Emery Staines’s opium-fueled disappearance

Emery Staines’s opium-fueled disappearance begins with a night of unexpected intimacy and turns into an eight-week break in his life: after trying opium in Anna Wetherell’s room, he becomes consumed by the desire to take it again. His account, given in court, traces that craving from Anna’s bed to Kaniere Chinatown and back to Hokitika, where he vanishes from view before being found wounded and barely oriented to his surroundings.

The first taste and the sudden departure

On the night of 14 January, Staines met Anna Wetherell at the Dust and Nugget, shared a drink with her, and went with her to his apartment on Revell Street. When he woke around half past ten, she had left. Unable to understand her sudden departure, he went looking for her and found her unconscious on the floor of her room at the Gridiron Hotel, with her opium pipe, resin, and lamp arranged around her. While waiting for her to recover, Staines examined the apparatus. He had never used opium before, but he had long been curious about it; the warm pipe and burning lamp made the opportunity seem, to him, like a chance occurrence.

Staines tried the drug while Anna lay unresponsive. He described the sensation as heavenly, and his account makes the change in his attention unmistakable: when he came back to himself, the lamp was cold, the pipe was empty, and Anna was gone, but he was ashamed to admit that he scarcely thought of her. What occupied him was the thirst to try opium again. The first experience did not remain an isolated experiment. It became the immediate cause of his departure from the ordinary world of his previous evening and the beginning of an urgent search for more.

Kaniere Chinatown and the search for opium

Just past dawn, Staines went to the den in Kaniere Chinatown. He remembered staying there for what he thought was a fortnight, although he could not give a reliable account of the days: each blurred into the next. Ah Sook took him in, fed him, and kept him from eating too much. He also recorded Staines’s debts on a small chalkboard. The details give the disappearance a material shape—food, controlled portions, accumulating debt—while Staines’s uncertain sense of time shows how little command he had over the period.

Staines remembered Ah Sook as kind, and could recall no one else during that stay. When he next remembered waking, Ah Sook was absent and had taken his opium with him, as he did when he left the den. Staines searched the place in increasing desperation. Then he remembered Anna’s supply. His account presents his return not as a considered decision to seek Anna, but as a frantic effort to find the drug he had come to crave.

The return to the Gridiron

Staines set out for Hokitika on a heavily rainy morning and reached it without seeing anyone he knew. He entered the Gridiron by its rear door and climbed the servants’ staircase. Waiting until Anna had gone down to luncheon, he slipped into her room and found the resin and the apparatus in a drawer. A conversation began in the hallway outside, leaving him unable to get out. When Anna returned, he panicked and hid behind the drapes.

This return brings his disappearance back to the same room where his opium use began, but the circumstances have reversed. On the first visit, he had entered because he was looking for Anna; now he has come for her opium and is concealed from her. His testimony ends this part of the episode with him trapped in the room. It does not explain the intervening circumstances that left him missing for weeks, nor does it supply a complete day-by-day chronology; Staines himself repeatedly stresses how much he cannot remember.

Discovery after eight weeks

Staines is eventually found by Joseph Pritchard, with Te Rau Tauwhare present. When Staines opens his eyes, he recognizes Pritchard as the druggist, but his speech is confused. He smiles at Te Rau Tauwhare and praises Māori guides, an incongruous remark that makes his disorientation visible even as he responds to the people around him. Pritchard checks Staines’s cheek and forehead and observes that he does not look too thin. He reasons that someone must have fed him, or that he managed to scavenge, and remarks that something more than prayers has kept him alive through eight weeks.

The discovery also establishes the immediate physical danger Staines has survived: he has a bullet wound in his shoulder. Pritchard pulls Staines’s collar back over the wound and tells him they will take him to Hokitika so that Dr. Gillies can remove the bullet; he offers medicine to ease the journey. The evidence does not identify who shot Staines or reconstruct how he came to be wounded. Instead, the episode closes on the contrast between the duration of his absence and the fragmentary state of his own account: he has endured eight weeks, but can offer only blurred memories, a brief return to Anna’s room, and a confused awakening among the people who find him.

Narrative significance

Because Staines recounts the earlier events while answering questions in court, the disappearance reaches the reader as retrospective testimony rather than as a continuous account of his whereabouts. The form follows the limits of his memory: clear particulars of the first night and the return to the Gridiron give way to an indistinct fortnight in Kaniere Chinatown and an acknowledged inability to remember much. His testimony supplies a causal chain—the first taste, the craving, the search, the dependence on other people—without pretending to fill every gap in the eight weeks.

The episode also joins Staines’s missing-person status to the novel’s larger entanglement of opium, money, and concealed lives. Ah Sook’s care is inseparable from a tally of debt, while Staines’s return to Anna’s room is driven by the drug supply rather than by concern for her. Yet the later scene of discovery makes him more than a mystery to be solved: he is a badly wounded, disoriented person whose survival has depended on food, shelter, and the help of others. The disappearance’s decisive revelation is therefore not a complete explanation of where he went, but the extent to which opium has fractured his memory and redirected his actions.