The Luminaries

Balfour. ‘When Mr. Lauderback first arrived in Hokitika in January, he came over the Alps, as you might remember. His trunk and assorted effects were sent by sea. He sent down a shipping crate from Lyttelton to Port Chalmers, and once the crate reached Port Chalmers I arranged for one of my vessels—the
Virtue
—to pick it up and bring it over to the Coast. Well, she got here all right—the
Virtue
—with the crate aboard. Arrived on thetwelfth of January, two days before Mr. Lauderback himself. Next day, the crate was unloaded—stacked onto the quay with all the rest of the cargo—and I signed for it to be transferred into my warehouse, where Mr. Lauderback would pick it up, after he arrived. But that never happened: the crate was swiped. Never made it into the warehouse.’
    ‘Was the crate identified on the exterior as belonging to Mr. Lauderback?’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ said Balfour. ‘You’ll have seen the crates stacked along the quay—they’d be indistinguishable, you know, were it not for the bills of lading. The bill tells you who owns the goods and who’s the shipper and what have you.’
    ‘What happened when you discovered the crate was missing?’
    ‘You can be sure I tore my hair out, looking for it: I hadn’t the faintest clue where it might have gone. Well,
Godspeed
was wrecked on the bar two weeks later, and when they cleared her cargo, what should turn up but the Lauderback crate! Seems it had been loaded onto
Godspeed
, when she last weighed anchor from the Hokitika port.’
    ‘In other words, very early on the morning of the fifteenth of January.’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘What happened when the Lauderback trunk was finally recovered ?’
    ‘I did some sniffing around,’ said Balfour. ‘Asked some questions of the crew, and they told me how the mistake had come about. Well, here’s what happened. Someone had seen the bill of lading—“Mr. Lauderback, bearer”—and remembered that their skipper—that’s Carver—had been on the lookout for a crate so identified, the previous year. They saw this crate on the wharf, the night of the fourteenth, and they thought, here’s a chance to earn a bit of favour with the master.
    ‘So they open it up—just to be curious. Inside there’s a trunk and a pair of carpetbags and not much else. Doesn’t look terribly valuable , but they figure, you never know. They go off to find Captain Carver, but he’s nowhere to be found. Not in his rooms at the hotel,not at the bars, nowhere. They decide to leave it to the morning, and off they go to bed. Then Carver himself comes flying down the quay in a terrible bother, turns them all out of their hammocks, and says
Godspeed
weighs anchor at the first light of dawn—only a few hours’ hence. He won’t say why. Anyway, the fellows make a decision. They pop the lid back on the crate, haul it aboard nice and quick, and when
Godspeed
weighs anchor just before first light, the crate’s in the hold.’
    ‘Was Captain Carver notified of this addition to the cargo?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ said Balfour, smiling. ‘The fellows were pleased as Punch—they thought there would be a reward in it, you see. So they wait until
Godspeed
is under sail before they call him down. Carver takes one look at the bill of sale and sees they’ve botched the job. “Balfour Shipping?” he says. “It was
Danforth
Shipping, that was the one I lost. You’ve lifted the wrong bloody one—and now we’ve got stolen goods aboard.”’
    ‘Might we infer from this,’ Moody said, ‘that Captain Carver had lost a shipping crate, identified as belonging to Alistair Lauderback, with Danforth Shipping as its shipper, that contained something of great value to him?’
    ‘Certainly looks that way,’ said Balfour.
    ‘Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Balfour.’
    ‘My pleasure, Mr. Moody.’
    Broham, who very plainly had no idea where Moody’s line of questioning was going, waived his right to cross-examine the witness for the defence, and the justice, making a note of this, called the second witness.
    ‘The Honourable Mr. Alistair Lauderback.’
    Alistair Lauderback crossed the breadth of the courtroom in five strides.
    ‘Mr. Lauderback,’ said Moody, when he had given his oath. ‘You are the former owner of the barque
Godspeed
, is that correct?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Lauderback. ‘That is correct.’
    ‘According to the deed of sale, you sold the ship on the twelfth of May, 1865.’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘Is the man to