Silent Mystery

SOUTH SEAS

In London last week, a divorce, action charging desertion against one Thomas Henry Miller, late of the Royal Navy, was indefinitely postponed. Reason: Miller cannot be found. The fate and whereabouts of picturesque "Dusty" Miller are locked in a maritime mystery as seemingly inscrutable as that which befell the master and men of the Mary Celeste more than 80 years ago./-

On the beaches and in the barrooms of the South Pacific, endless speculations continue but no man has yet offered a convincing explanation of why Dusty Miller and the 24 souls he carried aboard the twin-screw cabin cruiser Joyita two months ago should have disappeared without trace.

Uncharted Shoals. Once Mary Pickford's private yacht, the sturdy, 75-ft. Joyita was apparently sound as a dollar when she hauled anchor in the Samoan port of Apia one day early last October on a routine, 40-hour voyage to the nearby Tokelau Islands. Sudden line squalls, uncharted shoals and the whirling menace of unheralded waterspouts are common hazards to navigation in that part of the world, but during his years as a charter captain and fisherman in the South Seas, Dusty Miller, who habitually stood his watches in native costume, had brought his little ship safely through many such perils, and on this, his last voyage, no storms of undue severity were reported. Yet Miller and his passengers never reached the Tokelaus. The first hint of his fate came more than a month later when Joyita, listing badly, half full of water but still afloat and seaworthy, was discovered wallowing alone and abandoned in a gently rolling sea some 600 miles off her course.

A Desert Island. What had persuaded such able seamen as Miller and his mate, a salt-encrusted American Indian named Chuck Simpson, to abandon a still sound ship in the open sea and entrust their fates and those of their passengers to the doubtful security of an outboard dinghy and three flimsy life rafts? An island newspaper stoutly proclaimed that pirates had seized the passengers and scuttled the ship for the sake of a thousand pounds reputedly resting in the wallet of one of the passengers. But what pirate worth his salt would jettison a ship as fine as the Joyita? Other theorists argue that a waterspout struck Joyita and pointed to her damaged superstructure as evidence. But careful examination of the damage by qualified experts indicated that it was, in all likelihood, the result only of wallowing unmanned in the pounding sea.

Prince Tungi of Tonga believed that the little craft had struck an uncharted reef, capsized and righted herself. "Those aboard," he said, "must have clung to her sides for as long as they were able before the seas washed them away." Why, then, was her compass missing? And her log book? One diehard romanticist persisted in the belief that Dusty Miller had kidnaped his entire ship's company and whisked them away by lifeboat and raft to a desert island to live forever after, free of the perils of divorce courts and bill collectors.

Last week Joyita sat high and dry on a beach at Fiji, hugging her secret in silence, while official investigators from three nations pondered the problem. Perhaps, in time, they might find an answer better than that of the U.S. Navy captain who investigated the fate of Mary Celeste in 1873. "I hope and expect," he wrote in his official report, "to hear from her crew. But if we should never hear of them again, I shall remember with interest this sad and silent mystery of the sea."

/- On a fine afternoon in December 1872, the brigantine Mary Celeste was picked up heading westward in the South Atlantic under jib and fore-topsail, her galley table set for dinner, and not one soul aboard. Why her master, Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, his crew and his passengers--ten in all--should have deserted their ship in midocean is still the sea's most taunting mystery.

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