Emery Staines’s opium dependence

Emery Staines’s opium dependence turns a prolonged disappearance into both a personal crisis and a legal liability. He later admits that he spent much of the missing time in the Kaniere Chinatown opium den, could not account for its passage, and had been incapacitated by prolonged consumption. His dependence coexists with deliberate concealment of gold: the court treats the two as separate grounds for judgment, even as both shape the consequences of his absence.

The Disappearance and Its Explanation

When Staines reappears after more than two months away from Hokitika, he tells the court that he has been under the effects of opium and is astonished by how much time has passed. He believes he spent much of that interval at the opium den in Kaniere Chinatown, though he cannot say so with certainty. His account makes the disappearance more than a matter of whereabouts: the drug has disrupted his sense of time and left him unable to give a clear history of the period.

The court’s later summary makes the impairment consequential in legal terms. Staines pleads guilty to dereliction, stating that excessive and prolonged opium consumption had incapacitated him for two months. His dependence therefore helps explain why he was absent, but does not erase the formal charge arising from that absence.

Treatment in Custody

After Staines is found and reunited with Anna Wetherell, both remain incarcerated in the Police Camp gaol. His bail is set at one pound and one shilling, the standard rate, but he chooses not to pay it and stays with Anna to await the Magistrate’s Court summons. His recovery is described as rapid, while a shoulder wound still limits his movement.

Dr. Gillies prescribes Staines five drams of laudanum a day, with the dose to fall by one dram every fortnight until his shoulder has completely healed. The prescription places the drug within a supervised taper rather than treating abstinence as immediate or simple. Each night Cowell Devlin brings the laudanum to the gaol-house, where the chaplain pours it into tin cups; he sometimes mixes it with sugar or sweet sherry to reduce its bitter taste. Staines experiences a sudden, inconsolable thirst for the medicine. The evidence establishes a planned reduction, not that he completes it or is free of dependence.

Dependence and the Gold Case

Staines’s opium use surfaces during proceedings that also expose his handling of gold from The Aurora. He admits that John Long Quee excavated the ore and that he took the retorted gold, valued at £4,096, to the Arahura Valley and buried it instead of banking it as required. The court separately identifies falsified mine records, the embezzlement, and his prolonged incapacity through opium as grounds for his guilty pleas.

That distinction matters: the evidence does not make the drug the cause of his gold concealment. Rather, dependence is one strand in a wider account of conduct and consequence. Staines’s lost months impair his capacity to account for his own life; his deliberate handling of the gold remains an action for which he accepts responsibility. The court’s treatment of both facts keeps explanation from becoming exoneration.