Crosbie Wells’s death and funeral bring private grief, Māori funerary practice, colonial authority, and a contested fortune into the same small space. The death is not witnessed by Te Rau Tauwhare, who says he was in the Arahura Valley when it occurred. But the morning after, he encounters Wells’s body being carried away from the cottage, and his effort to remain beside his friend until burial becomes a direct test of whose customs the authorities will recognize. The funeral does not close the matter: an examination finds traces of laudanum, and a later clearance of Wells’s cottage reveals £4,000 in gold that unsettles the apparently ordinary account of his death and estate.

Death and the discovery of the body

Wells was found dead in his cottage in the Arahura Valley. On the following morning, Tauwhare arrived as he customarily did, bringing food to share; Wells had supplied the spirits in their arrangement. Instead of meeting his friend, Tauwhare saw a departing cart driven by Dr. Gillies, with the gaol-house chaplain, Cowell Devlin, beside him. Beneath a folded blanket he recognized Wells’s body. Shocked, he dropped the food he had brought. Devlin allowed him to accompany the body back to Hokitika, although Tauwhare had to ride on the cart’s rear tongue rather than beside the driver.

The journey made a private loss visible to the town. Hoteliers and shopkeepers watched from their doorways along Revell Street as the cart passed. Tauwhare sat limp and blank-faced, one hand loosely holding Wells’s ankle as the body shifted with the cart’s movement. At the Police Camp, he remained beside it while the other men conferred. His presence was an act of attachment as well as a refusal to let Wells become merely an administrative charge.

Funeral preparations and the vigil

A cooper agreed to make a pine coffin and a rounded wooden headstone bearing Wells’s name and the dates of his life. His birth year was uncertain; 1809, written on the flyleaf of his Bible, was treated as plausible and would make him fifty-seven. Until the coffin and headstone were ready and the grave had been dug, the gaol’s governor ordered the body laid on the floor of his private study, separated from the ground by a muslin sheet.

Tauwhare objected to leaving his friend alone. He explained that the tangi required people to watch over the dead person, touch him, pray for him, and sing until burial; in his account, a spirit had not fully departed before that final rite. He described these practices not as rules open to debate but as sacred obligations. The gaoler instead called him a heathen and directed him toward the practical work of digging the grave. The exchange exposes a clash between formal custody and a funerary duty the institution did not accept as binding.

Tauwhare persisted. He kept watch on the porch, then in the garden, and then in the alley between the gaoler’s cottage and the Camp, moving each time he was driven away. The gaoler eventually threatened to shoot him if he came within fifty yards of the Camp before the body was buried. Tauwhare counted out the distance, sat against the façade of the Grey and Buller Bank, and kept watch from there. On the last night before burial, he spoke beloved words for Wells. Their friendship had grown through meals and long conversations, and Tauwhare had regarded Wells as a kindred spirit and brother even though Wells had shared little about his own past.

Examination and disputed cause of death

At the Camp, Dr. Gillies examined Wells’s vital organs and the contents of his stomach and intestines. He concluded that Wells had died from drink. The examination also found traces of laudanum, but the physician judged the amount insufficient to warrant undue suspicion. Governor Shepard later said that he accepted the physician’s conclusion and did not believe Wells had been poisoned except by drink. The evidence therefore establishes the official account and the presence of the traces, but does not establish that laudanum caused Wells’s death.

The body’s passage through the Camp and the physician’s examination became important when questions arose over the estate. Shepard stressed that Wells had been examined before burial, while others later challenged the speed and apparent profitability of the transactions made after his death. In one dispute, the timing prompted the pointed suggestion that Wells had been buried while still warm. That remark records suspicion, not proof of a different cause of death; the reported medical conclusion remained death from drink.

The fortune and the afterlife of the funeral

Before the wake had ended, Wells’s land and mill had been sold. The bank reclaimed the land, which Edgar Clinch then purchased. Harald Nilssen was engaged to clear the cottage and sell Wells’s effects, with his fee to be set against their value. In the course of that work, he discovered hoarded gold worth £4,000, hidden in a flour canister. The find was called a homeward bounder, a term for a fortune discovered after its owner’s death. Nilssen later said that he had expected a small estate and had not known about the hidden gold; the discovery transformed what had looked like a routine liquidation into a transaction from which he stood to profit substantially.

Wells’s widow, Lydia Wells, arrived a week too late to attend the burial but in time to contest the sale and the transactions that followed it. The interval between funeral and discovery thus became legally consequential: the body had been buried, but ownership of what it left behind was unresolved. Later, Cowell Devlin told Anna Wetherell that the gold found in Wells’s cottage might not have belonged to Wells at all. Its smelting bore a mark that traced it to the Aurora mine, owned by Emery Staines. Anna insisted that the deed in her possession concerned Emery’s money, not Crosbie’s inheritance. The distinction made the cottage gold a new question rather than a settled explanation of Wells’s wealth.

A death that remains entangled

Later inquiry placed Francis Carver at Wells’s cottage on the day Wells died, and Moody considered the possibility that Carver had witnessed his death. Moody also cautioned himself against treating Carver as the single cause of every connected event, or turning a web of incidental relationships into a proven conspiracy. Wells’s death sits at the center of that web because it links a disputed body, an uncertain estate, the disappearance of Emery Staines, and gold whose ownership has to be reconstructed from documents and marks. The funeral gives Tauwhare’s loyalty a clear, concrete form; the aftermath shows how quickly official procedure, commercial advantage, and competing claims can crowd around the dead.