The Godspeed changes hands in a transaction that makes a false identity commercially useful and leaves ownership inseparable from the obligations attached to a ship. Francis Carver acquires the barque using the name Wells, with Alistair Lauderback signing the sale papers. The transfer is immediate in effect: it gives Carver the vessel and, later, a route to claim shipowners’ mutual insurance funds, while leaving Lauderback to contest a transaction he says was founded on forgery.

The sale and the borrowed name

The exchange is introduced as a moment when Carver takes an alias and Lauderback signs his name. When Lauderback encounters Carver aboard the ship, he addresses him as Wells; Carver is waiting with a pistol in hand. The scene establishes the discrepancy at the heart of the sale: the man who has acquired the ship is Carver, but the paperwork represents him as someone else.

The Danforth bill of lading gives Lauderback a specific document to connect with the disguise. Carver acknowledges that this is the paper at issue, and Lauderback recognizes that the written account differs from the actual arrangement. The transaction is therefore more than a change of possession. The name on the documents lets Carver present himself as acting for Wells, a claim that will later make the transfer difficult to challenge even as Lauderback calls it a forgery.

Two hours after the encounter, Carver visits Lydia Wells at 35 Cumberland Street and tells her the deal has gone through. He has the deed of sale folded in his inside pocket and says it is effective immediately. He has left someone watching Lauderback until morning, but assures Lydia that he has not hurt him. The signed document makes the transfer real in practice; the guard and the night’s secrecy help keep Lauderback from undoing it at once.

A new captain and a missing crate

The change of ownership also reshapes command aboard the Godspeed. Carver’s injuries on the night of 12 May prevent him from making the barque’s scheduled departure for Melbourne the following afternoon, so he cannot tell Captain James Raxworthy that ownership has changed. Raxworthy sails on schedule. Carver is left waiting for the ship’s return, unable to exercise the authority the sale has given him until the vessel comes back from Port Phillip on 14 June.

When it returns, Carver informs Raxworthy that his tenure as captain is over. Under the new ownership, Carver himself is promoted to captain and can disband Raxworthy’s crew and assemble his own. Their meeting is long and unfriendly. Carver’s new authority is thus not merely nominal: it permits him to replace the crew and take control of the vessel’s operations, although the transfer also exposes him to practical losses and disputes that ownership alone cannot settle.

One item has disappeared from the Godspeed’s inventory. Raxworthy says its recall did not breach regulation or protocol, but Carver reacts with fury and then anguish. He searches the customhouse, shipping firms along the quay, and sailors’ lodging houses without finding it. Shipping news offers a narrow lead: besides the Godspeed, only the schooner Blanche left Port Chalmers for Hokitika on 13 May. Carver still has Wells’s birth certificate and miner’s right, and decides to use the Wells identity to advertise a reward for the missing crate. The borrowed name that secured the ship becomes a tool in his search for what was taken from it.

The cost of the wreck and the insurance claim

Carver later tells Cowell Devlin that he expects to be a thousand pounds out of pocket: the visible costs of dealing with the wreck are coming from his own funds. Devlin raises protection and indemnity, or P&I, a mutual arrangement in which shipowners pay annual contributions and may draw on the pool for liabilities that ordinary insurance does not cover, including wreck removal. This kind of cover may remain available even after a ship changes ownership.

Devlin presents the possibility cautiously, but the narrative reveals that he has already established the facts. Alistair Lauderback’s ships are covered through the Garrity Group, and each has nearly a thousand pounds in credit. Carver is legally entitled to seek those funds toward removing the Godspeed from the Hokitika spit, provided he files his appeal before the middle of May, when a year will have passed since the sale and Lauderback’s obligation to the ship will end. Devlin’s inquiries had led him through Balfour Shipping, newspaper archives, the Harbourmaster’s office, and the Reserve Bank. This research belonged to a separate investigation into possible connections among George Shepard, Lauderback, and Crosbie Wells, but it also gives him decisive knowledge about the financial consequences of the transfer.

The dispute over what the papers prove

Lauderback tries to refuse Carver access to the P&I funds. He says Carver planned to cheat him from the beginning and insists that Crosbie Wells never bought the Godspeed: Carver, he alleges, signed the contract in another man’s name. But the documents support a competing account. In a letter to John Hincher Garrity, Carver presents himself as acting for Wells, who is dead, and as settling the shipowner’s affairs by proxy. Devlin sees no evidence that clearly disproves that explanation and warns that a forgery will be difficult to establish.

The transaction’s consequence is a reversal in which the false identity that gives Carver control also makes his later claim legally plausible. Lauderback’s knowledge of the deception does not, by itself, overcome the written record. Meanwhile, the sale transfers not only command of the Godspeed but also access to a mutual fund intended to meet the very wreck-removal costs Carver cannot comfortably bear. The ship’s changed ownership therefore sets identity, paperwork, and maritime liability against one another: what happened in private becomes a public contest over who the law will recognize as the owner.