Albert Bone’s New Zealand expedition

Albert Bone’s New Zealand expedition turns a search for new markets into an encounter with the machinery of overseas timber extraction. Bone travels to inspect the country’s renowned kauri and assess the prospects for an axe factory, bringing Jinot Sel along despite Jinot’s reluctance. Their passage connects the ambitions of a manufacturer in Boston to a colonial trading world in which timber, transport, and commerce converge—and in which forest abundance becomes a justification for rapid depletion.

Commercial Ambition and the Choice of New Zealand

Bone’s expedition follows a deliberate reassessment of wealth. Observing the fur trade’s swings between glut and scarcity, Charles Duquet had earlier rejected beaver, fish, seals, game, and birds as foundations for permanent riches. He instead imagined the forest as an enduring commodity that could supply ships, houses, and fuel, and planned to move from furs into timber. The contrast establishes the wider commercial logic that Bone later applies to axe-making: forests appear to offer an abundant resource, while the tools needed to fell them promise a market wherever people build.

After a year’s consideration, Bone proposes establishing an axe manufactory abroad. He reasons that trees grow around the world and that people everywhere need axes to build houses and other structures. His list of possible countries includes Norway, Russia, Java, New Zealand, and Brazil; the requirement that inhabitants speak English narrows the choice to New Zealand. Jinot suggests instead that the vast forests west of Ohio might merit attention, but Bone dismisses the alternative and pursues the overseas venture.

Kauri is the decisive attraction. Bone has learned that the trees are exceptionally large and that their wood is prized for being unblemished, light, odorless, golden in color, workable, and durable. He also hears of an emerging market in inferior axes and resolves to see the forests himself before deciding. The expedition is therefore both a personal inspection and a commercial investigation: Bone wants to judge the resource and the opportunity for manufacturing tools to exploit it.

Jinot’s Reluctant Departure

Bone expects Jinot to accompany him and has already arranged passage, naming Joseph Dogg as the competent manager who will look after the factory while they are away. Jinot objects that he has promised to keep his son Aaron close until he reaches manhood. His appeal to Bone’s knowledge of his painful family history makes clear that the journey is not simply a business assignment for him; it conflicts with a responsibility he has chosen to honor.

The route makes the distance and the lack of choice tangible. In London, Bone has leased rooms for a month in a shabby-genteel neighborhood near the shipping wharves. Jinot finds the city unlike the larger Boston he had expected, while Bone invites him to explore its docks. Their onward passage is discussed at a meeting with travelers and missionaries. A missionary explains that the voyage from London may take five months or longer, with Port Jackson as the first port and the departure point for New Zealand. Convict transports continue to the island and return carrying masts, making the existing timber route part of the expedition’s context.

Jinot’s objections intensify when Bone’s advisers trade conflicting descriptions of Māori people. One account depicts them as exceptionally violent; another missionary describes them as intelligent and spiritual people who might welcome peaceful religious teaching. Jinot says he wants to return to Boston and has no desire to meet them. Bone rejects the claim that they are cannibals as a sailors’ tale and allows that Māori resistance may be a defense of their land against seizure. At the same time, he assumes that kind treatment will eventually persuade them of the advantages of white people’s inventions. His sympathy for resistance thus coexists with a paternalistic confidence in colonial improvement.

Despite Jinot’s objections, he and Bone board the Doublehail, a convict transport. The voyage is difficult for many passengers, while missionary Edward Torrents Rainburrow remains active and missionary Boxall follows him with a notebook. Below deck, the convicts travel in cramped confinement. Jinot, wearied by the crossing and longing for the Atlantic and the coast of Maine, is kept from falling silent only by the prospect of a costly return and by the fact that Bone has paid him no wages since they left Boston. Australia comes into view, but the expedition continues: Jinot understands that he is bound for New Zealand because returning is beyond his means.

Arrival and the Colonial Timber Frontier

At Port Jackson, the travelers wait a month for passage onward. New Zealand presents itself first as a settlement organized around shipping and trade. As Bone and Jinot arrive by river, they see a large trader’s warehouse, a chandler’s shop, two shacks—one marked NEW ZEALAND COMPANY—and the houses of European traders and government officials ranged along the hillside. A fenced Māori village lies beyond the settlement, with a dense forest farther back. The layout places the commercial town, colonial administration, Māori community, and forest within one view, but not on equal terms.

Jinot also sees the expedition through his position among its participants. Māori aboard the ship listen to Rainburrow’s preaching and ask questions, while they treat Jinot as Bone’s inferior servant and largely ignore him. The moment complicates any simple division between European observers and Māori subjects: Jinot himself is misrecognized within the hierarchy of the expedition, even as Bone and his associates arrive to assess local resources.

The wider timber system is already moving into the forests. Shore stations in deep-water harbors combine logging camps with trading posts handling flax, spars, and lumber. Chandlers, warehouses, sawmills, and small shipyards attract European settlers; once the most valuable coastal timber is taken, camps shift to the next promising site. The account describes the residue left behind as smoldering stumps and deep accumulations of waste. Kahikatea is cut first, then kauri, and in some places felled timber covers the ground for days of travel. Burning becomes a quick way to clear the remaining forest, taking not only trees but also vines, birds, insects, fruit, bats, epiphytes, ferns, and forest litter.

This damage is not presented as a side effect unknown to the commercial system. Rather, the newcomers’ restricted interest in the country—to take whatever can be made profitable—makes the clearing intelligible as part of the business. The idea that the forest exists for the incoming traders turns ecological abundance into permission to extract, discard, and move on.

Significance and Afterlife

The expedition belongs to a longer history of timber commerce, not an isolated adventure. When Duke & Breitsprecher later sends its first shipload of premium pine to Sydney, a prospective buyer seeks a decade-long supply contract and expresses interest in kauri and in finding a partner to establish efficient New Zealand lumber camps. The exchange makes explicit what Bone’s earlier journey foreshadows: distant forests can be joined to overseas buyers through shipping and organized production, extending the reach of companies beyond their original territories.

The episode’s significance lies in the distance between the promise of a permanent resource and the practices used to obtain it. Bone’s search is founded on the confidence that trees are widely available and useful, while the New Zealand timber camps reveal how extraction advances by taking the best coastal stands, burning what remains, and transferring operations to the next site. Jinot’s reluctant presence gives that commercial logic a human counterpoint: the expedition’s plans override his wish to stay near Aaron, just as the traders’ plans subordinate the forest and its existing inhabitants to external markets. The journey consequently joins family obligation, labor, colonial assumptions, and ecological loss within one expanding timber economy.