Albert Bone’s chiming watch

Albert Bone’s chiming watch begins as a treasured possession and instrument of business authority, but in New Zealand it becomes the focus of a fatal clash between Bone’s confidence in his own power and Māori interpretations of the unfamiliar device. Its journey—from pocket to public display, from the scene of Bone’s death to the fire—makes the watch more than a personal keepsake: it is a material object whose meanings shift with the people who encounter it.

A keepsake and a business tool

On a Boston coach journey, Bone presses the watch’s knob and lets its mechanism chime while explaining his ambitions for Jinot Sel. He wants Jinot to learn not only the technical craft of axe-making but also how to deal with businessmen. Bone presents his instruction as part of a broader effort to educate Indigenous people in manufacturing, while arguing that they should leave the forests for trades and that the woodlands should become cultivated and commercially productive. The watch’s chiming accompanies this lecture, connecting the device to the business world Bone hopes Jinot will enter.

The watch also carries private value. As Bone recounts his youth and his apprenticeship under the blacksmith Judah Bitter, Jinot considers why his employer has taken an interest in him: perhaps Bone recognizes a fellow poor orphan, or perhaps he regards Jinot as raw material to be heated and shaped into a useful tool. Bone then draws out the watch and calls it his family treasure. The juxtaposition makes the watch a token of inherited attachment within Bone’s own story, even as Jinot is left uncertain whether Bone’s solicitude respects him as a person or treats him as something to be fashioned.

The watch in New Zealand

When Bone and Jinot encounter Māori in New Zealand, Bone’s watch acquires a different meaning. Bone takes it from his pocket; the gathered people react with alarm, murmur that it is an atua, and interpret its audible mechanism as a beating heart. John Grapple explains that they regard the watch as a demon and recalls that, after a whaler lost a watch in the harbor, subsequent illness and calamity had been attributed to an evil spirit beneath the water.

Grapple advises Bone to put the device away because the Māori have strong feelings about such instruments. Bone instead displays what he considers his power: he shakes the watch and speaks to it as if it were a disobedient child. Its chime sounds again, intensifying the crowd’s alarm. The scene turns a familiar instrument of precision and status into an object that cannot be understood on Bone’s terms alone. Its mechanical sound is real, but its significance is not fixed by the owner’s explanation of how it works.

After Bone’s death

Bone later asks whether the enormous trees are kauri. As he turns toward the answer, he is killed by the chief, without noticing the approaching blow. The chief then removes the Quare watch from Bone’s pocket before the body is cut up. Its importance persists in the scene, but ownership and interpretation have changed: the watch is no longer Bone’s cherished possession or demonstration of authority.

The chief places it on a large leaf, covers it with another protective leaf, and later casts it into the fire. The gathered people watch as the watch’s mechanism seems to cry out and then goes silent. The episode reverses Bone’s earlier display: where he treated the watch as a device he could command and use to assert power, the people handle it according to their understanding of its danger. The fire ends the watch’s physical presence in the narrative and gives the object’s destruction the force of a communal response to the threat they associate with it.

Inheritance, memory, and interpretation

The watch’s successive roles gather together several kinds of value without making them identical. To Bone, it is an heirloom and a possession he can use to punctuate a lesson about commerce. To Jinot, it appears within a scene that raises doubts about the assumptions behind Bone’s interest in him. To the Māori who encounter it, its chime and the remembered calamities associated with a lost watch make it a dangerous presence. Those interpretations expose the limits of Bone’s claim to explain the device simply by displaying it.

Elsewhere in the novel, objects and speech carry family memory across separation: Père Crème composes unsent letters to an imaginary sister, while relatives recall a carved snow snake and discuss restoring family ties. The watch participates in this wider pattern of material memory, but its fate is unusually stark. Bone calls it a family treasure; in the New Zealand episode, its significance is not secured by the inheritance he claims for it. It is taken, reinterpreted, and destroyed, leaving the contrast between European technological confidence and Māori knowledge embedded in the object’s changing use.