Francis Carver’s visit to Crosbie Wells’s cottage and his subsequent departure from Hokitika aboard the Godspeed form a chain of circumstantial clues around Wells’s death. Reports place Carver at the Arahura Valley cottage on the day Wells died and before Alistair Lauderback arrived; the ship then left after sundown without its departure being recorded. The sequence makes Carver’s movements suspicious, but does not establish whether he witnessed Wells’s death.

The Visit to Wells’s Cottage

Te Rau Tauwhare, who had been a close friend of Crosbie Wells, told Thomas Balfour that he had seen Francis Carver entering the cottage on the day of the hermit’s death. Balfour did not know whether Carver arrived before or after Wells died. Tauwhare did, however, place Carver’s arrival before Lauderback’s. Lauderback had reached the cottage not long after Wells’s death; he recalled finding the kettle still boiling on the range, not yet run dry.

From those timings, Balfour reasoned that Carver must have been at the cottage before Wells died, and might even have witnessed his death. That possibility remains an inference rather than a confirmed account of what happened inside. The distinction matters: the reported visit establishes Carver’s presence at a consequential time, but leaves his knowledge and actions there unresolved.

The Godspeed’s Unrecorded Departure

Benjamin Löwenthal connected the cottage report to Carver’s movements by noting that the Godspeed had sailed late that evening, well after sundown. The departure was off schedule and took place on a Sunday, after the shipping news had already appeared in Saturday’s edition. Because the ship was not scheduled to leave that day and sailed after dark, its departure was omitted both from the customhouse log and from the newspaper. The Harbourmaster was upset that the ship seemed, in the records, never to have left its mooring.

Balfour identified the Sunday in question as the day Lauderback arrived and dated it as the fourteenth. Löwenthal inferred that Carver had returned from the Arahura Valley to Hokitika, gone directly to the ship, and weighed anchor before dawn. Balfour, meanwhile, thought the timing especially suspicious because his shipping crate had vanished. The late sailing thus connected Carver’s visit to a separate loss, while the missing record made the journey harder to trace.

The Search and Its Unanswered Questions

After Carver’s departure, Ah Sook treated Balfour’s supposition that Carver had gone to Canton and would be away for months as true. Remembering that Te Rau Tauwhare had said Carver was seeking a man named Crosbie Wells, Ah Sook went to the Arahura Valley to question Wells himself. He found the cottage empty and learned that the hermit was dead.

During the following week, Ah Sook followed the story of Wells’s fortune, suspecting that the death and Carver’s departure were connected. His inquiry continued for nearly eight days, up to the morning of 27 January, when he was about to explain his discoveries to Ah Quee. The event therefore serves not as a solved account of Wells’s final hours, but as a hinge between a death, an undocumented voyage, a missing crate, and the investigation those coincidences provoke.