Crosbie Wells—Te Rau Tauwhare friendship

Crosbie Wells and Te Rau Tauwhare share a friendship that Tauwhare describes in the language of chosen brotherhood: he had been Wells’s only friend, and the two had built their bond through shared language and stories. The relationship is tested by Tauwhare’s unwitting role in directing Francis Carver to Wells, then recast by the grief and guilt that follow Wells’s death. Its significance lies in the contrast between the closeness Tauwhare freely gave and the betrayal he believes he committed without knowing what he was enabling.

Friendship and Chosen Kinship

Tauwhare’s correction that he was Wells’s only friend makes the bond more than a casual companionship. When Cowell Devlin recalls that Tauwhare called Wells his brother, Tauwhare initially qualifies the word as figurative. Devlin, however, draws attention to the feeling behind it: brotherhood here names love freely given, not a relation guaranteed by blood. Tauwhare’s distinction is pointed—some brothers cannot be chosen—while Wells was a friend he chose to love as family.

Their closeness was also made through the exchange of language and cultural knowledge. Tauwhare taught Wells korero Maori and shared stories of his people. Devlin recognizes this exchange as a foundation for friendship, and Tauwhare confirms its importance with a simple assent. The relationship therefore rests not only on loyalty between two individuals but on what Tauwhare entrusted to Wells: a language and stories that made their companionship a form of sharing.

The word brother carries particular weight because Tauwhare had used it before, on the night before Wells’s body was interred. Devlin remembers that earlier declaration and returns to it in conversation, inviting Tauwhare to consider what it meant. The later recollection makes the term both intimate and painful: it preserves the closeness of their chosen kinship while bringing Tauwhare’s responsibility for Wells’s fate back into the present.

The Address Given to Carver

On the morning of 14 January, Tauwhare told Francis Carver where Wells lived and accepted two shillings for the information. The exchange did not seem suspicious to him. Rewards for news of people lost on the goldfields were ordinary, and messages passed by word of mouth could reach diggers who did not read the newspaper or follow its daily notices. Tauwhare understood Carver’s offer within that familiar practice, not as a threat to his friend.

That evening, Tauwhare saw Carver approach Wells’s cottage, knock, and enter. He assumed Carver was an old associate from Wells’s years in Dunedin; he did not investigate the meeting or imagine that Wells was in danger. Believing the two men had matters to discuss privately, Tauwhare chose to sleep beside his snares on the ridge. The same trust that had made his friendship with Wells possible left him unsuspecting of the consequences of his own small act.

The details that emerged afterward changed the meaning of the two-shilling payment. Wells was found dead the next morning. On the day of his funeral, a phial of laudanum was discovered under his cot; days later, Tauwhare learned that Carver’s ship, the Godspeed, had departed that night, off schedule and under cover of darkness. To Tauwhare, these facts seemed to point toward Carver’s involvement in Wells’s death—and toward his own part in making the meeting possible. He had not intended to endanger Wells, but he had supplied Carver with the precise information needed to find him, and had accepted money for it.

Grief, Shame, and Responsibility

Tauwhare’s sense of self-mastery made the discovery especially difficult to bear. He could not comfortably dismiss his action as harmless merely because he had not foreseen what followed. The knowledge that he had betrayed his friend for money brought deep shame, expressed as anger directed both inward and outward. In the days after Wells’s burial, he ground his teeth, pulled on his forelock, and cursed Carver as he walked. His fury at Carver did not cancel his self-reproach; the two feelings occupied the same wound.

When Devlin later asks about the matter, Tauwhare’s eyes narrow, and his temper rises. He insists that any unfinished business between Wells and Carver is finished now. Devlin then raises a rumor that the two men were brothers, but the exchange does not resolve the mystery of their connection. Instead, it returns the conversation to Tauwhare’s own use of brotherhood: kinship, whether literal or chosen, is measured here against care, loyalty, and the consequences of failing to protect someone loved.

The Grave and the Meaning of Home

After Wells’s burial, Tauwhare approaches the grave with Devlin following behind. He stops several feet from the wooden headstone, as though the grave were a deathbed he feared to enter. The setting sharpens his sense of loss: he had never seen Wells beyond the Arahura Valley, and he believes Wells had repeatedly wished to end his days in that solitary country. Instead, Wells lies on a forsaken terrace in Hokitika, among men Tauwhare considers not his brethren, on soil Wells had neither worked nor loved.

Tauwhare imagines the burial that would have seemed fitting to him: in the Arahura, perhaps by the clearing, beside Wells’s small garden, or on the sunny north side of the cottage. These imagined places connect his grief to the home Wells had left behind. Tauwhare’s sorrow is not only that his friend is dead, but that Wells rests far from the landscape Tauwhare believes belonged to his life and wishes.

At the grave, guilt returns as a question of confession. Tauwhare wonders whether he should tell the chaplain that he had led Wells to his death, and resolves that he will. He then squats down, places a careful palm on the wet earth over Wells’s heart, and holds it there. The gesture brings physical tenderness to the admission he cannot undo: his hand rests where his friend lies, while his account of the past must include the address he gave Carver.

Narrative Significance

The friendship’s story is structured by a painful reversal. Tauwhare’s act of giving Wells’s address initially belongs to an everyday system of rewards for locating missing diggers; only later does it become, in his understanding, the means by which Carver reached Wells. The delayed discovery does not erase Tauwhare’s intention, but it changes the moral burden he carries. His loyalty is real, and so is his shame at having unknowingly helped expose his friend to danger.

Devlin’s recollection of the word brother and Tauwhare’s final vigil bring the relationship into focus without resolving every uncertainty surrounding Wells’s death. Their shared language and stories testify to an intimacy built by choice; the grave-side confession shows the cost Tauwhare attaches to that choice when he believes he has failed it. The bond remains, in the end, both a source of grief and the standard by which Tauwhare judges himself.