what did happen on that boat? It seems to stem
either from a series of accidents and fortunate events, misunderstanding
something of some kind of combination, but it's kind of
hard to know for sure, So this one remains unexplained.

(06:31):
And this is part of an article from cracked dot com,
so I read part of their article. But it's a
fascinating story nonetheless, and whatever happened to these individuals, it
may never get closure. My condolences to the families who've
lost someone