Crosbie tries to flee Dunedin and recover the gold shipment

Crosbie Wells’s attempt to leave Dunedin and recover the shipment brings his flight, the theft of his identity, and the missing crate into a single tense negotiation. He asks Bill, a port official, for help reaching a ship before daybreak; when the official discovers a crate bound for Melbourne and logged under Wells’s name, Wells reveals that Francis Carver has taken his papers and is using his identity. Wells offers a nugget and a plan, but Bill ultimately refuses to participate.

A discreet passage from Dunedin

Wells approaches Bill in the dark with his palms raised and asks for a favour. His immediate request is narrow: he needs to get aboard a ship at first light, without drawing attention. When Bill asks where he is going, Wells declines to name a destination and says he needs only to leave quietly. The exchange frames departure not as a planned journey but as urgent escape, with discretion itself part of what he is asking Bill to provide.

Wells then makes the request easier to grant, at least in practical terms. He says he will hide aboard that night and sail in the morning; Bill need not arrange passage, but only identify the departing ship and turn a blind eye as Wells passes. In return, Bill can keep Wells’s nugget. The offer reduces Bill’s role to a moment of deliberate non-interference, while making the nugget a concrete inducement. Bill hesitates and checks the schedule pinned above his desk. The ship he identifies is the Blanche, a schooner bound for Hokitika at first light.

The crate on the Godspeed

The plan changes when Bill consults the inventory. It records a crate going to Melbourne, loaded onto the Godspeed and authorized under Wells’s signature. Bill pulls the log away when Wells asks to inspect it, and his surprise hardens into suspicion: the signature makes it appear that Wells himself arranged the shipment. Wells denies knowing about the crate and asks again to see the entry, but Bill accuses him of inventing a story.

Wells answers by explaining that his certificates, miner’s right, and other papers were kept in the safe at 35 Cumberland Street. He says Francis Carver, a former convict who served time on Cockatoo Island, took them all, leaving Wells with nothing but the shirt on his back. Carver, Wells insists, is using his name. This disclosure changes the meaning of the inventory: the authorization that implicates Wells is also, according to his account, evidence of how Carver has appropriated his identity. The scene does not establish the crate’s contents in Bill’s hearing, but Wells’s urgency and his effort to stop its passage make recovering it the immediate object of the negotiation.

A proposed route for the shipment

Wells urges Bill to pull the crate from the inventory at once and send it with him to Hokitika. He argues that this route would keep it from going offshore and would be legal, offering to sign a transfer or any other document Bill requires. The appeal is both practical and self-protective: Wells needs access to the shipment, but presents the transfer as a way to avoid the customs-duty evasion he associates with sending it overseas.

Bill says the crate cannot be put aboard the Blanche. The schooner is due to sail at first light, and Parrish has already signed off on its cargo; there is no time to add the crate. Wells proposes sending it later and offering a transfer immediately. By then, his request has shifted from securing a quiet berth for himself to diverting a specific shipment whose paperwork bears his name. The two aims are linked in the scene, but they are not identical: leaving without the crate would not recover what Carver has taken, while intervening in the shipment requires Bill to risk involvement.

The refusal and its limits

Wells places the nugget on Bill’s desk. The object briefly seems to quiver like a compass needle, an image that gives the offered payment a charged stillness without resolving the choice before Bill. He studies it, then tells Wells to keep it and says he wants no part in any scheme. His refusal closes the immediate bargain: Wells has not secured Bill’s promised silence, a place on the Blanche, or an agreement to transfer the crate.

The exchange ends without confirming what becomes of the shipment or whether Wells finds another way to leave. Bill had said he would pull the inventory in the morning, but his final refusal does not amount to a clear commitment to help Wells recover the crate. The scene therefore leaves the practical outcome open while making the predicament plain. Carver’s alleged theft has turned Wells’s own certificates and signature into instruments against him; the route out of Dunedin depends on an official’s willingness to treat that claim as credible, and on whether Wells can recover the property before the false identity hardens into the record. The nugget can tempt Bill, but it cannot restore Wells’s papers or make the official accept the risk.