The Godspeed's secret departure from port at night

Francis Carver’s secret departure aboard the Godspeed on the night of 14 January turns a gap in Hokitika’s records into a consequential clue. The ship left after an encounter with Crosbie Wells in the Arahura Valley, but its absence from the official log and shipping news initially made the voyage look as though it had never happened. That concealed movement connected Carver to the night surrounding Wells’s death and the disappearance of Emery Staines, while remaining unknown to Ah Sook as he began planning his revenge.

An unrecorded departure

The Godspeed left its mooring off schedule, well after sundown on a Sunday. The timing mattered: the shipping news had already appeared in Saturday’s edition, and because the vessel was not scheduled to sail that day, its departure was not entered in the customhouse log. No one had informed Benjamin Löwenthal, so the newspaper did not record it either. In effect, the ship’s departure disappeared from the ordinary public account of the port’s movements.

The omission was not merely a clerical irregularity. Löwenthal told Thomas Balfour that the Harbourmaster had been upset by the failure to record the sailing, and that Carver’s unscheduled departure had put him in hot water. Balfour, meanwhile, connected the date to Alistair Lauderback’s arrival: both events fell on 14 January. Their exchange establishes a precise, if incomplete, chronology around the Godspeed’s sudden absence.

The night in the Arahura Valley

Balfour recognized the difficulty in the timing. Carver, he observed, had been in the Arahura Valley on the very same night that the Godspeed sailed. Löwenthal reasoned that Carver must therefore have returned directly to Hokitika, gone straight to the ship, and weighed anchor before dawn. The journey and departure made for a hasty sequence, as well as a suspicious one.

The significance of Carver’s presence inland sharpened the implication. Te Rau Tauwhare had told Balfour that Carver entered Crosbie Wells’s cottage before Lauderback arrived. Lauderback himself had said that he reached the cottage not long after the hermit’s death, when the kettle was still boiling on the range. Balfour saw that Carver might have been at the cottage before Wells died, and perhaps even witnessed his death. The secret sailing did not prove what Carver had done there, but it joined his visit to an unusually swift return to port and departure.

Balfour also linked the sailing to another disappearance. When Löwenthal noted that Emery Staines had vanished around the same time, Balfour was already thinking about his own missing shipping crate. The departure thus sat at the intersection of several unresolved absences: Staines, the crate, and the Godspeed itself. Their proximity invited suspicion without yet supplying a full explanation.

What Ah Sook did not know

The account of the departure later intersects with Ah Sook’s plans. On the night the Godspeed left, he remained in Kaniere, occupied with arranging Carver’s murder. He wanted the killing to happen with ceremony, but had no pistol and knew of no compatriot who possessed one. He would have to buy a weapon discreetly and learn to use it. Having spent all his gold dust on opium from Pritchard’s Drug Hall, he had no money for the purchase and was considering whether to ask a fellow Chinese man for a loan.

Ah Sook did not know that Carver had sailed. The next morning, news reached him that Anna Wetherell had tried to end her life. Distressed, he doubted that her accustomed tolerance of opium could explain an unconsciousness lasting many hours, and suspected that Pritchard’s latest shipment had been poisoned. On 16 January he returned to Hokitika to question Balfour, who was distracted by discovering that the crate of Lauderback’s personal effects had disappeared from the waterfront. Balfour confirmed that his company held Pritchard’s contract, then directed Ah Sook toward the supplier, Carver. Only then did Ah Sook learn that Carver had sailed two days earlier, probably for Canton, and would not be back in Hokitika soon.

A clue assembled from separate accounts

The episode’s force comes from the uneven distribution of knowledge. The reader learns of the Godspeed’s departure as part of Ah Sook’s account, although Ah Sook himself remains ignorant of it for several days. Balfour and Löwenthal, from a different line of inquiry, reconstruct the same night through the sailing record’s absence, Lauderback’s arrival, and Carver’s movements between the valley and the port. Neither account immediately resolves the mystery; together they turn an unrecorded voyage into evidence that can be placed beside the other disappearances.

The departure also gives secrecy a concrete, bureaucratic form. Carver’s ship does not vanish at sea: first its leaving vanishes from the customary record of what ships have done. That missing entry allows the Godspeed’s movement to evade notice at the very moment when the movements of Carver, Wells, and Staines are becoming entangled. The event therefore marks both a literal departure from port and a break in the public chronology on which the town depends.