June 1865

June 1865 is the month in which Francis Carver, using the name Crosbie Francis Wells, publicly searched Hokitika for a missing crate of immense personal value. The date matters because Benjamin Löwenthal’s recollection turns a brief newspaper advertisement into evidence linking Carver to Crosbie Wells’s name and birth certificate, and to the gold fortune that threads through the novel’s intersecting claims. Yet the memory is precise in some respects and openly uncertain in others: the month and the name can be explained by the newspaper’s production history, while the scar on the visitor’s cheek remains a matter of recollection rather than proof.

The date recovered from a memory

The advertisement enters the story not as a contemporary document but as a memory narrated months later. At the Crown Hotel, Thomas Balfour’s disordered account has gathered together men connected to Crosbie Wells’s death and estate. Benjamin Löwenthal, hearing parts of the story anew, is reminded of a customer who came to his office the previous June. His recollection supplies a critical link in Walter Moody’s attempt to arrange the scattered events into a chronology.

Löwenthal can explain why he places the encounter in June. The West Coast Times had begun publication on 29 May 1865, and he displayed its first edition behind glass in his office. The paper’s first press run was twenty copies; after the purchase of a steam-powered press, delivered on 1 July, circulation grew. Löwenthal remembers setting the visitor’s advertisement on the older, hand-powered machine, which places it before that delivery and, in his account, during June. The date is therefore not a precise day established by a surviving record, but a month recalled through the practical history of a new newspaper.

The advertisement and the name

The visitor was a dark-haired man with a cheek scar, carrying a top hat. He wanted a notice placed in the West Coast Times about a lost shipping crate. He offered twenty pounds for its return, or fifty if it came back unopened, and described its contents only as items of considerable personal value. Asked for his name, he did not answer aloud; instead, he laid a birth certificate on Löwenthal’s desk. The document gave the name Crosbie Francis Wells. The man directed anyone who found the crate to an address on Gibson Quay, paid the fee, and left.

A small typesetting problem made the name especially memorable. The standard two-inch-square advertisement column could not fit the entire notice without leaving its final word, Wells, stranded at the top of a third column. Rather than alter the paper’s layout, Löwenthal removed the middle name Francis. The visitor returned the following morning, objected strongly to the omission, and insisted that the middle name be restored. Löwenthal reprinted the notice and, because the customer had paid for a week’s advertising, provided an additional printing without charge. What began as an editorial adjustment became the detail that fixed the full name in the editor’s memory.

What the month connects

The advertisement followed the transfer of the Godspeed to Carver in May 1865. By the time Moody reconstructs the sequence, the missing crate is understood to have held a trunk containing about four thousand pounds in gold, sewn into the linings of five dresses by Lydia Wells, who was then posing as Carver’s wife. Carver had come to Hokitika seeking the lost shipment and advertised under the name on the birth certificate, although he was otherwise known as Francis Carver. Why he adopted that identity, and how he came to possess the certificate, remain unanswered questions at this point in the narrative.

The search did not recover the crate during Carver’s visit. He also offered Te Rau Tauwhare a private reward for information about a man named Crosbie Wells, but Tauwhare did not know anyone of that name or description. Carver returned to Dunedin without the crate. The advertisement thus records both a practical attempt to retrieve stolen or misplaced wealth and a search for the person whose name Carver was using. Its two objects—the crate and Crosbie Wells—become difficult to separate.

Documentary evidence and its limits

Löwenthal’s account strengthens the connection between Carver and the name Crosbie Francis Wells, but it does not settle every question. He is confident about the month and the full name because he can explain how he remembered them. He is less certain that the visitor’s face bore a scar. His image of the man is vivid, including the way he pressed his hat between his palms, but Löwenthal acknowledges that he might have overlaid the scar from another memory. He had never known the real Crosbie Wells in life and had no surviving image by which to compare the two men.

Later, Moody finds that the Godspeed bill of sale bears the signature Francis Wells, written with a conspicuous flourish that may also read as a C before the name. Set beside Löwenthal’s recollection of the birth certificate and the insistence on retaining the middle name Francis, that ambiguity supports Moody’s suspicion that Carver had appropriated Crosbie Wells’s identity. The court later compares the bill of sale with signatures attributed to Crosbie Wells and identifies the ship-sale signature as forged. June 1865 therefore functions as more than a date in the background: it preserves the moment when a name, a document, and a missing fortune first converge in public, while leaving the origin and authenticity of the identity itself unsettled.