Carver steals Crosbie Wells’s property and assumes his identity

Francis Carver’s theft of Crosbie Wells’s property and use of his name turn identity into an instrument of fraud: papers let Carver make a new history plausible, while stolen gold and a stolen ship give that history material force. The scheme links Carver’s dealings with Emery Staines and Alistair Lauderback to the hidden fortune that later circulates through Lydia Wells’s dresses and Anna Wetherell’s life. Its full sequence emerges piecemeal, through Wells’s accusations, Moody’s reconstruction, and the movements of the objects themselves.

Sponsorship, deception, and borrowed papers

In Dunedin, Carver approached Emery Staines after Staines had lost his money at cards and fallen into debt. He offered to pay those debts and supply the equipment and ticket needed to reach a payable goldfield. In return, Staines was to sign over half-shares in his first claim, with dividends paid to Carver in perpetuity. Staines suspected that Carver had encouraged his losses by keeping him gambling, but accepted the offer with good humour, treating the episode as an early lesson in the goldfields.

For another transaction, Carver instructed Staines to use a different name for him: Francis Wells. Later evidence shows that his assumed identity shifted with his audience. He used Crosbie Wells’s identity when dealing with Benjamin Löwenthal at the West Coast Times, but called himself Francis Wells when confronting Lauderback, signing in a deliberately ambiguous way. Moody could infer that Carver had presented himself to Lauderback as Crosbie Wells’s brother, but could not establish why he chose that version of the lie.

Wells’s papers supplied the practical means for this impersonation. Thinking through the theft, Wells reasoned that someone who wanted to escape a tarnished past might need another man’s miner’s right and birth certificate. He suspected that Lydia had taken his documents along with his gold and passed them to Carver. When Wells later confronted the history of his ruin, he accused Carver of taking his papers and name, cheating him out of a fortune, turning his wife against him, and trying to kill him. Wells said that the attempt had failed: he had escaped, though he was left living hand to mouth and constantly looking over his shoulder. The exact route by which Carver acquired the documents remained uncertain, but their usefulness was plain.

The Godspeed and the missing fortune

About nine months before Moody’s reconstruction, Carver had cheated Lauderback out of the Godspeed. A shipping crate connected to that coercive bargain subsequently disappeared. It contained a trunk holding roughly four thousand pounds in pure gold, carefully sewn into the linings of five dresses. Lydia, then posing as Carver’s wife, had done the sewing. The crate therefore carried both the proceeds of Carver’s earlier maneuver and a concealed record of the partnership between him and Lydia.

After learning that the crate was missing, Carver sailed to Hokitika, apparently supposing it had been delivered there by mistake. He advertised in the West Coast Times, offering a substantial reward for its safe return, and presented himself as Crosbie Francis Wells, supported by a birth certificate. Moody could not determine why Carver’s blackmail of Lauderback had required or prompted the alias, or how a birth certificate bearing Wells’s identity had come into Carver’s possession. The documents made the deception more than a spoken claim: they allowed Carver to attach a borrowed name to a public search for his own lost property.

The dresses and the dispersal of the gold

The missing fortune did not remain together. Anna had worn the dresses, one at a time, without speaking of the gold or visibly trying to remove it. Her opium use may have kept her from noticing their added weight, though Moody also considered whether she might have recognized the garments as Lydia’s. During a month in September and October, late pregnancy led her to wear a different dress; otherwise, the hidden gold traveled with her.

Edgar Clinch discovered the gold and mistakenly concluded that Dick Mannering was using Anna to smuggle raw ore and evade bank duty. Ah Quee made the same misreading. Knowing that Mannering had cheated him before, Ah Quee decided to turn the supposed fraud to his own advantage: over several months he removed gold from four dresses while Anna, heavily affected by opium at his hut in Kaniere Chinatown, slept. He retorted the dust into squares and stamped them with the Aurora name so that the proceeds would be credited to his claim. Anna’s orange dress, which she did not wear on those visits, escaped the process and retained its share.

Anna found the gold in that orange dress after waking in gaol, confused and unable to remember the twelve hours before her arrest. She assumed it had recently been planted on her. With Aubert Gascoigne’s help, she removed it and hid it in a flour sack beneath his bed. The remaining gold thus passed from Carver’s missing shipment into Anna’s possession without her understanding its origin, while the four other dresses had already been stripped by Ah Quee. The apparent continuity of a single fortune concealed a chain of separate discoveries, mistaken explanations, and transfers.

Moody’s reconstruction and the human cost

Moody assembled the history indirectly, placing together testimony, advertisements, identity papers, and the missing shipment. His discovery of Lauderback’s trunk offered a material counterpart to the disputed names: inside its lining, beneath a carefully disguised slit in the tartan calico, he found a bundle of about fifteen letters addressed to Lauderback. The concealment showed that the trunk held evidence beyond its visible contents, though the letters’ presence alone did not resolve every uncertainty about Carver’s aliases or the birth certificate.

Wells’s account gives the impersonation its most intimate consequence. Carver’s appropriation of papers and money was not merely a commercial trick: Wells believed it had cost him his standing, his marriage, and his safety. The stolen identity also joined otherwise separate strands of the plot—the coercion of Lauderback, Carver’s search for the lost crate, Lydia’s work on the gold-bearing dresses, and the fortune’s later dispersal. What remains unsettled is precisely how Carver obtained and deployed Wells’s documents. Their power, however, is unmistakable: a name made usable by paper could redirect a fortune, while the person from whom it was taken was left to live under the shadow of that theft.