Francis Carver searches for Crosbie Wells

Francis Carver’s search for Crosbie Wells turns on a small payment with large consequences: on 14 January, Te Rau Tauwhare told Carver where Wells lived in the Arahura Valley, having accepted two shillings for the information. Carver’s visit to the cottage, followed by his hurried return to Hokitika and the Godspeed’s departure that night, later made the search part of the evidence surrounding Wells’s death. The episode also places a private pursuit inside a larger dispute over who could claim the land through which Carver was seeking Wells.

An offer renewed

Months before the January encounter, Carver had offered Tauwhare money for news of a man named Crosbie Wells. The two then went separate ways: Carver returned to Dunedin, while Tauwhare went to Greymouth. By chance, Tauwhare subsequently met the very man Carver wanted to find. Wells became his good friend and lived upriver in the Arahura Valley, where he had once prospected and was now building a mill.

When Carver and Tauwhare crossed paths again on the Hokitika waterfront on the morning of 14 January, Tauwhare remembered the earlier offer. He approached Carver and said that he could provide news of Wells for a price. Carver accepted the proposal, and they agreed on a fee of two shillings. Only after the coins were in Tauwhare’s hand did he identify Wells’s home. The exchange was direct and practical: Carver sought a location, and Tauwhare converted his knowledge of a friend’s whereabouts into cash.

The route to Wells’s cottage

Tauwhare’s information placed Wells in the Arahura Valley, some miles upriver from the coast. The geography linked Carver’s search to the friendship that had developed between Wells and Tauwhare. Their acquaintance began when Tauwhare, travelling through the valley to hunt for pounamu in the Arahura River, heard Wells’s axe ringing as he split kindling. Wells was building a cottage, clearing a garden, and beginning work on a timber mill; he welcomed Tauwhare’s interest in Māori life and lore. Their visits became a tradition, and Tauwhare came to regard Wells as a close friend.

That history gives the sale of the location a particular tension. Tauwhare did not tell Carver about a stranger’s whereabouts: he directed a man who had once offered payment toward the home of someone who had since become dear to him. Yet Tauwhare’s decision followed the terms Carver had proposed months earlier. When Ah Sook later asked about the waterfront conversation, Tauwhare explained both the original offer and the renewed bargain. His account made clear that the search had been deliberate, not an accidental encounter that happened to lead Carver into the valley.

Suspicion after the visit

Tauwhare’s knowledge of the search later became important to Thomas Balfour and Benjamin Löwenthal. Balfour reported that Tauwhare had seen Carver enter Wells’s cottage on the day the hermit died. Tauwhare could not establish whether Carver had been there before or after Wells’s death, but he placed Carver’s arrival before Alistair Lauderback’s. Lauderback had testified that when he entered the cottage, Wells’s kettle was still boiling on the range and had not run dry. The timing led Balfour to reason that Carver had reached the cottage before Wells died and might even have witnessed his death; it raised suspicion, but did not prove that Carver had done so.

The chronology also drew attention to Carver’s departure. Benjamin Löwenthal observed that the Godspeed sailed late that evening, well after sundown. If Carver had gone straight back to Hokitika from the Arahura Valley, he had then made for the ship and weighed anchor before dawn. Balfour considered the speed of that sequence suspicious, though his own concern included the shipping crate that had vanished. Carver’s search thus became entangled with two unresolved matters: the circumstances of Wells’s death and the missing crate.

Land, friendship, and possession

The cottage’s location carried a history beyond the search itself. The Crown had purchased an extensive tract from Poutini Ngāi Tahu for three hundred pounds, reserving only the Arahura River, parts of its banks, and a small parcel at Mawhera. Six years later, the scale of the gold rush made the bargain look to the iwi like theft: prospectors paid for licences and land, while the value of the gold in the rivers and sands remained beyond calculation. Crosbie Wells had paid the Crown fifty pounds for one hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley, rather than paying Poutini Ngāi Tahu.

After Wells’s death, the land and cottage passed into a further dispute. Edgar Clinch purchased the acreage before Wells’s body had been buried; in Tauwhare’s view, Clinch had shown little interest in living on or working the land and had stripped the cottage of items he could sell. The sequence complicates any simple account of ownership: Carver’s search relies on information from a Māori man whose people’s land had been sharply restricted, while the destination is a cottage on land acquired through a Crown purchase Tauwhare regarded as unjust. The search therefore connects the intimate bond between Tauwhare and Wells to the larger conflict between lived attachment to place and its conversion into property and profit.