Carver’s theft of Crosbie Wells’s identity and gold is the hinge between a private dispossession and a wider scheme of impersonation, blackmail, and contested ownership. By taking Wells’s papers and fortune, the former convict could present himself under another man’s name; the stolen identity then became part of the transaction that put Alistair Lauderback’s ship, the Godspeed, in his hands. The gold itself changed forms and locations, passing through dresses, a shipping crate, and the claims made after the shipwreck, while the question of who could lawfully act in Wells’s name remained unresolved.

Background and the theft of Wells’s papers

Crosbie Wells had made a major strike at the Dunstan goldfields but kept his wealth and circumstances obscure. He lived alone in the Arahura Valley, where his small acquaintance in Hokitika did not suspect that he possessed a fortune. His later account to Emery Staines recasts that anonymity as a precarious shelter: Carver took his certificates, miner’s right, and other papers from a safe at 35 Cumberland Street. Wells identified Carver as an ex-convict who had served time at Cockatoo Island Penitentiary, and said that the theft left him with only the clothes he was wearing.

Wells’s grievance reached beyond documents. He believed Carver had cheated him out of a substantial quantity of gold, turned his wife against him, and tried to take his life. The account does not establish the exact method by which Carver acquired the gold or all the papers, and Wells himself says he cannot see the whole picture. What is clear is the practical effect: Carver’s possession of the documents gave him a route to impersonation, while Wells was reduced to hand-to-mouth work and a life spent keeping his head down.

The borrowed name becomes a business instrument

Carver’s dealings with Staines show the theft extending into commercial arrangements. After meeting him in Otago, Carver urged Staines to go west to Hokitika, where a man might make a fortune quickly. He arranged the practical steps of the journey, taking Staines to the customhouse, an outfitter, and the Reserve Bank; Staines then obtained a miner’s right, a swag, and passage on the schooner Blanche from Port Chalmers. When a sponsorship agreement was signed, Carver used Staines’s name. Later, Carver also instructed Staines to call him Francis Wells, without explaining why.

The alias was not a casual convenience. Wells eventually inferred that his papers had been passed to a man trying to escape a tarnished past and begin again under a better name. He connected the missing documents to the sponsorship arrangement and concluded that he would meet Francis Carver that night. When Staines confirmed that Carver had signed in his name, Wells recognized the pattern as the same appropriation that had stripped him of his papers and wealth. His account identifies the personal cost of the fraud: Carver had taken his name and money and, in Wells’s understanding, tried to take his life as well.

Gold, dresses, and the missing crate

The gold’s circulation made the theft difficult to separate from other schemes. About nine months before the events reconstructed by Walter Moody, Carver had cheated Lauderback out of the Godspeed. A shipping crate connected with the transaction was later lost. It contained a trunk holding approximately 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 wanted the crate back and advertised in the West Coast Times under the name Crosbie Francis Wells, using a birth certificate to support that identity. The account leaves unresolved why the blackmail scheme required or prompted this particular alias, and how Carver came to possess the birth certificate.

The dresses also demonstrate how stolen wealth could be mistaken for something else as it moved between people. Edgar Clinch found gold in the gowns and assumed that Dick Mannering was using Anna Wetherell to smuggle ore and evade duty. Quee Long reached much the same conclusion, but acted on it: believing Mannering capable of fraud and determined to outplay him, he removed gold dust from the dresses while Anna slept, retorted it into squares, and stamped them with the Aurora name so the proceeds would be credited to the claim owned by Staines. He worked through four gowns over several months; Anna’s orange dress remained full because she did not wear it on her trips to Quee’s hut. These mistaken readings and successive transfers complicate the apparent ownership of the gold without erasing the original theft or establishing every link in its chain.

Discovery and the legal afterlife of the fraud

The theft surfaced through objects that could be examined but did not settle the matter. While investigating an unfamiliar black trunk marked with Lauderback’s name, Moody found a bill of sale and, hidden beneath the tartan calico lining, a neatly concealed packet of about fifteen letters addressed to Lauderback. The trunk’s Southampton and Lyttelton labels and its first-class appearance suggested a different owner from Moody; its hidden contents connected the object to the tangled history of the ship and its names. The papers offered clues, but Carver’s shifting use of Wells, Francis Wells, and Crosbie Francis Wells left the purpose and legal meaning of each assumed identity uncertain.

After the Godspeed was wrecked, Carver faced the cost of disposing of the wreck. He told Aubert Gascoigne that the expenses were mounting and that he expected to be a thousand pounds out of pocket. Gascoigne investigated the shipowners’ mutual protection-and-indemnity arrangements and learned that Lauderback belonged to the Garrity Group. Its cover could meet certain liabilities, including wreck removal, and Carver could seek funds while Lauderback’s obligation remained in force, provided he filed before the middle of May, when a year would have passed since the sale.

Lauderback tried to block Carver from drawing on that protection, accusing him of planning the scheme from the outset and insisting that the sale contract was forged because Carver had signed under another man’s name. Gascoigne judged the claim difficult to prove: in correspondence, Carver had represented himself as acting for Wells, who was dead, and could appear to be settling the shipowner’s affairs as a proxy. The theft therefore produced an enduring reversal. Wells’s name, first taken from him as a means of dispossession, could be presented as authority for Carver’s later claim; the truth of the fraud was not, by itself, enough to make it easy to establish in law.