May 1865

May 1865 is the hinge between Crosbie Wells’s Dunedin past and the concealed life he began in the Arahura Valley. In Walter Moody’s reconstruction at trial, Wells returned from the Dunstan fields, turned several thousand pounds’ worth of gold ore into the barque Godspeed, entrusted the vessel to Francis Carver, and left Dunedin without telling his wife or disclosing his destination. The month matters not simply as a date of purchase but as the point at which wealth, departure, and concealment converge.

The purchase and its evidence

Moody establishes the month through Carver’s testimony: Carver acknowledges that Godspeed was bought in May of the previous year, just before Wells left Dunedin for the Arahura Valley. The exchange makes the timing difficult for Carver to evade. Moody leads him through the sequence, and Carver confirms the month and the departure that followed. May therefore serves as a fixed point in a case otherwise clouded by hidden motives and contested identities.

The purchase had a documented public trace. Moody cites a notice in the Otago Witness dated 14 May, which states that the ship was bought for gold. That report supports the connection between the transfer and payment in gold, while leaving the precise path of the money to be reconstructed. According to Moody’s account, Wells possessed no shares or bonds that could otherwise explain the purchase. The newspaper notice thus makes the ship more than an incidental possession: its acquisition supplies an externally recorded marker of a sudden conversion of wealth.

Moody’s account places the ore in a safe at Wells’s Dunedin residence, where Lydia Wells was living. He says Wells returned from the Dunstan Valley, cleared the safe without notifying his wife, and invested the entire bonanza in Godspeed. The distinction between evidence and inference is important. The notice establishes that the ship was purchased for gold; Moody infers that Wells himself removed the ore from the safe and used it to buy the vessel. He presents that inference as the most plausible explanation, not as a separately witnessed act. Carver’s testimony confirms the timing and purchase, but the scene does not turn every step in Moody’s reconstruction into direct observation.

A ship, a departure, and a hidden design

The scale and abruptness of the transaction sharpen its significance. Wells is described as putting the whole fortune into a barque, rather than acquiring a modest stake or a conventional financial asset. Moody also treats Wells’s choice of a ship as curious, asking whether he had any prior interest in seafaring. Carver cannot supply an answer; he can only suppose that Wells must have had such an interest because he made the purchase. His uncertainty leaves the investment’s personal rationale unresolved even as the transaction itself becomes central to the chronology.

After the purchase, Wells entrusted Godspeed and its operation to Carver, then left for Hokitika without informing anyone of his destination or design. May consequently joins two kinds of concealment: the removal of the gold from a household safe, and the departure of its owner without an announced plan. The ship carried the value of Wells’s Dunstan fortune into a new phase of his life, while Carver’s role in its operation placed him close to the means by which that fortune had been converted. The month provides the sequence; it does not, by itself, settle what Wells intended to do once he reached the West Coast.

The contested reason for leaving

Carver attempts to redirect the inquiry from the gold and ship to Anna Wetherell. He presents her as the reason Wells quit Dunedin and fell out with Lydia. Moody challenges this version by placing the evidence in chronological order. A promissory note written by Richard Mannering and submitted to the court is dated June, after the May purchase and departure. It calls for Anna to be provided with a gown, a muff pistol, perfumes, petticoats, and other items in which she was then deficient; Moody uses it to argue that she had not yet entered the profession Carver associates with her.

That correction does not erase Anna from the wider history, but it limits what her later circumstances can establish about Wells’s May decision. Carver’s accusation offers a personal explanation for the rupture between Wells and Lydia; the dates Moody presents complicate it. May’s importance lies partly in this evidentiary contrast: a purchase and departure can be placed in a clear sequence, while the motives attached to them remain open to challenge. In the trial’s reconstruction, the month is therefore both a historical marker and a test of competing accounts, with a newspaper notice and a June promissory note bearing on what Carver claims about the events around it.