Balfour’s discovery of Lauderback’s missing crate turns a vanished shipment into the material center of several intersecting mysteries. The crate had contained a trunk of dresses concealing about four thousand pounds in gold; as its contents passed through different hands, they became both a fortune and a source of misleading clues. The crate itself, however, remains missing, and the account never establishes exactly how it disappeared.

Discovery and Immediate Suspicion

On the morning of 16 January, Thomas Balfour discovered that the crate containing Alistair Lauderback’s personal effects had vanished from the Hokitika waterfront. The loss distracted him when Ah Sook came seeking information about a shipment of opium he suspected had poisoned Anna Wetherell. Balfour confirmed that his firm handled Joseph Pritchard’s contract, but said he had little involvement with the cargo itself and directed Ah Sook toward the supplier, Francis Carver.

The conversation connected two lines of inquiry. Balfour told Ah Sook that Carver had recently sailed, two days earlier, and that he had been an infrequent visitor to Hokitika since the previous spring. Ah Sook concealed his shock: he knew Carver from Canton. Balfour did not know how long Carver and Pritchard had done business, and supposed they had been partners for at least several months. The shipping agent’s account thus supplied Ah Sook with a lead while exposing how little Balfour knew about the man tied to his own missing cargo.

Balfour’s suspicion deepened as he considered the timing of Carver’s departure and his visit to Crosbie Wells’s cottage. Te Rau Tauwhare, Wells’s close friend, had seen Carver enter the cottage on the day Wells died, before Alistair Lauderback arrived. Lauderback had found the kettle still boiling, suggesting that he had reached the cottage not long after Wells’s death. Balfour could not establish whether Carver had entered before or after the death, but the sequence raised the chilling possibility that Carver had been there while Wells was still alive. Carver’s hurried return to Hokitika and departure aboard the Godspeed only sharpened the suspicion; Balfour, already thinking of his vanished crate, found the timing troubling.

What the Crate Contained

Walter Moody later reconstructed the shipment’s history from the scattered accounts and clues. About nine months earlier, Carver had cheated Lauderback out of the Godspeed. At some point afterward, the crate by which he had forced the politician’s hand was lost through circumstances that remained unknown. Inside it was a trunk containing roughly four thousand pounds in pure gold, painstakingly sewn into the linings of five dresses. Lydia Wells had made the dresses while posing as Carver’s wife.

Carver went to Hokitika, apparently suspecting that the crate had been delivered there by mistake, and advertised in the West Coast Times for its safe return, offering a substantial reward. He placed the notice under the name Crosbie Francis Wells and produced a birth certificate to support that identity. The reason for using the alias—and the reason Carver possessed the certificate, if it was genuine—remained uncertain. The false name also complicated the distinction between Carver and the real Crosbie Wells, a reclusive man living in the Arahura Valley whose own fortune would later become a separate focus of investigation.

The Gold’s Passage Through Other Hands

The dresses continued to circulate after the crate disappeared. Anna Wetherell wore them, one at a time, without publicly removing or discussing their hidden gold. Edgar Clinch, her landlord, eventually discovered the fortune and wrongly concluded that Dick Mannering was using Anna to smuggle raw ore past the bank’s duties. Ah Quee made the same mistake. Having previously been cheated by Mannering, he decided to turn the apparent scheme against him: over several months, he secretly removed gold from four dresses while Anna, heavily affected by opium, slept at his hut in Kaniere Chinatown. He retorted the dust into squares and stamped them with the name Aurora, intending that the proceeds be credited to the claim owned by Emery Staines.

The orange dress escaped that removal because Anna did not wear it on her visits to Ah Quee. After her overdose and arrest, she woke in gaol with no memory of the preceding twelve hours and found gold in the dress. She assumed it had recently been planted on her. With Aubert Gascoigne’s help, she extracted it and hid it in a flour sack beneath his bed. The remaining gold therefore linked the missing shipment to Anna’s immediate circumstances, even as the lapse in her memory left her unsure how it had come to be on her person.

The gold taken from the other dresses was later stolen from the camp-station vault. Moody considered Emery Staines the most likely thief, but the evidence he had did not explain why a wealthy man would steal from his own indentured worker or hide the gold in another person’s cottage. Nor had Staines banked Ah Quee’s earnings against the Aurora claim as required. The supposed mine fraud and the missing shipment thus became entangled, but the gold’s movement did not resolve the crate’s disappearance.

Later Clues and Unresolved Fate

A later search of Lauderback’s belongings gave Moody another object to examine, but not the missing crate. He entered his room and found a black, iron-strapped trunk bearing Lauderback’s name, with baggage labels indicating a history of first-class travel. Beneath its calico lining, Moody found a carefully concealed slit and a bundle of about fifteen letters addressed to Lauderback. Their discovery showed that the trunk, distinct from the missing shipping crate, held secret correspondence; it did not establish that the crate had been recovered or explain how it vanished.

The event’s importance lies in this difference between a shipment’s disappearance and its contents’ gradual reappearance. The dresses carry the gold beyond the crate, changing its apparent identity as it is worn, removed, stamped, hidden, and mistaken for illicit ore. Meanwhile, the false name on Carver’s reward notice and the unresolved birth certificate make the search for the shipment part of the wider problem of who can claim a name, a fortune, or a past. The gold’s trails can be partly traced; the crate’s fate cannot.