The Counterfeit Seal: A Tale of Otago’s First Settlers seeks to accurately portray how the lives of the early Otago settlers might have been, while elements of romance and deceit are simultaneously interwoven through the narrative as the reader is carried along with relationship of the story’s protagonist. The novel was written and published by Robert Noble Adams in Dunedin, 1897, for Otago’s Jubilee, and was praised in the Otago Witness¹ for its “homely diction” which conveyed “with tenderness, albeit without flourish” the struggles of his forefathers.