Francis Carver's impersonation of Crosbie Wells and seizure of his gold-mining fortune

Francis Carver’s relationship with Crosbie Wells was built on a contradiction: Carver described them as decent to one another, yet he used Wells’s identity in a scheme that joined the purchase of the Godspeed to the theft of Wells’s gold. Their connection was neither simply a friendship nor merely a business arrangement. It became a contest over who owned the ship, who bore the costs of its wreck, and whose name the law would accept.

A shipmaster and his supposed friend

Carver described himself as the Godspeed’s operating master and said that the barque had belonged to Wells. Asked whether the two men had been on good terms, he called their relationship fair. He also acknowledged being attracted to Wells’s wife, Lydia, while insisting that he had not come between the couple and that he had treated Wells decently. This account gives their association the surface of ordinary familiarity: Carver worked the ship, knew the household, and presented himself as a man who had not betrayed his employer or friend.

The account was compromised by Carver’s own description of the ship’s purchase. During Walter Moody’s questioning, Carver agreed that Wells had bought the Godspeed after returning to Dunedin in May 1865. Moody connected that purchase to the removal of several thousand pounds’ worth of ore from a safe at Wells’s residence. His reconstruction had Wells clearing the safe without telling Lydia, investing the fortune in the ship, entrusting its operation to Carver, and then leaving for Hokitika without disclosing his destination or purpose. Moody acknowledged that the assumption about who had removed the ore was not certain; the published transfer, however, recorded that the ship had been bought for gold.

The identity behind the transaction

The court’s account of the sale exposed how the appearance of a relationship could serve as cover for impersonation. Lauderback identified Carver as the man who had obtained the Godspeed by representing himself as Crosbie Wells. He said that Carver had signed the deed of sale as Wells and that Lauderback believed he was selling to Wells. Lauderback added that it took him eight or nine months to realize he had been deceived. The submitted deed bore the name C. Francis Wells, a detail Moody raised as he pressed the discrepancy between the document and the identity Lauderback said Carver had claimed.

Carver’s response during the questioning sharpened the distinction between his public story and the fraud Moody was assembling. When Moody described Wells as the ship’s purchaser, Carver affirmed it curtly, despite knowing he was being led into a trap. Lauderback then called the transaction an outright forgery and accused Carver of using the old affair with Lydia to pose as her jilted husband. In Lauderback’s version, Carver exploited his knowledge of the affair to make the sale seem like compensation for a wrong done to Wells. The scene makes the personal history part of the deception: the suggestion that Carver had been wronged by Lauderback helped disguise the more consequential lie about who Carver was.

The wreck and the cost of the lie

After the Godspeed was wrecked, Carver faced the expense of disposing of it. He told Aubert Gascoigne that he expected to be a thousand pounds out of pocket, with the visible costs falling on him. Gascoigne raised the possibility of protection and indemnity cover, a shipowners’ mutual fund that could meet certain liabilities, including wreck removal, even after ownership had changed. Carver said he did not know whether such protection applied.

Gascoigne’s inquiries established that Lauderback had belonged to the Garrity Group and that each of his ships carried nearly a thousand pounds in credit. Carver could legally seek those funds to help pay for removing the wreck from the Hokitika spit, provided he appealed before the middle of May, when a year would have passed since the sale and Lauderback’s legal obligation concerning the Godspeed would end. The transfer that had concealed Carver’s identity thus continued to shape the consequences of the wreck: the disputed sale determined whether Carver could claim assistance through Lauderback’s former shipowner protection.

Lauderback tried to stop the claim, insisting that Carver had planned the deception from the outset and that the sale was forged. Gascoigne, however, told him that no law appeared to have been broken on the evidence available. In a letter to Garrity, Carver had acted on behalf of the dead Wells, ostensibly settling the shipowner’s affairs as his proxy. To an outside observer, that could look like a charitable effort to handle business for a deceased man; Lauderback’s assertion that Wells had never bought the ship was difficult to prove. The legal ambiguity was not incidental. Carver’s assumed identity had left the surviving parties arguing over which version of ownership could be demonstrated.

Exposure and reversal

At the April court proceedings, Moody drew together the ship purchase and the missing fortune. He argued that Carver had obtained the Godspeed through extortion, impersonation, and fraud, and had used the same methods to steal thousands of pounds from Wells in May of the previous year. Moody further suggested that Lydia, by then Carver’s wife, had helped with the theft. That conclusion transformed Carver’s earlier account of a fair relationship into a cover story: the supposed friend and shipmaster had benefited from the identity and wealth of the man whose affairs he claimed to represent.

The accusation brought the hearing to an abrupt halt. Lawrence Broham requested a recess amid commotion, Justice Kemp summoned him and Moody to the Magistrate’s office, and the witnesses were ordered into custody as the court adjourned. Carver and Wells’s relationship therefore ends not with a settled account of their private dealings, but with a public exposure of how easily the language of trust, proxy, and ownership could be manipulated. Carver’s claim that he had been decent to Wells stands beside the much larger fact that he took the dead man’s name and fortune; the ship’s wreck made that concealed betrayal a matter of legal liability as well as personal history.