Carver’s blackmail of Lauderback and seizure of the Godspeed

Carver’s blackmail of Lauderback and seizure of the Godspeed turned a coercive transfer into a longer contest over identity, lost property, and liability for a wreck. The missing crate that had helped force Lauderback’s hand contained a fortune in gold; after the ship ran aground, the dispute shifted to whether Carver could claim mutual insurance funds in the name he had used to acquire it.

The Ship and the Missing Crate

Roughly nine months before the present events, the former convict Francis Carver cheated Alistair Lauderback out of the Godspeed. The coercion was tied to a shipping crate: after the ship changed hands, the crate disappeared through an unexplained complication. It held a trunk containing about four thousand pounds in pure gold, carefully sewn into the linings of five dresses by Lydia Wells, who was then posing as Carver’s wife. The loss therefore deprived Carver not only of a fortune but also of the property that had been bound up with his leverage over Lauderback.

After discovering the crate was missing, Carver went to Hokitika, apparently suspecting that it had been delivered there by mistake. In early June he advertised in the West Coast Times, offering a substantial reward for its safe return. He placed the notice under the name Crosbie Francis Wells and produced a birth certificate to support that identity, although he was otherwise known as Francis Carver. Why the blackmail had required or prompted him to assume this alias was not yet known, nor was it clear why he possessed the certificate.

Carver also offered Te Rau Tauwhare a private reward for information about a man named Crosbie Wells. Tauwhare knew no one of that name or description, and the crate was not recovered. Carver returned to Dunedin empty-handed. The real Crosbie Wells lived in the Arahura Valley, little known in Hokitika and not suspected by his acquaintances of possessing wealth. His earlier fortune from a strike at Dunstan would only be uncovered later, after his death; at the time of Carver’s search, the connection between the two men remained obscure.

The Wreck Changes the Leverage

The Godspeed’s wreck altered the purpose of the struggle. Lauderback had wanted the ship back, and its bill of sale had been kept in his trunk among his personal effects. Once the vessel was ruined, that document no longer offered him useful leverage against Carver. Some days after the wreck, Thomas Balfour told Lauderback that the crate containing his documents and personal possessions had disappeared from Gibson Quay because of a lading mistake for which no single person seemed responsible. Lauderback received the news dispiritedly, but the loss no longer served the same purpose: there was no intact ship for him to reclaim.

Carver, meanwhile, faced the cost of disposing of the wreck. He estimated that he would be a thousand pounds out of pocket by the time the expenses were settled. Aubert Gascoigne raised the possibility of protection and indemnity, or P&I, cover: a mutual fund to which shipowners paid yearly contributions, and from which they could draw money for liabilities that ordinary insurance might not cover, including wreck removal. The cover was not simply insurance for cargo, and the change of ownership did not necessarily end the ship’s protection.

The P&I Claim and the Dispute Over Identity

Gascoigne’s inquiries established that Lauderback belonged to the Garrity Group, a small cooperative of shipowners. Each of Lauderback’s vessels had almost a thousand pounds in credit, and Carver could legally draw on the funds for removing the Godspeed wreck, provided he filed his appeal before the middle of May. After a year had passed from the sale, Lauderback’s legal obligation connected with the ship would end. Gascoigne had traced the arrangement through Balfour Shipping, newspaper archives, the Harbourmaster’s office, and the Reserve Bank.

Carver made his claim through a letter to John Hincher Garrity, presenting himself as acting on behalf of Wells, whom he identified as the dead shipowner. To appearances, he was settling a liability as a proxy for an owner who could not do so himself. Gascoigne told Lauderback that he saw no evidence that Carver had broken the law or that Lauderback could disprove this account. Lauderback objected that Crosbie Wells had never bought the Godspeed and that Carver had signed the contract in another man’s name. Gascoigne considered that accusation difficult to prove. The episode thus left the ship’s fraudulent transfer exposed as a serious allegation, but not one that Lauderback could readily convert into a successful legal challenge.

Consequences and Significance

The episode’s reversals hinge on the movement of documents and names. The crate held the gold and personal effects connected to the original coercion; the bill of sale within it had been Lauderback’s prospective leverage; and the birth certificate let Carver present himself as Crosbie Francis Wells. When the ship was wrecked, the contest did not end but migrated into the rules of mutual indemnity, where Carver’s assumed identity and claim to act for Wells appeared legally plausible.

The sequence also separates the value of property from the question of responsibility. Carver’s acquisition of the Godspeed began as blackmail, but its wreck left him with removal costs and an opportunity to claim funds associated with Lauderback’s shipowner membership. Lauderback recognized the alleged forgery yet lacked a clear means to establish it. The missing crate, meanwhile, remained unrecovered, its gold fortune and the identity papers surrounding it extending the consequences of the original seizure beyond the ship itself.