13 May 1865

13 May 1865 marks a westward departure that later becomes a hinge in the novel’s intertwined stories of gold, identity, and possession. Emery Staines had agreed to travel to Hokitika aboard the schooner Blanche; months afterward, Francis Carver’s search for a lost shipping crate made the Blanche’s departure on that date a tantalising lead, though not proof of what it carried.

The journey to Hokitika

Carver persuaded Staines that Otago’s goldfield was past its prime and that Hokitika offered better prospects. The landing on the West Coast was known to be dangerous, with two steamers already wrecked on the bar, so Carver urged him to travel under sail. Staines agreed to accompany him to the customhouse, an outfitter on Princes-street, and the bank. Within three hours he had obtained a miner’s right, a swag, and a ticket to Hokitika aboard the Blanche, scheduled to depart Port Chalmers on the morning of 13 May.

The date belongs to a larger rush for land and mineral wealth. Poutini Ngāi Tahu had once held the western coast of the South Island, but the Crown had purchased most of their territory for three hundred pounds, leaving them confined to the Arahura River, parts of its banks, and a small parcel at Mawhera. In the years that followed, prospectors paid for licences and land while the value of the gold in the rivers and sands remained beyond calculation. Hokitika, the Blanche’s destination, was part of this rapidly changing goldfield world.

A departure becomes a clue

The date gains importance retrospectively, when Carver searches for a missing crate. After Godspeed returned from Port Phillip on 14 June, Carver learned that an item had been removed from its inventory. He pursued leads among the customhouse, shipping firms, and sailors’ lodging houses, then checked the shipping news. It showed that, besides Godspeed, the only vessel to leave Port Chalmers on 13 May had been the Blanche, bound for Hokitika.

That discovery gave Carver a possible route to follow, not a settled explanation. He still had Crosbie Wells’s birth certificate and miner’s right, and decided to use the name Crosbie Wells while advertising a reward for the crate. The date thus links Staines’s passage west with Carver’s effort to recover the cargo, while leaving unresolved whether the crate had travelled on the Blanche or how its loss had occurred.

The cargo and the assumed name

The missing crate contained a trunk holding about four thousand pounds in gold, sewn into the linings of five dresses by Lydia Wells, who was then posing as Carver’s wife. Carver had obtained Godspeed from Alistair Lauderback through blackmail; the crate had been part of the leverage behind that transaction. His later use of the name Crosbie Francis Wells complicated the search: he produced a birth certificate to support the identity, but the reason he adopted the alias, and how he came to possess the certificate, remained uncertain.

The gold’s later dispersal deepened the mystery surrounding the 13 May departure. Quee Long found gold in Anna Wetherell’s dresses and, mistaking it for ore being smuggled from the goldfields, secretly removed it over several months. He retorted the dust into squares stamped with the Aurora name, intending the proceeds to be credited to the claim held by Emery Staines. Anna’s orange dress retained its share until she discovered the gold after waking in gaol with no memory of the twelve hours before her arrest. She and Aubert Gascoigne hid it in a flour sack under his bed. These later discoveries reveal how far the cargo’s contents travelled from the original search, without resolving the precise part played by the Blanche.

A date that returns

The departure date also sits at the start of Staines’s association with Carver. In the period around their arrangement, the two spent time together in Dunedin: they lodged at the Hawthorn Hotel, often ate breakfast together, and Staines accompanied Carver on errands. Staines was drawn to Carver’s apparent daring, while Carver communicated little beyond a persistent anxiety. The contrast between Staines’s trusting enthusiasm and Carver’s guarded dealings foreshadows the deception that would attach to their shared goldfield history.

The calendar’s middle of May returns in the later dispute over Godspeed’s wreck. Lauderback had protection and indemnity through the Garrity Group, and the ship carried nearly a thousand pounds of credit. Carver could seek those funds for wreck removal only if he filed before the middle of May, when a year would have passed since the sale and Lauderback’s obligation would end. Lauderback challenged the claim, but Cowell Devlin observed that Carver appeared to be acting as the dead Crosbie Wells’s proxy and that the forgery would be difficult to prove. The sequence gives the May date an afterlife: first a departure recorded in shipping news, then part of a longer reckoning over who owned a ship, a name, and the wealth attached to both.