27 April 1866

27 April 1866 is the day Anna Wetherell and Emery Staines appear before Justice Kemp in Hokitika, with charges that the court recognizes as interdependent. The proceedings turn scattered documents and recollections into evidence, while the date itself echoes an earlier 27 April: the day Anna and an unidentified young man arrived in Dunedin and had their astrological charts drawn by Lydia Wells. The date thus joins public judgment to coincidence, and legal proof to the uncertain work of memory.

The Court Date and Its Two Cases

The cases were announced in the West Coast Times during the third week of April. Staines was to answer for falsifying the January 1866 quarterly report, stealing ore submitted by John Long Quee against the Aurora mine, and neglecting his mining responsibilities through an absence exceeding eight weeks. His hearing was set for one o’clock on 27 April at the Hokitika Resident Magistrate’s Court. Wetherell’s morning hearing, scheduled for nine, concerned forgery, public intoxication resulting in disorderly behaviour, and grievous assault.

The day’s proceedings were arranged around the connection between those accusations. Justice Kemp told the lawyers that the six charges across the two cases were interdependent, and delayed sentencing Wetherell until Staines’s case had also been heard. This order mattered: Wetherell’s alleged forgery concerned a deed of gift from Staines, while the assault charge arose from the shooting of Staines. The court was not treating their cases as separate stories, even though each defendant faced distinct allegations.

Walter Moody, acting as Wetherell’s defence counsel, arrived after taking unusual care over his appearance. He dressed in a burgundy vest and frock coat, carried a leather valise, and joined a long queue outside the courthouse. The public crowd had gathered in anticipation, but Justice Kemp warned that the court was to satisfy justice rather than prurience. He also restricted how the lawyers could refer to Wetherell’s former work. The morning therefore began with the judge setting limits on both courtroom spectacle and the language used against her.

Evidence, Documents, and Identity

The day’s legal stakes had been assembled from records whose details reach back months. In June 1865, a scarred man advertised in the West Coast Times for a missing shipping crate, offering twenty pounds for its return or fifty if it came back unopened. He identified himself not by giving a name but by presenting a birth certificate bearing the name Crosbie Francis Wells, and directed anyone finding the crate to an address on Gibson Quay. The advertisement’s middle name became a clue: when the editor, Benjamin Löwenthal, initially removed Francis to make the notice fit its column, the advertiser returned to insist that it be restored.

The name also complicated the history of the Godspeed’s sale. When Moody later examined the bill of sale, he found that the purchaser’s signature, Francis Wells, had been written with a large flourish that might be read as a C, and a small mark that could make the name appear to be C. Francis Wells. Moody connected that ambiguity with the birth certificate the scarred man had shown Löwenthal. The document suggested an assumed identity, but left open how the certificate had come into the man’s possession and whether it was genuine.

On 27 April, another comparison of signatures brought this chain of documentary clues into court. Moody pointed to the signature attributed to Crosbie Wells on an October 1865 deed of gift for two thousand pounds to Wetherell, witnessed by Wells. He compared it with the signature on Wells’s marriage certificate and with the one on the Godspeed bill of sale. The first two resembled one another; the bill of sale did not. The comparison supported Moody’s argument that the sale document was forged, shifting the case from a disputed signature toward a question of who had used Wells’s name.

The Older History Behind the Dispute

The documents point back to a larger dispute over wealth and ownership. Crosbie Wells had bought one hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley for fifty pounds, paying the Crown for land that had been taken from the territory of Poutini Ngāi Tahu. Six years earlier, the Crown had purchased an extensive tract for three hundred pounds, leaving the iwi with only the Arahura River and specified land along its banks, as well as a small parcel at Mawhera. The gold rush brought licence fees and land sales to the Crown, while the value of gold in the rivers and sands remained beyond calculation.

Te Rau Tauwhare travelled through the Arahura Valley as a hunter of pounamu and came to know Wells through visits to his cottage. He regarded the valley as part of the land of his people, and later resented that Wells’s hundred acres could be sold for profit rather than used and cared for. Wells’s cottage and fortune were consequently not just pieces in an inheritance puzzle: they occupied land whose legal transfer and Indigenous belonging stood in tension. The courtroom date falls amid that unresolved history, even as its formal charges concern Wetherell and Staines.

A Date That Repeats

The novel gives 27 April a second, deliberately suggestive place in its chronology. A year earlier, Wetherell and a young man, each one-and-twenty and born in Sydney on the same day, had both arrived in Dunedin. Lydia Wells says that each had a natal chart drawn by Mrs Crosbie Wells. When the two arrive in Dunedin again on 27 April 1866, Lydia interprets the repeated date and matching birth details as signs that their lives may share a destiny. The evidence does not identify the young man in this account, so the coincidence remains a claim made by Lydia rather than a settled explanation.

A letter dated Hokitika, 27 April 1866, adds another private reckoning to the public one. Adrian Moody writes to Walter Moody from the same town, says that he has taken lodging at the Temperance Hotel, and describes his oath to give up liquor as part of an effort to repent and set down his true intentions. He explains that debt drove him to leave the British Isles for Otago in secret, hoping to return wealthy, and that he had sent his wife his last twenty pounds before discovering the money had been stolen by its bearer. The date therefore contains not only the court’s examination of disputed acts, but also a written attempt to correct a history distorted by debt and drink.

Significance

The day’s structure makes time itself part of the evidence. Charges are announced in print; old notices and contracts are recalled; signatures are compared; and a letter tries to recover intentions obscured by the years. Meanwhile, the recurring 27 April encourages Lydia’s astrological reading of coincidence, without resolving whether the repeated pattern proves anything. The date’s significance lies in that contrast: the court demands claims that can be tested, while memory and prediction offer connections whose meaning remains uncertain.