Francis Carver impersonates Wells to acquire the Godspeed through a fraudulent transfer that turns identity into both a weapon and a legal instrument. The ship’s purchase is later shown to be bound up with Carver’s coercion of Alistair Lauderback, the theft of Crosbie Wells’s wealth, and the question of who must pay to remove the wreck from the Hokitika spit. Its exposure in court makes the forged signature more than a detail of ownership: it becomes evidence linking separate acts of fraud.

The purchase and the borrowed identity

In May 1865, Crosbie Wells returned to Dunedin and bought the Godspeed, a sudden investment in a ship despite the uncertainty surrounding any prior interest he may have had in seafaring. At the later hearing, Walter Moody drew Francis Carver through these facts. Carver acknowledged that Wells had bought the vessel and that the deed of sale was in his own possession. Asked how he came to hold it, he said Wells had entrusted it to him immediately before leaving Dunedin for the Arahura Valley, so that Carver could act as his proxy if Wells were injured or died.

That explanation gave Carver’s possession of the deed a plausible appearance of authority: he presented himself not as the buyer but as a custodian empowered to act for a dead man. The distinction mattered because the transaction rested on the name attached to the sale. Moody brought the document before the court, where it showed the signature C. Francis Wells. Lauderback identified Carver as the man who had obtained the ship, but the account he gave of their dealings also contained a falsehood that Carver visibly registered. The court’s eventual proof would rest less on Lauderback’s version of their first encounter than on the documents bearing Wells’s authentic signature.

Coercion behind the transfer

Lauderback described the transfer as the result of blackmail. In his account, Carver had intercepted a trunk sent between Lauderback and a dressmaker in Melbourne, opened it, removed the gowns, and placed a fortune beneath them. The shipment, Lauderback said, travelled in his name aboard the Godspeed; if the gold went offshore, he could be implicated in theft and evasion of duty. Carver’s leverage therefore depended on making Lauderback appear responsible for the concealed fortune. Lauderback said he gave up the ship under duress, and that Carver wanted the vessel and got it.

The shipment’s ordinary-looking contents and its concealed gold connected the transfer to a wider scheme of stolen wealth. Moody asked Lauderback to identify the shipping company; he named Danforth Shipping and its agent, Jem Danforth. He also said he had recognised Carver’s true identity only in December, after receiving a letter from the real Crosbie Wells. The letter made clear that Wells knew nothing of Lauderback’s affair with Lydia, and Lauderback said that this was when he understood he had been deceived. His testimony thus supplied a route from the ship sale to the forged identity, but it did not itself settle the authenticity of the document.

The wreck and the insurance dispute

The fraudulent acquisition continued to matter after the Godspeed was wrecked. Carver complained that the ship’s visible costs were coming out of his pocket and that he expected to be a thousand pounds down when everything was settled. Aubert Gascoigne raised the possibility of protection and indemnity insurance, a mutual arrangement funded by shipowners’ annual contributions and intended to meet liabilities that conventional insurance might not cover, including wreck removal.

Gascoigne explained that a change of ownership might not automatically extinguish the vessel’s protection. His inquiries had established that Lauderback belonged to the Garrity Group, a shipowners’ cooperative, and that each of Lauderback’s ships carried nearly a thousand pounds in credit. Carver could legally draw on those funds to help remove the wreck from the Hokitika spit if he filed before the middle of May. After a year from the sale, Lauderback’s legal obligation concerning the Godspeed would end. The deadline made the disputed sale financially urgent: Carver’s claim depended on acting as the shipowner’s proxy, while Lauderback wanted to prevent him from benefiting from a transfer Lauderback said had been forced by fraud.

When Lauderback sought to deny Carver access to the funds, Gascoigne observed that the apparent legal position favoured Carver. In his letter to John Hincher Garrity, Carver had represented himself as acting for Wells, who was dead; on the face of it, he appeared to be settling a shipowner’s liabilities as proxy. Gascoigne said he saw no evidence that would disprove that account. Lauderback insisted that the sale was forged, but Gascoigne warned that this would be difficult to prove. The exchange exposes the gap between a fraud Lauderback believed he understood and the evidence the law could accept.

Signatures expose the fraud

At the later court proceedings, Moody used the documents to close that gap. He compared the signature on Lauderback’s private correspondence with the signature on a deed of gift dated 11 October 1865. That deed recorded Emery Staines’s promise of two thousand pounds to Anna Wetherell, with Crosbie Wells as witness. Moody also compared the signatures with the one on the marriage certificate Lydia Wells had submitted to the Magistrate’s Court. The signatures on the correspondence, deed, and certificate matched one another; none resembled the signature on Carver’s Godspeed bill of sale.

The comparison established the bill of sale as a forgery and transformed the court’s reading of Carver’s proxy claim. Moody concluded that Carver had obtained the Godspeed through extortion, impersonation, and fraud. He connected the same methods to the theft of a fortune of many thousands of pounds from Wells in May, and suggested that Lydia Carver may have helped, since she was by then Carver’s wife. That suggestion was presented as an inference, not as a conclusion independently proved by the signatures.

Consequences and significance

The courtroom disclosure overturns the convenient distinction between Carver as an authorised proxy and Carver as a wrongdoer. A deed he had presented as a means of acting for Wells becomes the instrument through which his assumed identity can be tested. The genuine signatures in the court record—on a letter, a gift deed, and a marriage certificate—give the dispute a documentary chain, while the forged sale document marks the point where that chain breaks.

The event also reveals how ownership, liability, and identity could be made to serve the same deception. Carver’s possession of the ship allowed him to pursue mutual funds for wreck removal; his claim to act for Wells gave that pursuit a legal appearance; and the approaching insurance deadline threatened to leave Lauderback responsible if Carver succeeded. The fraud is therefore not resolved merely by naming the impersonator. Its consequences reach from the concealed gold and the ship’s transfer to the wreck’s cost, and finally to the wider case against Carver.