Crosbie Wells’s death in his Arahura Valley cottage is the hinge on which several mysteries turn: the suspicious visit by Francis Carver, the laudanum later found in Wells’s body, the fortune concealed throughout his home, and the contest over who could claim his property. The death is treated as suspicious, but the evidence never settles whether Carver killed Wells, witnessed his death, or left shortly before it occurred. That uncertainty makes the cottage both a crime scene and a storehouse of competing claims.

A cottage on contested land

Wells’s death takes place in a landscape already marked by a dispute over possession. Six years earlier, the Crown had purchased the extensive western territory of Poutini Ngāi Tahu for three hundred pounds, leaving the people with only the Arahura River, sections of its banks, and a small parcel at Mawhera. In the years that followed, prospectors paid for licences and land, while the value of gold drawn from the rivers and sands remained beyond calculation. Te Rau Tauwhare understood the transaction not as fair exchange but as theft, and felt anger at the wealth his people had been denied.

Wells, meanwhile, had paid the Crown fifty pounds for a hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley. He built a one-room cottage overlooking the river, made a garden, and began a timber mill. His settlement brought him into regular contact with Tauwhare, who travelled through the valley to hunt for pounamu. Their acquaintance began when Tauwhare heard Wells’s axe splitting kindling; it grew into a friendship sustained by frequent visits and Wells’s interest in Tauwhare’s knowledge of Māori life and lore. The cottage was therefore not merely an isolated home. It stood beside land Tauwhare regarded as his own, though his iwi could no longer claim it under colonial law.

The visit before the death

On the morning of 14 January, Tauwhare encountered Carver and accepted two shillings to tell him where Wells lived. Rewards for news of missing men were common on the goldfields, and a spoken offer could reach people who did not read the newspaper or follow its notices. Tauwhare did not understand himself to be putting his friend in danger. He assumed Carver was an old associate from Wells’s years in Dunedin, and when he saw Carver approach the cottage that evening, knock, and enter, he did not suspect a threat. He chose to sleep on the ridge beside his snares, believing the two men should have privacy for their reunion.

Wells was found dead the next morning. The sequence did not at first expose what the visit meant to Tauwhare; suspicion grew as further details emerged. A phial of laudanum was discovered beneath Wells’s cot on the day of the funeral. It was later established that Carver’s ship, the Godspeed, had left Hokitika on the night of 14 January, ahead of schedule and under cover of darkness. Tauwhare came to fear that Carver had played a part in Wells’s death and that his own directions had made the visit possible. The two-shilling payment, which had seemed ordinary when accepted, became a source of profound shame.

What the clues establish—and leave open

Later reconstruction places Carver at Wells’s cottage that night with a phial of laudanum. Traces of the drug were found in Wells’s stomach during the post-mortem. The evidence does not establish whether Carver watched Wells die or departed moments before his death, and the small quantity of laudanum did not by itself resolve the cause. At trial, Walter Moody objected when the timing of Emery Staines’s first use of opium was treated as significant merely because it coincided with Wells’s death. The court then heard that the post-mortem had found laudanum in Wells’s stomach. The detail sharpened the mystery without closing it.

Carver’s departure increased suspicion but remained a clue, not proof of murder. Alistair Lauderback reached the cottage after Carver had left and found Wells dead at the kitchen table, his head resting on his arms. Lauderback carried the news to Hokitika. The death later became part of a larger chain of events linked to the same night: Anna Wetherell nearly died, Emery Staines vanished, Carver sailed away, and Lauderback arrived in town. At a later gathering, Walter Moody tried to arrange the scattered accounts into a chronology, while recognizing how much remained uncertain about the absent people at its centre.

The cottage after Wells

Lauderback’s news prompted Benjamin Löwenthal to anticipate that Wells’s estate would be sold. Löwenthal told Edgar Clinch, who was looking to invest in land, and Clinch secured the property through the bank the following morning. He commissioned Harald Nilssen to clear the cottage and dispose of its contents. Nilssen discovered gold hidden in numerous places throughout the single room; once purified, it was valued at a little over four thousand pounds. After Nilssen’s commission and various taxes, fees, and expenses, the remaining fortune was held in escrow at the Reserve Bank. The discovery transformed the dead hermit’s supposed insignificance into an inheritance dispute.

The gold was not the only concealed matter found in the cottage. Cowell Devlin testified that he had gone there the morning after the death to help collect Wells’s remains, at Governor Shepard’s direction. On a wet day, he opened the stove’s ash drawer in order to light a fire and found a deed lying in the grate. The document would later connect Wells to a proposed gift of money to Anna Wetherell. Together, the gold and the deed made the house a repository of evidence as well as wealth: each discovery reopened the question of who had known what, and who had a rightful claim.

Consequences and significance

The cottage’s purchase and the competing claims to its contents echo the broader conflict over land. To Clinch, the estate was a legal investment; to Tauwhare, a profit-making purchase by a man who had not even walked the acreage represented a deeper wrong. He objected to treating land as currency, especially when the sale concerned ground from which his people had been confined. Wells’s death thus exposes two overlapping forms of uncertainty: the unresolved circumstances of an individual’s death and the disputed legitimacy of ownership around him.

The aftermath also shows how evidence acquires meaning through its connections. The phial, the laudanum in Wells’s stomach, Carver’s visit, and the Godspeed’s secret departure invite suspicion, but do not supply a complete account. The hidden gold and the deed widen the field of inquiry beyond the death itself, linking Wells’s private life to Anna, Staines, and the claims on his estate. Tauwhare’s remorse gives the chain a personal cost: without intending harm, he supplied the location that brought Carver to the cottage. Wells’s death remains unresolved, but it makes the valley’s concealed wealth, broken trust, and contested possession impossible to keep separate.