Staines's trial exposes Carver's fraud in court when a hearing over Emery Staines’s mining offences turns into a public demonstration that Francis Carver forged the Godspeed bill of sale and used the stolen identity of Crosbie Wells. The proceedings connect a concealed fortune, a disputed shipwreck claim, and signatures on separate documents; they end not with a verdict, but with the court in commotion and its witnesses ordered into custody.

Charges and the concealed fortune

The afternoon session opened with Staines answering three charges: falsifying the January 1866 quarterly report, embezzling ore submitted by his employee John Long Quee against The Aurora, and neglecting a claim through an absence of more than eight weeks. He pleaded guilty to each. The admissions established serious wrongdoing, but they also put the origin and destination of the gold at the centre of the hearing.

Lawrence Broham, representing the plaintiff, presented an inventory prepared by Nilssen & Co. It listed pure ore from the estate of the late Crosbie Wells, valued by the bank at exactly £4,096, and asked Staines to explain the fortune. Staines said Quee had excavated the ore on The Aurora in the middle months of the previous year, retorted it into squares, and submitted it to him as earnings. Rather than bank it against the claim, as he was required to do, Staines bagged the gold, carried it to the Arahura Valley, and buried it.

His choice of hiding place carried a legal and territorial rationale. Staines said he believed the gold would be safer there because prospecting on Māori land was prohibited and much of the Arahura belonged to Māori. In the wider history of the district, this land had been part of the extensive territory of Poutini Ngāi Tahu, much of which the Crown had purchased for £300 six years earlier. The trial did not resolve that history of dispossession; it did make clear that Staines had deliberately placed the ore where he thought it could remain undisturbed.

Asked what he intended to do with the fortune, Staines said he had planned to divide it equally: half for himself and half as a gift to Anna Wetherell. That intended gift complicates the prosecution’s account of the hoard without undoing Staines’s admissions. He acknowledged concealing the ore and failing to account for it through The Aurora, while presenting the intended division as part of what he meant to do with the recovered wealth.

A courtroom that leaves things unsaid

Several witnesses followed Staines, including Dick Mannering, Quee, Benjamin Löwenthal, Edgar Clinch, Harald Nilssen, and Charlie Frost. Their accounts assembled the chain by which the gold discovered in Wells’s cottage was identified, valued, and associated with The Aurora. Mannering described the terms on which the claim had been sold; Quee addressed the retorting of the ore; Löwenthal recounted learning of Wells’s death from Alistair Lauderback; Clinch said he had bought the estate the next morning; Nilssen described the gold’s concealment in the cottage; and Frost confirmed its value.

The testimony was also marked by what it left out. The witnesses made no mention of Anna’s gowns, the wrecked Godspeed, or the concerns and revelations that had brought the secret council together at the Crown Hotel months earlier. The court thus heard a carefully bounded account of the fortune, one that treated the retorted gold as an Aurora discovery while leaving the larger network of concealment outside its immediate record. The omission matters because Moody’s later intervention makes that wider history impossible to keep separate from the case.

The ship claim and the apparent legal impasse

The Godspeed’s wreck had already created a financial dispute between Carver and Lauderback. Carver said that dealing with the wreck was costing him money and that he expected to be a thousand pounds down. Aubert Gascoigne pointed him toward protection and indemnity insurance, a shipowners’ mutual fund that could cover liabilities such as wreck removal even when ordinary insurance would not. Lauderback belonged to the Garrity Group, and each of his ships had close to £1,000 in available credit. Carver could seek those funds if he filed before the middle of May, when a year would have passed since the sale and Lauderback’s obligation concerning the ship would end.

Lauderback tried to block Carver’s access to the fund, accusing him of planning the deception from the outset. Gascoigne, however, saw no apparent legal breach in Carver’s presentation: Carver had written to John Hincher Garrity as though acting for Wells, the dead shipowner, and there was no evidence in hand to disprove that account. Lauderback insisted that Wells had never bought the ship and that Carver had signed the contract in another man’s name. Gascoigne judged the allegation difficult to prove. That earlier impasse gives the courtroom revelation its force: the fraud is no longer merely Lauderback’s accusation, but a claim Moody can support by comparing documents.

Moody turns the evidence against Carver

After Lydia Carver had testified, the court called Francis Carver. Moody then brought Alistair Lauderback to the stand and asked him to identify the man who had obtained the Godspeed. Lauderback pointed directly at Carver. He testified that Carver had presented himself as Crosbie Wells, and that the sale had been made on that false identity. Although Lauderback said he had not understood the deception at the time, his account supplied a personal identification of the man behind the transaction.

Moody then focused the court on the signature. The deed of sale submitted by Carver bore the name C. Francis Wells, but Moody compared it with Lauderback’s private correspondence and with documents bearing Wells’s genuine signature. He identified a close resemblance between Wells’s signature on his correspondence, the deed of gift for Anna dated 11 October 1865, and Wells’s marriage certificate. Those signatures, he told the court, did not resemble the one on the Godspeed bill of sale. The documentary contrast turned a dispute about competing stories into a specific charge of forgery.

Moody’s conclusion reached beyond the ship. He argued that Carver had obtained the Godspeed through extortion, impersonation, and fraud, and had used the same methods to steal thousands of pounds from Wells the previous May. He further alleged that Lydia had helped with the theft, given that she was now Carver’s wife. The trial therefore linked the apparent ship transaction to the earlier disappearance of Wells’s fortune, while making Lydia’s possible part of that scheme an explicit accusation rather than an established finding in this passage.

Uproar and an unresolved outcome

Broham asked for a recess, but the commotion in the gallery overwhelmed his request. Justice Kemp called Moody and Broham to the Magistrate’s office, ordered that all witnesses be placed in custody, and adjourned the court. The interruption marks a reversal in the hearing: Staines had entered as the defendant whose guilty pleas and concealed gold were under scrutiny, but Moody’s evidence redirected attention toward Carver’s identity and the forged ship sale.

The scene confirms the exposure of Carver’s fraud, not the final judgment in the proceedings. Staines’s guilty pleas remain part of the record, while the court’s response to the new evidence leaves the immediate legal consequences pending. Its central revelation rests on the convergence of testimony and documents: Lauderback identifies Carver, and Wells’s known signatures provide a comparison against the forged bill. The gold, the ship, and the borrowed name are shown to belong to one connected history of concealment, even as the hearing closes before that history can be fully adjudicated.