Te Rau Tauwhare’s vigil for Crosbie Wells

Te Rau Tauwhare’s vigil for Crosbie Wells turns private friendship into a public act of mourning. After finding Wells’s body on its way to Hokitika, Tauwhare insists that his friend must not be left alone before burial. The gaoler rejects that obligation and threatens him with a pistol, but Tauwhare keeps watch from outside the forbidden boundary, speaking beloved words for the dead man through the final night.

Friendship before the vigil

In the months before Wells’s death, the two men had formed a close friendship through conversation and a regular exchange of hospitality. Tauwhare supplied the meat; Wells supplied the spirits. Their arrangement suited them both, and Tauwhare regarded Wells as a kindred spirit. Wells, who seldom spoke about his own past, asked Tauwhare persistent questions about his beliefs, his spirit, and his identity as a Māori man of Ngāi Tahu allegiance. Tauwhare was glad to explain himself to an audience that valued the qualities he most wanted recognized, including ones about which he privately doubted himself.

The friendship was not built on equal disclosure. Wells questioned Tauwhare intensely, while Tauwhare did not tend to ask many questions about Wells’s history. Yet Tauwhare repeatedly told Wells that he considered him a kindred spirit, making their bond a chosen intimacy rather than a product of shared background. When he later calls Wells his brother, that description carries the history of their visits and meals into a moment when the surrounding authorities insist on defining their relationship for them.

The body on the road to Hokitika

The morning after Wells’s death, Tauwhare arrived at the cottage with the food he customarily brought. A cart was leaving the clearing. The Hokitika physician, Dr. Gillies, held the reins, and the gaol-house chaplain, Cowell Devlin, sat beside him. Tauwhare did not know either man, but recognized Wells’s boots and the shape of his body beneath a folded blanket. He cried out and dropped his gift in shock.

Devlin offered him a place on the rear tongue of the cart, warning that there was no room beside the driver and that Tauwhare must keep his feet out of the way. As the cart entered Hokitika and turned along the main road, hoteliers and shopkeepers watched from their doorways; some moved closer to see. Tauwhare stared back blankly, limp, one hand loosely gripping Wells’s ankle as the body rolled and juddered with each lurch. At the Police Camp, while the other men conferred, he stayed where he was, still holding on to his friend.

Tauwhare later said that he had been in the Arahura when Wells died. His vigil therefore did not begin at the moment of death: it began when the body, already in the custody of others, came into view. The recognition of the boots and the physical act of holding Wells’s ankle make that encounter the hinge between the friendship’s ordinary habits and its last, constrained expression.

A burial delayed

The community’s preparations were practical and provisional. A Hokitika cooper had agreed to make a pine coffin and a rounded wooden headstone bearing Wells’s name and the two dates marking his life. His exact birth year was uncertain; the date 1809, written on the flyleaf of his Bible, seemed plausible and would make him fifty-seven. The cooper was to use that date. Until the coffin and headstone were ready and a grave had been dug, the gaol’s governor ordered Wells’s body laid on the floor of the governor’s private study at the Police Camp, with a muslin sheet between the body and the ground.

Once the body had been arranged with its hands folded across its chest, the gaoler ushered everyone out and shut the door. The calico walls of the gaoler’s house, stretched over its timber frame, quivered when the building creaked or a door slammed. Their movement gives the enclosed room a fragile boundary: Wells lies inside, while those who might attend him are excluded or kept at a distance. The sheet beneath him and the closed door are practical details of temporary custody, but they also define the vigil’s immediate problem: there is a body awaiting burial and no recognized place for Tauwhare beside it.

The vigil and its denied rite

Tauwhare insists that someone must remain with Wells. He says the dead man cannot be left alone on the floor without a flame, a watcher, touch, prayer, or song. He tries to explain the tangi, then makes clear that these are not principles to be debated but rites too sacred to explain or defend: they are simply what ought to be done. As he tells the gaoler, “A spirit has not fully departed until the body is interred.” For Tauwhare, burial is not merely the end of the authorities’ temporary arrangements; until it happens, care for the body and the spirit remains a living responsibility.

The gaoler calls him a heathen and refuses to recognize that responsibility. When Tauwhare persists, the gaoler answers his claim that Wells was his brother by insisting that Wells was a white man. Tauwhare’s reply, “Crosbie Wells was my friend and my brother,” makes the disagreement explicit: the gaoler treats racial identity as a reason to deny kinship, while Tauwhare names the relationship through friendship and mourning. The authorities control the body and the place of burial; Tauwhare has no power to make them accept his rite.

The funeral is set for Tuesday morning, and the gaoler tells Tauwhare that he can help dig the grave if he wants to be useful. Tauwhare instead stays close, first on the porch, then in the garden, then in the alley between the gaoler’s cottage and the Camp. Each time he is chased away. Finally, the gaoler comes out with a long-handled pistol and threatens to shoot him if he comes within fifty yards of the Camp before Wells’s body is lowered into the ground. Tauwhare backs away, counting the steps, and sits against the wooden façade of the Grey and Buller Bank. From there, beyond the line set by force, he watches over Wells and speaks beloved words for him on the final night before his spirit sails away.

Significance

The vigil places two kinds of authority beside one another without making them equivalent. The gaoler can set a boundary, control access to the body, and threaten violence; Tauwhare’s claim rests on friendship and the obligation, as he understands it, to accompany the dead through burial. Elsewhere, Governor Shepard describes the danger of a frontier where informal digger’s justice and civil law meet, and where each can be invoked against the other. This scene sharpens that broader conflict through a different encounter: Tauwhare is not asking to punish anyone or to replace the court, but his sacred duty is still overruled by institutional control.

His vigil also gives the friendship a final, physical form. Before Wells’s death, their bond was expressed in shared food, drink, and conversation; after it, Tauwhare holds the dead man’s ankle, stays near despite repeated expulsion, and keeps speaking when he can no longer sit beside him. The watch does not restore the closeness the gaoler denies, but it refuses to let official exclusion erase the relationship. Tauwhare cannot attend Wells in the room or ensure that the authorities honor his rites; he can remain within sight, keep his words for his friend, and stay until the burial draws near.