18 June 1865

18 June 1865 is the date on which Emery Staines, still without a claim or settled mining partnership, set out from Kaniere for Hokitika and encountered Crosbie Wells. The day’s modest transactions carry an unusual weight: Staines has only a small, diminishing accumulation of gold dust, while Wells says that his own fortune is already gone. Their meeting joins two lives whose fortunes and gold will become closely entangled.

Staines on the Goldfields

Before this date, Staines had gathered dust from beaches north and south of the river and from small gullies beyond Hokitika Gorge, but the yield was inconsistent and much of it had already been spent. He preferred company, meals, wine, salt beef, and cards to the solitude of his tent; bad weather gave him frequent reason to stay indoors. Without his sponsorship agreement with Francis Carver, which required him soon to invest in a claim, he might have continued alternating between excess and recovery without choosing a piece of ground.

On the morning of 18 June, Staines woke early in a low clapboard lodging house in Kaniere. He ate a plate of porridge outside, then started for Hokitika intending to meet a gold buyer before purchasing a claim. On the way around the harbour spit, he saw a three-masted ship enter the roadstead beyond the bar. A woman stood at its rail, gripping it as her skirts and bonnet strings moved in the wind. The scene offers a passing image of arrival and departure on the same morning that Staines’s own unsettled course begins to turn.

The Bank and the Meeting

At the Reserve Bank, Staines surrendered the dust in his pouch for examination and weighing. The valuation took time, but the offer was good: he left with a note for twenty pounds folded in his vest pocket. The payment gives concrete form to the small competence he has accumulated, though it is not yet the wealth or security he hopes to build through a claim.

As Staines came away from the bank, a weathered, sandy-haired man stopped him. The stranger described an acreage near Arahura where he hoped to work with timber, explaining that he was finished with gold because a fortune he once possessed had disappeared. When he gave his name as Crosbie Wells, Staines paused at the surname. The evidence records the recognition-like hesitation, but does not explain what Staines makes of the name at that moment. Wells’s intended move into timber also sharply contrasts with Staines’s approach to Hokitika: one man is preparing to leave gold behind, while the other is arriving to invest in it.

The Date’s Place in the Larger Story

The encounter is significant less for an immediate resolution than for the histories it brings together. Wells presents himself as a man who has already made and lost a fortune; Staines is still collecting the means to enter the mining economy. Later revelations show how unstable the apparent ownership and location of gold are in the novel: fortunes are concealed, removed, sewn into clothing, and pursued through competing claims. Against that wider pattern, the twenty-pound note and Wells’s account of lost wealth make the meeting a quiet point of departure for a story in which neither a name nor a fortune guarantees a clear account of who owns what.

The date therefore anchors a moment of transition rather than a completed turning point. Staines has not yet secured the claim he came to buy, and Wells’s timber plan does not disclose what became of his gold. What the day does establish is their first recorded meeting, marked by a brief pause over Wells’s name and by the contrast between one man’s prospective investment and the other’s abandoned fortune.