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| ISBN-13: | 9781775580973 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Joyita
Solving the Mystery
By David G. Wright
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2002 David G. WrightAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-097-3
CHAPTER 1
THE JOYITA AND ITS PEOPLE
The novelist vladimir nabokov liked to point out the incongruous and subversive word 'jest' lurking within the lofty term 'majesty'. If he had known about the Joyita he might have remarked on the ironic if accidental inclusion in its name of the word 'joy'. Although the 'correct' pronunciation of the name in Spanish would be 'hoyita', it is doubtful whether many people ever said it that way, apart, perhaps, from one or two of the boat's early owners. In his book on the mystery, Robin Maugham quotes Mrs Lorentsen, widow of Milton E. Bacon who owned the Joyita in the late 1930s: 'Joyita is a Mexican word meaning "little jewel" and they pronounce it with an initial aspirate as "Hoyita".' It is unclear whether, by 'they', she meant Mexicans, or people associated with the boat, but Dusty Miller and others anglicised the name in the 1950s, as several witnesses confirm. Maugham remarks that 'I always did and still do pronounce it Joyita, partly because everyone else [those he interviewed in 1961] did and partly because I like the sound of the name that way'. It is debatable whether some ships are ill-fated, but for much of its life the Joyita was certainly associated with more than its share of trouble and sadness: joy was a quality seldom attached to it.
In its earliest days, the Joyita was part of a heady mix of Hollywood, high living, scandal and tragedy, even though the often-told story that the boat was built for (or owned by) Douglas Fairbanks or Mary Pickford was untrue. Film director Roland West (1885-1952) ordered the boat, and it was built as a luxury ocean-going yacht at the Wilmington Boat Works in Los Angeles in 1931. According to a story published by Peter de Zoete, a Portuguese workman was killed during the Joyita's construction, and his widow placed a curse on the ship. This detail sounds embellished or apocryphal: a death during construction is commonly invoked, or invented, to explain a vessel's later misfortunes. Without additional evidence, de Zoete's claim that a fire broke out on board during the first voyage should also be treated with caution. The Joyita always attracted stories of this kind, and many people who have written about it have deliberately or involuntarily embroidered the boat's history. An article by Wilmon Menard, published in the New Zealand Home Journal in October 1961, quotes an anonymous seaman's claim that on two occasions while sailing between Apia and Pago Pago, the Joyita was pursued by a mystery ship travelling without lights. Once it escaped its pursuer by steering into a rain squall, and on the second occasion it managed to reach the safety of Apia Harbour. The seaman supposedly commented that Dusty Miller, the Joyita's captain at the time, 'seemed to have an idea why the ship was following the Joyita, but he never gave a hint what the reason was'. This story cannot be confirmed either.
Whether haunted or not, the Joyita was certainly a solidly built vessel, of 'sturdy hull construction and duck-like buoyancy'. The hull was 2-inch-thick cedar on oak frames, a mode of construction that would have sufficed for a larger ship, and it had teak overlay decking. It was 69 feet long, with a beam of 17 feet and a draft of 7 feet 6 inches. Nett tonnage was 47 tons and gross tonnage was approximately 70 tons (some accounts specify 72 or 73 tons). John Harris echoes several earlier reports in noting that, as first built, the boat 'was luxuriously equipped with the latest navigational aids, including an automatic pilot, twin diesels, a huge deep freeze, great iceboxes and tanks for 2500 gallons of water and 3000 gallons of fuel'.
Roland West named the boat for his wife, the actress Jewel Carmen (1897-1984), whose real name was Florence (or Evelyn) Quick. Her film career had begun in 1913; she appeared in Lillian Gish's Daphne and the Pirate (1916), and with Douglas Fairbanks in several films including Flirting with Fate (1916). After marrying West in 1918, she starred in You Can't Get Away with It (1923) and West's own The Bat (1926), but gave up acting at the end of the silent film era. For some reason, presumably related to taxes, legal ownership of the Joyita passed to Jewel Carmen in June 1932, then back to Roland West in March 1933.
Soon after the Joyita was launched, West became romantically involved with the considerably more famous actress Thelma Todd, born in 1905. Unlike Jewel Carmen, Todd did succeed in making the transition to talkies, and in a brief career she appeared in well over 100 movies, including seventeen in 1931 alone. Given her subsequent role in Roland West's life and in the Joyita story, some of her film titles for 1931 — the year when the boat was launched — seem ironically apt. They include Monkey Business (also starring the Marx Brothers and set on a ship), Corsair (directed by West himself), as well as Broadminded, Love Fever, Let's Do Things, Catch as Catch Can, On the Loose and Rough Seas. Despite all this filming, Todd also managed to spend much of her time on the Joyita, and left many of her possessions on board. In December 1935, aged 30, she died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her garage — not on the boat, as Harris reported. Whether her death had been an accident, suicide or murder was never resolved to everyone's satisfaction. West came under suspicion, amid allegations that he had deliberately shut the garage door while a tired and intoxicated Todd sat inside with her car's engine running, but there was never a legal finding to that effect. One immediate consequence of the scandal was the end of West's marriage to Jewel Carmen. She left Hollywood and lived in relative obscurity until her death nearly 50 years later.
Strangely, there were several faint echoes of the Joyita's Hollywood days as late as the 1950s. According to Jack Thornton, who would have much to do with the boat, he first went to Fiji in 1952 as a stand-in for Burt Lancaster during the filming of His Majesty O'Keefe. Joan Rhind, a nurse who worked on various Pacific islands during the early 1950s, appeared in the same film as an extra. Later, at various times, both of them sailed on the Joyita. But Rhind had never met or even heard of Thornton, and she first learnt about this curious association in January 2000, more than 47 years later. Terry Dunleavy, a journalist from New Zealand, appeared in the movie Return to Paradise, filmed in Samoa at about the same time as His Majesty O'Keefe, and also went fishing on the Joyita.
After the Thelma Todd scandal, the Joyita was sold to new owners — by April 1936 it was registered in the name of Milton E. Bacon — and the next five years appear to have been the most uneventful and serene of its sometimes unfortunate life. Then, in October 1941, the United States Navy took possession of the Joyita and used it as a patrol boat throughout the Second World War. In 1943 it ran aground off Lanai and suffered serious damage. Many private owners or insurers would have written it off at that point, but the Navy needed ships, and could afford the repair bill. Most of the bottom of the hull needed to be replanked and, according to Sir Ron Davison, new pipework was installed in the hull, though wartime shortages meant galvanised iron fittings were used in place of brass or copper.
In 1946 the Joyita became surplus to naval requirements. Most of its equipment was removed, and the hull of the boat remained tied up at a Honolulu pier until 1948. Then the firm of Louis Brothers bought the Joyita and converted it into a fishing vessel. At this point 'she was fully equipped with American Navy surplus stores, she was fitted out with refrigerated equipment, and in every manner she was well and properly equipped for the job it was proposed she should do'. It was at this time that the boat acquired its famous cork lining, originally installed to help keep cargo chilled but more noteworthy later for its contribution to the vessel's exceptional buoyancy. Various claims have been made about the quantity of cork installed, but a reasonable estimate would be 740 cubic feet, evidently enough to make the boat unsinkable. The 'American Navy surplus stores' no doubt included the three Carley floats that were carried on the boat in the early 1950s. Moreover, 'her power was derived from two Gray marine diesel engines, each of 225 H.P., driving independent shafts and propellers. She had also two auxiliary diesel engines, made by General Motors, each driving an electric generator of 20 kW, with 120-volt output, to serve lighting and various other electrically driven appliances.' Despite all this equipment, Louis Brothers found fishing from the Joyita unprofitable, and in June 1950 the boat changed hands, to William Tavares. But Tavares in his turn seems to have made little use of the Joyita, and in September 1952 he sold it again, for US$17,000.
The purchaser was Katharine Luomala (1907-1992), who owned the Joyita throughout the events of 1955. An anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, she was widely regarded as a dedicated and productive professional in her field. Leonard Mason remarks that 'in Hawaii her [Finnish] surname causes occasional confusion about her ancestry because "Luomala" has a Polynesian ring to it, and she is known as an authority on Polynesian folklore and mythology. Once people see her in person, however, the sight of her blond hair quickly dispels that illusion.' She had, in fact, been born in Minnesota to Finnish immigrant parents. Her early life seems to have juxtaposed a close-knit and devoted family with a harsh climate and austere lifestyle. In October 1918, when she was eleven, she and her family narrowly survived a Minnesota forest fire that killed 400 people and burnt out an area of 2000 square miles. The immigrant culture in which she grew up, with its oral folklore traditions, may have influenced her choice of career, as Mason notes: 'it is scarcely surprising ... that Katharine would translate her childhood fascination with legends and folktales into a lifetime profession, even though she did shift her regional focus from the Old World to Oceania'. In the late 1940s, now firmly based in Honolulu, Luomala lived and carried out research in the Gilbert Islands. It was during this time, in 1948, that she first met Thomas Henry ('Dusty') Miller.
Born in Cardiff on 29 December 1913, Dusty Miller came from a seafaring family. Jack Thornton reports that Miller 'first went to sea in his teens. Prior to World War Two he served mainly aboard cargo ships, which he usually joined in Wales.' He then served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary acting sublieutenant from January 1943 to May 1947, working on at least ten ships in various parts of the world, including Yemen, Kenya, South Africa and Singapore. There is no evidence in his RNVR record that he ever attained the rank of lieutenant-commander often ascribed to him, presumably on the basis of his own claims. He was married to Ismay Beatrice Miller, and the couple had a daughter, Barbara, born in 1942, and a son, Ian, born in 1947. In 1948, initially on the pretext of emigrating with his family to New Zealand, he moved to the Pacific, but never sent for his family to follow him. 'On the voyage out from Britain he met a high-ranking official from the South Pacific Commission in Sydney and as a result the administration at Tarawa engaged him as master aboard government-operated ships trading in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony.'
Thornton reports that Katharine Luomala 'had arrived at Tarawa from Honolulu to study Gilbertese customs. Captain Miller delivered her to an outlying atoll where she gathered material for an anthropological manuscript.' Evidently some kind of relationship between Luomala and Miller began at this time. Thornton remarks dryly that 'after Dr Luomala had left the Gilbert Islands, Dusty did not renew his contract with the administration at Tarawa'. Instead, he followed her to Honolulu.
Yet his preference for roaming, which had evidently ended his marriage, appears to have recurred in Miller's relationship with Luomala. Although he said she had become his fiancée, and that they would marry once his divorce was finalised, he does not seem to have spent much time with her. It remains unclear what drew the seemingly improbable partners together, but Miller's main ambition was obviously to captain his own ship, and it is hard to escape the suspicion that some portion of Luomala's appeal was her ability and willingness to acquire a boat for him. She appears, with considerable generosity, to have done just this. Immediately after she bought the Joyita in September 1952, she chartered it to Miller, who was then registered as a company called Phoenix Island Fisheries. There is no evidence that Miller ever acquired a share of the Joyita's ownership, as was sometimes claimed, but he clearly had undisputed use of the boat. He spent most of the next three years travelling about in it, making several fishing trips to Canton Island.
After Miller left Hawaii for the last time in April 1954, he apparently never saw Katharine Luomala again. Joan Rhind knew Miller quite well during 1954, sailing on the Joyita and occasionally going to dances with him, and he never once mentioned Luomala to her. Thornton reports Miller dallying with other women in the Gilbert Islands. Perhaps it suited Luomala in some ways to have Miller at a distance, but it remains a mystery just what this relationship meant to her or what she might have expected it to become. It must have been clear that he was not the kind of man to settle down. She was 40 when they first met, and 48 by the time of the Joyita's voyage in October 1955. Neither of them seems to have been much interested in children. Miller was handsome and widely described as charming to women: for her, the whole episode may have been something of a romantic adventure in a generally quiet and scholarly life.
Yet in the 1986 revised edition of her book Voices on the Wind, originally published in the year of the Joyita disaster, Luomala retained an acknowledgement to 'Captain T. H. Miller whose reading and criticisms of certain chapters helped make them more readable'. Mason describes this book as 'unquestionably her best work as a writer. ... Voices is an adventurous fun fest inspired with her great affection for the heroic players. Here I have the feeling that Katharine really let herself go, enjoying to the fullest the composing of each chapter as a gift of love, and saddened at the end when the final chapter had been completed.' So perhaps there was more companionship or compatibility between Katharine Luomala and Dusty Miller than first appears.
When Luomala was interviewed by the United States Coast Guard in Honolulu on 29 November 1955, she said, 'I had complete confidence in Captain Miller as a seaman. ... [He] enlisted in the war when it first began and later because of his ability and heroic circumstances [?] was recommended for officer and served in the salvage section as Lieutenant-Commander.' (In fact, he joined the RNVR only in 1943 and there is no evidence that he became a lieutenant-commander.)
Various other witnesses have left impressions of Miller, most of them agreeing with the claim that he was an extremely capable seaman. Members of the Joyita commission of inquiry would acknowledge 'all the evidence shows that Miller was a highly competent Master mariner'. Peter Plowman, an Australian who became a member of the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council of Western Samoa, and himself a highly experienced sailor, remarks: 'I became convinnced during the many weekends we spent together at my home that Miller was a fine seaman.' Jack Thornton paid tribute to Miller's exceptional navigational skills and also emphasised his quick thinking, calm assessment of danger and acute knowledge of local conditions. When a Gilbert Islander was washed overboard on a voyage near Canton Island, 'Dusty was told about five minutes after the Gilbertese had gone overboard, and he turned the ship around, estimated drift and steered straight to the spot in what was generally regarded by [the] Gilbertese aboard as a miraculous saving'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Joyita by David G. Wright. Copyright © 2002 David G. Wright. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Preface,
1 The Joyita and its People,
2 The Fatal Voyage,
3 The Aftermath,
4 The Commission of Inquiry,
5 Later Theories,
6 What Must Have Happened,
7 What Became of Dusty Miller?,
8 The Years to Come,
Appendices,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,