Alistair Lauderback and Francis Carver's dealings and blackmail

Alistair Lauderback and Francis Carver’s dealings combine blackmail, impersonation, and a disputed transfer of the Godspeed. Carver turns a shipment of gold hidden in dresses into leverage against Lauderback, who signs over the vessel rather than face the ruin he believes the evidence could bring. The relationship later reverses direction: Lauderback comes to believe Carver’s shifting names may invalidate the sale, and sets out to expose him and recover the ship.

Background and Conflicting Identities

Lauderback recounts that, after the Godspeed had been anchored in Dunedin, he leased it privately to James Raxworthy, a retired naval officer seeking to establish a route between Australia and the Otago fields. When Lauderback next returned to Dunedin, he found Lydia Wells with a husband. In his account, that husband was Carver, whom he knew as Francis Wells—not Crosbie Wells. This distinction immediately unsettles the later claim that Lydia was Crosbie Wells’s wife: Thomas Balfour recognizes that the competing names and marriages cannot all be straightforwardly true.

Carver’s identity is not merely a private matter between the two men. Lauderback says Carver told him he was a murderer being pursued by a companion of the man he had killed, but withheld the dead man’s name and the circumstances of the killing. He also said he possessed a “twinkle” on Lauderback. Balfour understood this as some means of reading cards, while Lauderback admitted he did not know what the supposed advantage was. The threat’s obscurity is part of its force: Lauderback is unsettled by what Carver might know, without being told enough to assess the danger precisely.

From Favour to Leverage

Before the confrontation over the ship, Carver asked Lauderback for a personal favour. Raxworthy needed a crew member for the Godspeed, and Carver said he intended to apply for the position. Lauderback agreed to recommend him. In retrospect, that assistance placed Carver aboard the very vessel he would use to compel Lauderback. The arrangement also made the later encounter more complicated than a simple attack by an outsider: Carver had entered the ship’s service with Lauderback’s help.

Lauderback says he went to the Godspeed intending to speak with Raxworthy, but found Carver alone in the forecastle. Carver claimed that a shipping crate in the hold bore Lauderback’s name and that records linked him to its repeated transport over the preceding year. The crate supposedly contained dresses ordered for Lydia Wells through Melbourne. Because people in Dunedin believed Lauderback was maintaining Lydia, Carver could present the shipment as evidence of their relationship, even though Lauderback said he had not arranged it.

The dresses, Carver claimed, concealed a fortune in gold. He represented it as stolen from Lauderback by Lydia, while presenting the accusation itself as part of a scheme in which the two of them were acting together. He further claimed that the gold came from an undeclared claim near Dunstan. In Lauderback’s view, the combination made the apparent case especially dangerous: the records could suggest adultery, theft, conspiracy, and the evasion of customs duties. He believed that the gold’s undeclared status created the gravest legal exposure and feared that a prosecution could cost him the rest of his life.

The Godspeed Changes Hands

Carver wanted the Godspeed. He had worked under Raxworthy and, according to Lauderback, had worked out that Lauderback meant to dismiss the captain and end the crew’s contract. Carver sought a transfer of the ship free and clear. Lauderback initially refused, but believed Carver could summon the harbour master and bring the alleged evidence into the open. He ultimately signed the vessel over. The transfer was therefore the outcome of pressure built from a paper trail, a story about Lydia, and the risk attached to the undeclared gold—not an ordinary sale between willing parties.

The account leaves the status of the transfer uncertain. Lauderback later identifies what he sees as a weakness in it: if Carver signed under another man’s name, the deed might be void. He also reasons that, if Carver was in fact using the name Wells, Lydia could not at the same time be married to Crosbie Wells. Either possibility, he believes, could expose a lie and provide grounds to reclaim the ship. His confidence grows into a declared intention to expose Francis Carver and take back the Godspeed, but Balfour’s response is guarded. He has begun to suspect that Lauderback has not told him everything, particularly about the deaths and the alleged connection between Carver and Crosbie Wells.

The Crate and the Wider Mystery

Walter Moody’s later reconstruction clarifies the material stakes while preserving uncertainty about the identities involved. He places Carver’s successful acquisition of the Godspeed roughly nine months before the present events. The crate used as leverage had gone missing at some point afterward. It contained about four thousand pounds in pure gold, sewn into the linings of five dresses by Lydia Wells, who was then posing as Carver’s wife. Carver later sought the lost shipment in Hokitika, advertising for its return under the name Crosbie Francis Wells and supporting that identity with a birth certificate. He was otherwise known as Francis Carver; why he used that alias, and how he came to possess the certificate, remained unexplained.

The gold in this missing crate should not be confused with the separate fortune later discovered in Crosbie Wells’s cottage or with the gold removed from Anna Wetherell’s dresses. Moody’s account links the dresses to Lydia and to the blackmail of Lauderback, but it also shows how the fortune became dispersed and how Carver’s pursuit of it led him to invoke another man’s identity. The shipment is at once merchandise, concealed wealth, and supposed evidence against Lauderback; its uncertain destination keeps the consequences of the ship transfer alive after the confrontation itself.

Evidence, Memory, and Unresolved Kinship

The relationship reaches the reader through accounts that do not settle into a single, complete explanation. Lauderback tells his story to Balfour out of chronological order, and Balfour notices gaps in it, including the coincidence of Crosbie Wells’s death and the question of why Lauderback thinks Carver and Wells were brothers. Moody later finds a trunk marked as Lauderback’s and discovers letters addressed to him, concealed beneath its lining. Their existence establishes a further record of correspondence between Lauderback and Crosbie Wells, but the available account does not disclose what those letters say.

These unresolved links make the conflict more than a dispute over a vessel. Lauderback believes a question of names can undo Carver’s claim; Carver’s leverage, in turn, depends on making written records and social assumptions appear to prove a damaging story. The Godspeed changes hands through one version of events, and the attempt to reverse that transfer depends on another. Neither man’s account, as presented here, fully resolves who Carver was to Crosbie Wells, what Lauderback continues to conceal, or where the missing gold finally went.