Carver blackmails Lauderback into handing over the Godspeed

Francis Carver’s blackmail of Alistair Lauderback converts a hidden fortune and a paper trail into instruments of control. In Lauderback’s account, Carver does not begin by demanding money: he arranges matters so that the politician appears responsible for a series of serious offenses, then makes the Godspeed the price of silence. The transfer gives Carver the ship, but the trunk that made the threat effective disappears soon afterward, scattering the gold’s history across several later mysteries.

Background and the first warning

Lauderback tells the story to Thomas Balfour while explaining how his ship passed into Carver’s hands. Before the confrontation, Lauderback had known Lydia Wells in Dunedin and continued to call on her when he was in town. He insists that their earlier association had involved no payment. During one absence, however, Lydia acquired a husband: Francis Carver, whom Lauderback then knew as Francis Wells. Carver’s name and identity were therefore already part of the deception that would ensnare Lauderback.

Carver initially presented himself not as a man seeking a ship, but as someone in danger. He told Lauderback, in a controlled and polite manner, that he was a murderer pursued by a companion of the man he had killed. He did not identify either the victim or the reason for the killing. He also warned that the pursuer would come for Lauderback, whom Carver described as his associate. Lauderback could not understand how he had been marked out, though he suspected that his visits to a gambling house and his time with Lydia might have made him visible to others. The threat was deliberately incomplete: it offered fear without enough information to judge what danger was real.

Carver soon attached a practical request to this uncertainty. The Godspeed needed a master, and James Raxworthy, a retired naval officer, had leased the vessel for a proposed route between Australia and the Otago goldfields. When Raxworthy needed another able seaman, Carver asked Lauderback to recommend him. Lauderback did so. By the time the later confrontation took place, Carver had gained a position aboard the ship and was working under Raxworthy.

The paper trail and the disguised fortune

Lauderback’s suspicions sharpened when he examined shipping records connected with the Godspeed and the cargo agent Danforth. The papers showed a repeated westbound shipment across the Tasman, carried by the Godspeed under Raxworthy, with Lauderback named as shipper and the charges paid in full. The entries appeared month after month. The listed amount owing was zero, yet Lauderback had paid none of the fees and had not noticed money leaving his own accounts. Someone had made the records look regular while arranging the payments in cash.

Lauderback travelled to Dunedin to investigate. He went aboard the Godspeed at the wharf, intending to speak with Raxworthy, but found Carver alone in the forecastle. Carver said that a crate in the hold bore Lauderback’s name and that the documents connected him to its repeated transport over the preceding year. The apparent contents were women’s dresses. According to the story Carver had prepared, Lauderback was ordering fashionable clothes in Melbourne for Lydia, while keeping her identity out of the shipping records to protect his reputation and his marriage.

The dresses concealed a second cargo. Carver disclosed that gold had been sewn into their seams, rather than left loose in the trunk. There were five gowns, each filled with gold in a way that would not be apparent from a casual inspection; a person would have to lift and handle them to notice their weight. Lauderback understood the arrangement as a trap. The account books made him appear to have paid for the shipments, and the clothes supplied an apparent explanation for his relationship with Lydia. The gold, meanwhile, was undeclared. If the vessel sailed on schedule, the shipment could expose him to accusations of theft, adultery, conspiracy, and evasion of customs duties. These were the liabilities Carver had constructed, not charges that had already been adjudicated.

The demand and transfer of the ship

Carver’s scheme depended on making the evidence look coherent from the outside. Lauderback believed that if the trunk were discovered after departure, Carver could present it to Raxworthy as a shocking discovery: the dresses would seem to belong to his wife, the freight documents would bear Lauderback’s name, and the gold would suggest an illegal export. The ship might be stopped before leaving the harbour, while the records would appear to connect Lauderback to the whole arrangement. Even if Lydia were also implicated, Lauderback feared that a trial would expose him and leave the two of them able to turn against him.

Only after laying out the apparent danger did Carver reveal what he wanted. He demanded the Godspeed. He had anticipated that Lauderback might dismiss him or cancel his employment, and had planned around Raxworthy’s expected absence. Raxworthy was at a gambling house that night, with Lydia nearby. Carver held a policeman’s whistle and a pistol, giving his warning an immediate force, and Lauderback saw the prospect of public exposure closing around him. He resisted at first, but eventually signed the ship over to Carver. In Lauderback’s account, the decisive change is not a payment but a surrender: he yields the vessel to escape the legal and reputational consequences Carver had staged.

The public account of the sale concealed what had happened. Newspapers reported that Lauderback had sold the Godspeed at a reasonable price, paid in gold. Lauderback says he never received the money. The gold remained in the trunk, and after the Godspeed sailed for Melbourne the following day, the trunk was collected there as it had been on earlier voyages. It then disappeared. Lauderback could not pursue the matter openly without reviving the allegations that had forced him to part with the ship, and he did not know where the fortune went.

Aftermath and the trail of the gowns

Moody later reconstructs the episode as having occurred roughly nine months before the present events. He identifies the fortune as approximately four thousand pounds in pure gold and notes that Lydia was posing as Carver’s wife when she sewed it into the five dresses. Carver subsequently sought the missing crate in Hokitika, placing a reward advertisement in the West Coast Times under the name Crosbie Francis Wells and producing a birth certificate to support that identity. The reason for his use of this alias remained uncertain in Moody’s reconstruction.

The dresses and their hidden value continued to circulate after the crate’s disappearance. Anna Wetherell wore the gowns, unaware—or at least with no clear memory—of their concealed gold. Ah Quee later discovered the seams and secretly removed the gold from four dresses, retorting the dust into squares stamped with the Aurora name. The orange dress retained its share; Anna eventually found that gold after waking in gaol with a twelve-hour gap in her memory, and she and Aubert Gascoigne hid it in a flour sack. Thus the shipment that had enabled Carver to take the Godspeed did not end with the ship’s sale. Its concealed contents became a separate chain of theft, mistaken explanations, and recovery, while the original crate and the fortune’s full whereabouts remained unresolved.