Emery's disappearance and presumed-dead status

Emery's disappearance and presumed-dead status describes the gap of more than two months in which Emery Staines vanished from Hokitika while under the effects of opium, leaving his whereabouts and condition unknown. His reappearance on 20 March at Crosbie Wells’s former cottage in the Arahura Valley resolved the immediate mystery but not its consequences: Staines had lost his assets, remembered the missing period only in fragments, and was arrested the next morning on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and dereliction. The absence was not a confirmed death; it was an unresolved state that ended only when Te Rau Tauwhare found him.

The disappearance and its consequences

Staines later told the court that opium had kept him away from Hokitika for more than two months, and that he had been astonished to learn how much time had passed. He was discovered on 20 March inside the cottage that had belonged to Crosbie Wells. By then he was unwell and muddled, searching for his bonanza but unable to remember where he had buried it. His account makes the disappearance less a deliberate journey than a period in which addiction disrupted his sense of time, direction, and purpose.

The delay also had a precise financial cost. After his return, Staines was told that his assets had been seized; had he come back just three days earlier, his claims would not have been taken. His first response was notably unconcerned: he believed more gold could be found and said that a large nest egg remained hidden in the Arahura Valley. That confidence did not erase the loss. The gold he thought he could recover was still concealed, and his recollection of where it lay was unreliable.

Discovery at Wells’s cottage

The place where Tauwhare found Staines carried an older history of contested possession. Six years earlier, the Crown had bought a vast tract of the western coast from Poutini Ngāi Tahu for three hundred pounds, reserving only the Arahura River, some of its banks, and a small parcel at Mawhera. The people had come to regard the transaction as theft. In the same valley, Crosbie Wells had paid the Crown fifty pounds for one hundred acres, built a one-room cottage overlooking the river, cleared a garden, and begun a timber mill.

Tauwhare knew Wells through frequent visits to that cottage, where Wells had been an eager pupil of Māori life and lore. After Wells’s death, the property passed into a new legal ownership: Edgar Clinch had bought the acreage, and Tauwhare resented that Clinch had purchased land for profit without living on or working it. The old cottage thus stood at the intersection of Tauwhare’s personal connection to Wells and his wider anger at land converted into property and currency. Staines’s return to it placed his missing fortune inside a landscape already marked by disputes over who could claim the land and what such a claim meant.

Tauwhare found Staines in the former cottage and brought him back from the disappearance. By the time Staines was recovering in custody, the two had become extraordinarily attached. Tauwhare was the one visitor Devlin allowed to see him; the visits were brief but improved Staines’s mood and health. His rescue therefore changed the missing man’s status twice over: it ended the uncertainty about where he was, and it established a close bond that continued through his confinement.

Fragmented memory and recovery

Staines could not give a continuous account of the weeks he had been gone. He did not remember boarding a ship or experiencing a shipwreck, though he recalled being washed onto a beach, coughing seawater and clinging to a cask of salt beef. Other impressions came without a dependable sequence: approaching Wells’s cottage, passing diggers around a fire, leaves and running water, a ruined canoe, a steep gorge, and the red eye of a weka. His dreams had mingled Tarot patterns, gold-lined corsets, and a fortune hidden in a flour sack beneath a bed. These remnants offered images rather than a reliable chronology.

His own explanation was that he had walked into the night and become lost in the bush. That uncertainty matters: even after he was found, Staines could not reconstruct the route or the events that had brought him to Wells’s cottage. His account records the limits of his memory without resolving every gap. The disappearance is therefore both a plot mystery with a concrete endpoint and a damaged stretch of experience that the returning character himself cannot fully recover.

Custody and the end of the missing-person state

Staines returned to Hokitika only to be arrested on the morning after his reappearance. He was remanded on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and dereliction, while Anna Wetherell was also held in the Police Camp gaol. His bail was set at one pound and one shilling, the standard rate, but he chose not to pay it, preferring to remain with Anna and await his summons to the Magistrate’s Court. His disappearance thus ended not in an immediate return to freedom but in a new period of confinement.

The pair’s health improved while they were held. Dr. Gillies prescribed Staines five drams of laudanum daily, reduced by one dram every fortnight until his shoulder had healed; his wound improved after being sewn and dressed, though he could not yet raise his arm above his head. Anna’s health improved too, and she received a decreasing dose intended to wean her from opium. When the prisoners moved from the temporary quarters to the new gaol-house at Seaview on 12 April, Staines’s absence had become a public legal matter as well as a personal crisis: men came seeking interviews, and Devlin had to confirm that he was alive, recovering, and still awaiting the court’s verdict.

The state named by the disappearance therefore has two distinct endings. Tauwhare’s discovery ended Staines’s unexplained absence, while recovery and custody did not restore his lost time, assets, or memories. His return makes survival certain; the seized claims, incomplete recollection, and pending charges ensure that being found is not the same as being returned to his former life.