Francis Carver’s seizure of Alistair Lauderback’s ship, the Godspeed, set a chain of losses and claims in motion. The transaction gave Carver the vessel, but the missing crate that had helped force Lauderback’s hand carried both a fortune sewn into dresses and the documents that later complicated the ownership and wreck-removal disputes.

The ship, the leverage, and the missing crate

Roughly nine months before the events being reconstructed, the former convict Carver cheated Lauderback out of the Godspeed. Lauderback had hoped to use the ship’s bill of sale, kept among his personal effects, as leverage to get his beloved vessel back. Once the ship was wrecked, that document no longer served his purpose; by then, the contest over the vessel had shifted from recovering it to accounting for the consequences of its loss.

The missing shipping crate was central to the earlier coercion and to the wealth at stake. It contained a trunk holding approximately four thousand pounds in pure gold, meticulously sewn into the linings of five dresses by Lydia Wells, who was then posing as Carver’s wife. The crate also contained Lauderback’s documents and personal effects. Its disappearance was attributed to a mistake of lading at Gibson Quay, for which no single person appeared responsible. Lauderback learned of the loss only days after the Godspeed’s wreck and received the news dispiritedly, without much interest: the ship’s destruction had already made his bill of sale useless as a means of blackmailing Carver.

Carver’s search and assumed identity

After learning that the crate was gone, Carver sought to recover the gold. He sailed to Hokitika, apparently guessing that the crate might have been delivered there by mistake, and advertised in the West Coast Times, offering a large reward for its safe return. He placed the notice under the name Crosbie Francis Wells and produced a birth certificate to support that identity, although before and after this episode he was known as Francis Carver.

The choice of name deepened the mystery around the transaction. In his dealings with Lauderback the month before, Carver had called himself Francis Wells and signed in a deliberately ambiguous way; Lauderback believed that Crosbie Wells and Carver were brothers. The evidence does not establish why Carver adopted these variations, or why he possessed a birth certificate for Crosbie Wells if it was genuine. His assumed identity thus served as more than a disguise: it became a point of uncertainty in the later effort to determine who had acquired the ship and on whose behalf its owner was acting.

While in Hokitika, Carver privately offered Te Rau Tauwhare a reward for information about a man named Crosbie Wells. Tauwhare did not know anyone matching the description, and the crate was not found. Carver returned to Dunedin empty-handed. The failure of the search left the gold’s whereabouts unresolved, while the fortune’s history became entangled with the separate mystery surrounding the real Crosbie Wells, who had secretly made a substantial strike at Dunstan years earlier.

The wreck and the insurance claim

The Godspeed’s later wreck did not end the consequences of Carver’s acquisition. Carver told Aubert Gascoigne that he expected to be a thousand pounds out of pocket, since the visible costs of dealing with the wreck were coming from his own funds. Gascoigne raised the possibility of protection and indemnity, or P&I: a shipowners’ mutual fund that could cover liabilities, including wreck removal, that ordinary insurance might not address. The protection could remain applicable even after ownership of the ship changed.

Gascoigne’s inquiries established that Lauderback’s ships were covered through the Garrity Group and that each had nearly a thousand pounds in credit. Carver could legally seek those funds to help pay for removing the wreck from the Hokitika spit, provided he filed before the middle of May, when a year would have passed since the transfer and Lauderback’s legal obligation concerning the Godspeed would cease. The claim therefore depended on the earlier sale and on a narrow deadline: Carver had taken the ship through coercion, but the financial protection attached to it could still be invoked through the formal machinery of shipowners’ mutual insurance.

A disputed proxy and an unresolved fraud

Lauderback objected when Carver attempted to draw on the P&I funds. He regarded the claim as part of Carver’s original scheme and wanted to refuse him access to the money. Gascoigne, however, observed that no law appeared to have been broken. In a letter to John Hincher Garrity, Carver had presented himself as acting for Crosbie Wells, who was dead, and therefore as settling the affairs of a shipowner unable to act for himself. On the available evidence, Gascoigne could not identify proof that would discredit that account.

Lauderback insisted that Crosbie Wells had never bought the ship and that Carver had signed the contract in another man’s name. Gascoigne judged that accusation difficult to prove. The episode consequently turns on the gap between what Lauderback believed had happened and what the documents could establish: the ship had changed hands through Carver’s blackmail, but the later claim was framed as legitimate action by a dead owner’s proxy. The seizure’s decisive consequence was not simply the loss of Lauderback’s vessel; it was the creation of a durable legal ambiguity in which identity, ownership, and responsibility for the wreck could each be contested.