Edward Torrents Rainburrow

Edward Torrents Rainburrow is a Protestant missionary and Albert Bone’s chief adviser, a figure whose polished religious authority helps turn colonial assumptions into practical power. He advocates conversion and labor discipline while disparaging Indigenous knowledge and land use; after Bone disappears in New Zealand, he confines Bone’s servant, Jinot Sel, and writes to the Bone Ax Company in a way that shifts suspicion onto Jinot and presents Rainburrow as the natural custodian of Bone’s property.

Identity and Public Bearing

Rainburrow is introduced as a missionary of an unspecified Protestant denomination and Bone’s principal adviser. His physical presence is described as imposing, but he has trained his voice to a quiet pitch and smiles. The contrast between his outward composure and the authority he claims becomes important: he can present himself as a measured spiritual guide even while advancing coercive judgments about Indigenous peoples and their place in colonial society.

He is one of seven missionaries at a meeting about passage to New Zealand. When another missionary, Mr. Boxall, disputes the demeaning reports about Māori people and describes them as intelligent and spiritual, Rainburrow resents what he sees as an intrusion into his own relationship with Bone. He then privately offers to arrange Bone’s passage from Australia to New Zealand and accommodation there. His influence thus operates not only through religious pronouncements but through personal access, travel arrangements, and proximity to a wealthy employer.

Missionary Ideas and Colonial Authority

Rainburrow’s view of Indigenous people is marked by a division between spiritual instruction, which he regards as a missionary’s proper task, and knowledge or judgment, which he refuses to recognize as their standing. In a conversation about Mi’kmaq people, he rejects an appeal to their sensibilities and treats a young sailor’s reported mistreatment as irrelevant to the duty of converting them and cultivating loyalty to the French king. He insists that their role is to fight the English when French territory is threatened. His religious office is therefore linked to imperial demands: spiritual care is made compatible with mobilizing Indigenous people for colonial war, while their own experience is dismissed.

In another account, Rainburrow describes Mi’kmaq relationships with animals and plants, their seasonal lives, and their understanding of trees as persons. He sets that outlook against his own instruction that trees exist for human uses such as building houses and ships. He also urges people to farm and establish gardens, framing settled agricultural routines as proper order. The contrast shows that his description of Indigenous life is not neutral ethnography: he interprets a different system of knowledge and subsistence as a refusal of the labor and land-use practices he considers legitimate.

His letter to Sister Marguerite makes that judgment explicit. He argues that land belongs to the person who improves it, and portrays fishing, hunting, and gathering as idleness in contrast with clearing forest, building a house, and sheltering livestock. On this basis, he represents French settlement as earning a moral title from God. The argument converts a colonial preference for cleared, cultivated land into a supposedly universal religious principle, making Indigenous use and knowledge of the land disappear from the question of ownership.

Bone’s New Zealand Expedition

Rainburrow accompanies Bone’s plans to travel to New Zealand, where colonial settlement and timber are presented as opportunities. At a meeting of prospective travelers, he describes Port Jackson as the first stop and discusses convict transports that continue to New Zealand to collect masts for the return voyage. Bone is attracted to systematic colonization, while the discussion around him includes conflicting missionary accounts of Māori people. Rainburrow’s role is both ideological and practical: he participates in the discussions that frame colonization and offers to secure the arrangements that will carry Bone there.

Jinot, Bone’s servant, tells Bone that he wants to return to Boston and does not wish to meet the people being described as dangerous. Bone rejects the certainty of the sensational reports and allows that Māori people may be protecting their land from unfair seizure. Rainburrow, meanwhile, has already offered to assist with the journey. Though Jinot objects, he is swept aboard the convict transport Doublehail with Bone and the missionaries. Rainburrow remains active throughout the passage, while Jinot’s reluctance does not alter the expedition’s course.

Bone’s Disappearance and Rainburrow’s Letter

When Bone disappears from the settlement, Rainburrow turns suspicion toward Jinot. He claims that Jinot may have harmed his employer and challenges his account that Bone left with a Māori man. Because the interpreter, John Grapple, is away in Port Jackson, Rainburrow says Jinot’s statement cannot yet be verified. He orders Jinot confined to a hut, has guards placed to prevent escape, and says food will be brought to him. The confinement rests on Rainburrow’s authority and on the temporary absence of the witness who could confirm Jinot’s account.

Rainburrow then writes to Joseph Dogg at the Bone Ax Company. He presents himself as a close friend of Bone and characterizes Jinot as suspicious, emphasizing his excursions into the forest and suggesting a sinister motive. He reports that Bone has been missing for three days, repeats Jinot’s account of the Māori companion, and notes that Grapple cannot yet corroborate it. In the same letter, Rainburrow says he has taken Bone’s money box into his care, interpreting Jinot’s claim that Bone owed him money as further reason for suspicion.

The letter also makes Rainburrow’s proposed authority plain. He offers to act for Bone as friend and spiritual adviser, arrange the return of Bone’s possessions to Boston, and oversee legal matters, invoking his influence in the country and New Zealand’s recent annexation by Britain. He says he does not know of a will made in the colony, while asking whether Dogg knows of one. The sequence is revealing: Rainburrow first confines the person whose account could challenge his version, then writes to the employer’s company in a voice of protective concern while holding the money box and offering to manage the absent man’s affairs. The text does not establish what ultimately happened to Bone, but it shows how Rainburrow’s religious and colonial standing enables him to control the immediate account of the disappearance.

Narrative Significance

Rainburrow links the book’s earlier colonial arguments about conversion, agricultural improvement, and Indigenous land to its later account of overseas timber extraction. Across these settings, he treats Indigenous difference as a problem to be reordered: people should be converted, directed toward approved forms of labor, and made to accept the land claims of European settlers. His assertions of spiritual responsibility do not displace material interests; in the Bone episode, they accompany control over a servant, a money box, and the proposed handling of an employer’s estate.

His polished manner sharpens the contrast between benevolent presentation and coercive effect. The quiet voice and smile do not prevent him from endorsing imperial force, dismissing Indigenous claims, or using confinement to limit a witness’s ability to speak. Rainburrow is therefore not merely a religious commentator: he embodies the way missionary authority can reinforce colonial ownership and administrative power, while representing those interventions as moral care.