“A Posthumous Investment”

A POSTHUMOUS INVESTMENT? names Alistair Lauderback’s February 1866 newspaper challenge to George Shepard: had gold taken from Crosbie Wells’s dwelling after Wells’s death been used, without proper authority, to begin constructing a public gaol? The phrase’s force lies in the contradiction it exposes. An investment ordinarily implies an investor’s choice and anticipated benefit; here, the alleged investor was dead, and the proposed public work was already under way.

The public accusation

On 18 February 1866, Lauderback wrote to the editor of the West Coast Times under the heading A POSTHUMOUS INVESTMENT? He demanded that Shepard publish the names of those appointed to build the Hokitika Gaol at Seaview, a statement of contracted work, the sums voted and advanced, and any additional money required to complete or improve the project. The request made the dispute concrete: Lauderback was asking for accounts, not merely offering a general objection to the prison.

Lauderback alleged that construction had begun with a private donation made without the consent of the Provincial Council, the Westland Public Works Committee, the Municipal Board, or the supposed investor. He identified that investor as Wells, whose estate had recently attracted public speculation. According to Lauderback’s account, money had been taken from Wells’s dwelling after his death and later assigned to the gaol without public disclosure. He asked Shepard to clarify the matter and allowed that he would stand corrected if his understanding proved false. The letter therefore presents the funding story as an accusation requiring an answer, not as an independently established finding.

The fortune behind the question

The allegation drew its weight from the discovery of Wells’s hidden wealth. After Edgar Clinch commissioned Harald Nilssen to clear Wells’s cottage, Nilssen found gold concealed throughout its single room. Once purified by the bank, it was valued at a little over four thousand pounds. Nilssen received a ten-percent commission; death taxes, fees, and other expenses further reduced the sum, including a thirty-pound present to banker Charlie Frost. The remainder, still a substantial fortune, was held in escrow at the Reserve Bank while Lydia Wells appealed Clinch’s purchase of the property and effects.

That cottage gold was not the whole fortune in circulation. Four thousand pounds in gold had also been sewn into the lining of five dresses, and four dresses had been stripped of their gold by Quee Long, who retorted it into squares and stamped them with the Aurora name. The final portion, hidden in Anna Wetherell’s orange dress, was later found by Anna and Aubert Gascoigne. These separate movements of gold make the estate dispute part of a wider chain of concealed wealth, mistaken claims, and uncertain custody; they do not, by themselves, establish which particular gold paid for the gaol.

Land, ownership, and public use

The question of who could authorize the use of Wells’s wealth echoes the contested ownership of the land on which his cottage stood. Poutini Ngāi Tahu had once held the western coast, but the Crown had purchased most of that territory for three hundred pounds, leaving the people confined to specified areas, including land along the Arahura River and a parcel at Mawhera. The subsequent gold rush brought revenue from miners’ licences and land sales, as well as immense value from gold whose total had not been calculated.

Wells bought a hundred acres in the Arahura Valley from the Crown for fifty pounds, built a one-room cottage overlooking the river, and began a timber mill. Te Rau Tauwhare, who regarded the valley as part of his people’s land, objected to ownership that treated land as a source of profit without use or care. Against that history, Lauderback’s phrase raises more than an accounting question: the cottage, the gold, and the prison project all sit within systems that convert land and wealth into legally administered property, while leaving the question of rightful authority unsettled.

Records, secrecy, and the title’s irony

The novel surrounds the fortune with competing records and concealed claims. Francis Carver had used the name Crosbie Francis Wells when advertising for the missing shipping crate that held the dresses and their gold, producing a birth certificate to support the identity. Elsewhere, Walter Moody found an unfamiliar trunk marked as Alistair Lauderback’s and discovered a packet of letters hidden beneath its lining. Such documents offer evidence, but they also show how names, possessions, and accounts can be manipulated or kept from view.

Lauderback’s title compresses this larger uncertainty into a pointed question. The money may be described as an investment in a public institution, but the dead Wells could neither authorize it nor explain what he intended for his estate. By demanding disclosure from Shepard, Lauderback makes transparency the test of legitimacy. The phrase thus joins the mystery of Wells’s fortune to the political problem of public works financed through private wealth: what appears to be a civic contribution may also be an unauthorized appropriation, and the difference depends on evidence the public has not yet been given.