The disappearance of Lauderback’s crate of gold-laden gowns begins as a shipping failure and becomes a knot of blackmail, hidden wealth, and disputed identity. A crate entrusted to Thomas Balfour vanishes from Gibson Quay before Alistair Lauderback can retrieve the documents inside it; later accounts connect the lost shipment to a trunk of dresses concealing thousands of pounds in gold. Its absence delays the exposure of a fraudulent bill of sale, draws Francis Carver into a search, and leaves Balfour bound to a lie of his own making.

Shipment and concealed stakes

The crate containing Lauderback’s trunk arrived in Hokitika on 12 January, two days before Lauderback himself. Balfour saw to its clearance and instructed that it be moved from the quay to his warehouse. He believed those instructions had been followed, but the crate disappeared. The failure was especially distressing because Lauderback was a friend whose esteem Balfour valued, and because the contents were more consequential than ordinary personal effects.

Lauderback’s trunk held a contract connected with the Godspeed. He believed Francis Carver would probably destroy his own copy of the bill of sale, so he wanted to have his copy notarised as protection against the lie it could prove. The document might also help him challenge Carver’s fraudulent claim to the ship. At the time the crate vanished, Lauderback did not yet know it was missing: he had spent a fortnight visiting camps and settlements around the Coast, and believed the ship Virtue was still carrying his effects from Dunedin.

The shipment’s material history proved more complicated than Balfour initially knew. In Walter Moody’s later reconstruction of the case, Carver had obtained the Godspeed from Lauderback and subsequently lost the crate that had helped him force the politician’s hand. That crate contained a trunk holding about four thousand pounds in gold, sewn into the linings of five dresses. Lydia Wells, then posing as Carver’s wife, had made the dresses. The crate was thus at once a container for Lauderback’s documents and part of a chain of concealment involving gold-bearing gowns; the account does not resolve every step by which these contents and identities became entangled.

Balfour’s silence and the competing explanations

Balfour tried to recover the shipment. He walked the quay, made inquiries at every door, and questioned stevedores, porters, mariners, and customs officers. None of these searches produced a lead. When Lauderback eventually said that the contract was packed in the trunk inside the crate, Balfour’s anxiety sharpened: he had a direct opportunity to disclose the loss, but could not bring himself to speak.

Instead, Balfour told Lauderback that the Virtue had not yet arrived. He imagined that the crate might turn up in some unlikely place, perhaps battered but intact, and persuaded himself that a calm confession could wait. He also began to suspect that its disappearance was not an ordinary clerical mishap. Lauderback had described a trunk of women’s dresses that had crossed the Tasman for a year; Balfour saw a possible connection to the vanished trunk and its fraudulent contract. Since he had never before lost a crate, he wondered whether Carver—already implicated in blackmailing Lauderback—had stolen it.

That suspicion remained distinct from certainty. During another discussion, Balfour proposed a different reconstruction: Emery Staines had vanished on the day Carver weighed anchor, and on the day Balfour’s crate disappeared; perhaps Staines had been put inside it and Carver had taken the crate away by ship. The suggestion explained the coincidences but left the purpose unknown. The disappearance therefore functions not only as a loss, but as an evidentiary gap around which characters build competing accounts.

The burden of Balfour’s lie was personal as well as practical. He understood that once he had concealed the loss, he was committed to maintaining the falsehood and adding smaller lies to it. He resolved to find the crate without Lauderback’s knowledge or assistance. Days after the Godspeed was wrecked, however, he finally confessed that the crate containing Lauderback’s documents and effects had disappeared from Gibson Quay, apparently through a lading mistake for which no single person could be blamed. By then Lauderback had little interest in the news: with the ship ruined, the bill of sale no longer offered useful leverage to win it back from Carver.

The gowns and the circulation of gold

The crate’s association with the dresses leads into a second chain of mistaken interpretation. Anna Wetherell arrived in Hokitika aboard the Godspeed, wearing a rented purple working gown supplied by Dick Mannering. When she later learned that a trunk of women’s dresses had been salvaged from a wreck, she bought all five. She wore them without telling anyone about their hidden gold; whether she knew what the garments contained, or recognised them as Lydia’s, remained uncertain. Her opium use and the possibility that she had known Lydia made certainty impossible.

Edgar Clinch, Anna’s landlord, discovered the concealed fortune and concluded that Mannering was using her to smuggle raw gold and evade duty. Quee Long reached much the same conclusion, but acted on it differently. Having previously been cheated by Mannering, Quee Long began removing gold from Anna’s dresses while she slept, retorting the dust into squares and stamping them with the Aurora name so the proceeds would be credited to Emery Staines’s claim. He took the gold from four dresses over several months. Anna did not wear her orange gown on visits to his hut in Kaniere Chinatown, so that dress retained its share.

The remaining gold surfaced after Anna woke in gaol following an overdose and discovered the orange gown’s concealed contents. With Aubert Gascoigne’s help, she removed the metal and hid it in a flour sack under his bed. The episode extended the crate’s consequences well beyond its disappearance: the dresses had become a concealed store of wealth, then the object of theft, suspicion, and recovery, while their gold was repeatedly assigned different meanings and owners.

Aftermath and narrative significance

The lost crate also intersects with the Godspeed’s financial aftermath. Carver said that dealing with the wreck would leave him a thousand pounds out of pocket. Gascoigne pointed him toward protection-and-indemnity cover, explaining that the mutual fund could meet liabilities such as wreck removal even after a change of ownership. Lauderback did belong to the Garrity Group, and the ships he insured carried credits of nearly a thousand pounds each. Carver could seek funds for removing the wreck from the Hokitika spit if he filed before the middle of May, when a year from the sale would have passed and Lauderback’s legal obligation connected with the ship would end.

Lauderback tried to block Carver’s access to that money, arguing that Carver had planned the deception from the outset and forged the contract in another man’s name. Gascoigne observed that Carver appeared to be acting as proxy for the dead Crosbie Wells and that Lauderback had no evidence to disprove this account. The old missing crate had helped make the original fraud harder to challenge; after the shipwreck, questions of ownership and liability continued to turn on documents, names, and the legal appearance of acting for someone else.

The episode’s fragmented disclosure mirrors the crate’s uncertain passage. Balfour tells his tale out of chronological order, and Moody must arrange its parts into a sequence: the ship changes hands, a crate disappears, a fortune is sewn into dresses, and people mistake concealed wealth for evidence of smuggling or fraud. The crate is never merely missing property. Its absence withholds proof, generates conjecture, and lets gold travel through several hands before its origins and claims can be partially reconstructed.