Francis Carver and Crosbie Wells

Francis Carver and Crosbie Wells are joined by a pursuit that turns on a hidden address, a visit to an isolated cottage, and the appropriation of a name. Carver sought Wells before the latter’s death, then became linked to the circumstances of that death and to a separate fortune concealed in dresses; the surviving clues invite suspicion without resolving every part of the connection.

A search for Wells

Months before the main events, Carver offered Te Rau Tauwhare money for news of a man named Crosbie Wells. Carver returned to Dunedin, while Tauwhare went back to Greymouth; the two did not meet again until Tauwhare encountered Wells and became his close friend. Wells was living in the Arahura Valley, where he had left prospecting to build a mill. His cottage stood on land he had bought from the British Crown, within a valley adjoining land to which Poutini Ngāi Tahu had been confined after the Crown’s purchase of their much larger territory.

On the morning of 14 January, Tauwhare saw Carver on the Hokitika waterfront and remembered the earlier offer. He approached Carver and named his price for Wells’s location. Carver paid two shillings, and Tauwhare told him where Wells lived. The transaction was brief, but it supplied Carver with the route to a man whose existence and whereabouts had otherwise been difficult to trace.

The cottage and the suspicious departure

Carver entered Wells’s cottage before Alistair Lauderback arrived there. Lauderback later testified that the kettle was still boiling when he entered, not long after Wells had died. From Tauwhare’s account of the order of the visits and Lauderback’s description of the kettle, Thomas Balfour reasoned that Carver had been at the cottage before Wells’s death and might even have witnessed it. That is an inference, not a witnessed account of what occurred between the two men; the evidence establishes Carver’s presence, but leaves his precise role unresolved.

The timing sharpened the suspicion. Carver returned from the Arahura Valley to Hokitika and the Godspeed sailed late that evening, after sundown. Benjamin Löwenthal observed that the departure was hasty, while Balfour found it troubling in light of the missing shipping crate he was already concerned about. The journey and departure connect Carver’s search for Wells to the ship and its lost cargo, without by themselves proving why he left so quickly.

Names, ships, and separate fortunes

Walter Moody later reconstructed another strand of the connection. About nine months earlier, Carver had obtained the Godspeed from Alistair Lauderback through fraud and coercion. The missing crate contained a trunk with roughly four thousand pounds in gold, sewn into five dresses by Lydia Wells, who was then posing as Carver’s wife. Seeking the lost cargo, Carver advertised in the West Coast Times under the name Crosbie Francis Wells and produced a birth certificate to support that identity. Moody could not determine why Carver had adopted the alias or how he had come to possess the certificate.

This shipment must be distinguished from Crosbie Wells’s own concealed fortune. Wells had made a substantial find at Dunstan and hidden his wealth; after his death, a fortune worth just over four thousand pounds was discovered in hiding places throughout his cottage. Meanwhile, gold from the dresses took a different route: Ah Quee removed gold from four gowns, and Anna Wetherell later discovered the remaining gold in her orange dress. The two fortunes were similar in scale but distinct in origin and concealment, a distinction that makes the apparent connection between Carver and Wells more intricate than a single stolen hoard.

What the evidence leaves unsettled

Carver’s use of Wells’s name made the search more than a matter of locating a former prospector. It placed Wells’s identity alongside the lost dresses, the missing crate, and Carver’s dealings with Lauderback, while Wells’s secluded life and hidden gold supplied a separate mystery. Ah Sook, learning that Carver had sought Wells, went to the Arahura Valley to question him, only to find the cottage empty and its former occupant dead. The discovery turned Carver’s earlier inquiry into a possible clue to Wells’s death, but not a complete explanation.

The relationship also sits within a larger dispute over land and possession. Tauwhare regarded the Arahura Valley as part of a homeland wrongfully diminished by colonial purchase, while Wells had acquired acreage from the Crown and built his home and mill there. After Wells’s death, the cottage and its contents became subject to competing claims and transactions. In this setting, Carver’s pursuit of a man, his assumption of that man’s name, and the movement of concealed gold all echo the novel’s broader question of how possession is established—and whose account of ownership is allowed to count.