Staines’s promise of the bonanza to Anna

Staines’s promise of the bonanza to Anna is a conditional pledge made at a moment of grief and uncertainty, when Staines disclosed the hidden gold and proposed giving her Carver’s share. Its importance lies as much in what did not happen as in what was promised: Crosbie Wells prepared a document, but Staines left it unsigned, and he never saw Wells again.

The circumstances of the promise

The promise followed a chain of events Staines later recounted in court. On the night of 11 October 1865, after Benjamin Löwenthal advised him that Anna Wetherell had been assaulted, Staines went directly to the Arahura Valley to tell Wells. Staines explained that he considered the news important because Wells was the father of Anna’s child. He believed Wells should know that the child had died.

The visit therefore began not as a negotiation over property but as the delivery of devastating news. Staines testified that Wells responded quietly. They had a drink and sat together for some time, and Staines stayed late. Only after this subdued exchange did Staines tell Wells about the fortune he had buried near the cottage. He said that, if Anna survived the night, he would give her Carver’s share.

A pledge shaped by loss

The promise tied a possible future for Anna to an immediate uncertainty: Staines could not yet know whether she would survive. The condition was explicit, and the proposed gift was substantial in meaning as well as value. Rather than keeping the concealed fortune for himself, Staines described an intention to transfer Carver’s portion to Anna. The court testimony establishes the pledge and its condition, but does not establish that Anna received the gold or that the promised transfer was completed.

The disclosure also linked two intimate losses. Staines brought Wells news of the death of Wells’s unborn child, then entrusted him with the location of wealth that might be given to Anna. Wells’s quiet response, followed by their drinking and sitting together, forms the immediate setting for the arrangement. The promise does not erase the loss; it turns the conversation toward a possible act of provision after it.

The buried fortune and its setting

Staines said the fortune was buried near Wells’s cottage in the Arahura Valley, and later confirmed that he had described the site to Wells only in general terms. Its location was thus shared, but not recorded in the testimony as a precise set of directions. The cottage mattered as more than a meeting place: it stood beside the concealed wealth and became the point around which information about the fortune passed between the men.

The land itself carried a history of contested ownership. The Crown had purchased a broad stretch of the West Coast from Poutini Ngāi Tahu for three hundred pounds, reserving for them the Arahura River, parts of its banks, and a small parcel at Mawhera. Six years later, the community regarded the transaction as theft. Crosbie Wells had paid the Crown fifty pounds for a hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley, where he built his cottage. In the later account of the site, Edgar Clinch had acquired the acreage and stripped the cottage of items he could sell. Against this background, the buried fortune was located in a landscape where gold, private title, and prior belonging were in conflict; the promise itself, however, concerns Staines’s proposed gift and does not resolve those wider disputes.

The document that remained unsigned

Wells drew up a document recording the arrangement, but Staines did not sign it. Asked why, he could not give a definite explanation. He had been drinking, it was late, and he allowed that the conversation may have turned to other subjects or that he may simply have forgotten to sign. His account makes the absence of a signature a matter of uncertain circumstance rather than a stated change of mind.

That distinction preserves the difference between intention and completion. Staines testified to a clear conditional purpose: if Anna survived, he meant to give her Carver’s share. Yet the written instrument Wells prepared was left without Staines’s signature, so the promise did not acquire the documentary form the men had begun to make for it. The scene supplies no evidence that the deed was later completed or that the proposed gift was legally effective.

The interrupted aftermath

After the late conversation, Staines slept for a while, then returned to Hokitika early in the morning to check on Anna’s recovery. He never saw Wells again. The separation left the proposed arrangement without a follow-up between the two men: Wells had heard the news, learned of the buried gold, and drawn up the document, but Staines departed before signing it.

Staines’s testimony also places the promise within a longer chain of concealed facts. He had gone to Wells because Anna’s condition and the child’s death mattered to him, and he disclosed the fortune as part of his response to that crisis. He told Wells where the ore lay only in general terms. The account therefore preserves both the act of disclosure and its limits: the fortune was revealed, a gift was proposed, and the record of that intention remained unfinished.

Significance in the later account

The episode is presented retrospectively through Staines’s courtroom testimony, with Walter Moody directing him back to the agreed sequence of events. Its remembered details are deliberately uneven: Staines is definite about why he went to Wells, what he proposed, and the document Wells drew up, but uncertain about why he failed to sign. That gap prevents the promise from becoming a simple, completed transfer and leaves its force suspended between spoken intention and unfinished paperwork.

For the story of the fortune, the scene establishes that Staines had buried wealth near Wells’s cottage and intended Anna to receive Carver’s share under a stated condition. It also explains why Wells knew something of the hidden ore. But it does not settle the fortune’s eventual ownership or Anna’s receipt of it. The promise is consequential precisely because it opens a possible claim while stopping short of securing it: a pledge made in the wake of loss, entered into writing, and left incomplete.