Lauderback's gold shipment crate goes missing

Lauderback's gold shipment crate goes missing after Francis Carver has used it to force Alistair Lauderback to surrender the Godspeed. The loss deprives Carver of the means to recover a fortune of roughly four thousand pounds and turns a piece of freight into a knot of false identities, hidden gold, and uncertain legal claims. Walter Moody reconstructs the episode from a tangled, nonchronological account, while later discoveries show that the crate's contents continued to travel long after the crate itself vanished.

The crate and its concealed fortune

Roughly nine months before the events Moody is piecing together, Carver had successfully cheated Lauderback out of the Godspeed. The missing crate was connected to that coercion: Carver had used it to force the politician's hand. Its loss therefore threatened more than the recovery of valuable property. The crate had been part of the leverage that made Carver's seizure of the ship possible.

The fortune inside was concealed in a trunk containing five dresses. Lydia Wells, then posing as Carver's wife, had meticulously sewn approximately four thousand pounds in pure gold into their linings. The dresses made the wealth portable while disguising it as clothing; after the crate disappeared, the gold could be separated from its original container and passed along without the whole fortune being recognized as one shipment.

Carver's search and borrowed identity

Once Carver discovered the crate was lost, he sailed to Hokitika, apparently guessing that it might have been delivered there by mistake. In early June he placed an advertisement in the West Coast Times offering a large reward for its safe return. He did so under the name Crosbie Francis Wells and produced a birth certificate to support that identity, although he was known before and after this episode as Francis Carver.

The alias deepened the mystery rather than explaining it. Moody cannot establish why Carver assumed the name in the advertisement, why the blackmail of Lauderback required or encouraged him to do so, or how a birth certificate for Crosbie Wells came into Carver's possession. Carver also privately offered Te Rau Tauwhare a reward for information about a man named Crosbie Wells. Tauwhare knew no one of that name or description, and the search found neither the man nor the crate. Carver returned to Dunedin empty-handed.

The evidence also distinguishes the names Carver used in different dealings. He had spoken to Lauderback as Francis Wells and signed ambiguously, but used Crosbie Wells's identity when dealing with Benjamin Löwenthal at the newspaper office. Moody suspects that Carver had represented himself to Lauderback as Crosbie Wells's brother, in keeping with Lauderback's belief that the two men were brothers, but the reason for that performance remains unresolved. The shifting identities make the lost shipment part of a larger uncertainty over who owned the property and who had the right to claim it.

The gold after the crate vanished

The crate was never recovered, but its gold did not remain together. Anna Wetherell wore the dresses for months, apparently without knowing what they contained. Her opium use may have kept her from noticing their added weight; Moody also considers whether she recognized them as Lydia's. For about a month in September and October, late pregnancy required Anna to wear a different dress, but otherwise she continued wearing the gold-bearing gowns a portion at a time.

Ah Quee independently found gold in the dresses and, like Edgar Clinch, mistook it for ore that Dick Mannering was using Anna to smuggle. Knowing that Mannering had cheated him before, Ah Quee decided to outwit him. Over several months, while Anna visited his hut in Kaniere Chinatown and lay nearly senseless with opium, Ah Quee used thread and needle to remove the gold from four dresses. He retorted the dust into squares and stamped them with the name Aurora, so that the proceeds would be credited to the Aurora claim, by then purchased by Emery Staines. Anna did not wear her orange dress on those visits, leaving its share of the fortune sewn inside.

Anna eventually discovered the remaining gold in that orange gown after waking in gaol following her overdose. With no memory of the twelve hours before her arrest, she believed the metal had only recently been planted on her. She and Aubert Gascoigne excavated it and hid it in a flour sack under his bed. Thus the disappearance of the crate did not end the fortune's story: its contents became concealed, extracted, marked for a mine, and hidden again in separate places.

The changed stakes after the shipwreck

Some days after the Godspeed was wrecked, Thomas Balfour told Lauderback that the crate containing his documents and personal effects had disappeared from Gibson Quay because of a mistake in the lading for which no single person seemed responsible. The revelation brought Lauderback little interest. With the ship ruined, he no longer needed to blackmail Carver to win it back, and the bill of sale stored among his personal possessions had ceased to serve as useful leverage.

The loss instead acquired a new legal and financial dimension through the wreck. Carver faced substantial costs for disposing of the shipwreck and sought to draw on protection-and-indemnity cover associated with Lauderback's ships. Lauderback had nearly a thousand pounds of credit for each vessel through the Garrity Group, and Carver could legally claim funds toward removing the wreck from the Hokitika spit if he filed before the middle of May, when a year from the ship's sale would have passed. Gascoigne explained that the cover could remain available despite the change of ownership.

Lauderback wanted to deny Carver access to the money, insisting that Carver had forged the contract because Crosbie Wells had never bought the ship. Gascoigne's response exposed the difficulty of turning suspicion into a legal case: Carver's letter to John Hincher Garrity presented him as acting for the dead Wells, and Lauderback had no evidence that could disprove that account. The crate's disappearance had begun as a practical loss and a failure of Carver's search; after the shipwreck, the same chain of disputed identities left Lauderback unable to prove the fraud he believed had been done to him.