Joseph Dogg and Etienne Sel search for Jinot

Joseph Dogg and Etienne Sel search for Jinot in New Zealand as kin, investigators, and claimants to a history that Edward Torrents Rainburrow would prefer to close. Their arrival challenges the missionary’s convenient certainty that Albert Bone and Jinot are dead, and reveals that Jinot was not Bone’s servant but his favored friend and business associate, named heir to his works and possessions. The search becomes at once an inquiry into disappearance, a struggle over an estate, and an effort to bring Jinot home—even when the land has erased the grave they came to find.

The inquiry begins

The search takes shape when Joseph Dogg and Etienne Sel arrive at Rainburrow’s sunny workroom in spring. The missionary has hoped to finish his correspondence without interruption; instead, the two men stand before him with folded arms. The narration registers their appearance through Rainburrow’s prejudiced gaze: he sees their Indigenous features and reads their faces as signs of disagreeable character. That perspective matters. The visitors have come to ask for facts, while the man who controls the information initially treats them as unwelcome intruders.

Dogg identifies himself as the foreman and acting manager of Bone’s ax works. To establish why he has come, he produces a stained, tattered letter from Rainburrow, written several years earlier and torn at one corner. The old letter connects this encounter to a long-delayed inquiry: Dogg asks whether Bone has returned, since his own requests for information have gone unanswered. The worn paper is evidence of persistence, not proof of what happened.

Rainburrow answers that Bone never returned and that he is quite sure the man was decoyed and killed by a Maori renegade. Dogg refuses to accept assurance in place of evidence. He asks what grounds Rainburrow has for being so certain, and then insists that the people who supposedly know must be produced. His objection is direct: people do not simply disappear, or get eaten, without an account that can be examined. Rainburrow counters that such a death can happen in New Zealand, invoking Bone’s headstrong willingness to enter the forest with an unfamiliar local man and attributing guile to Maori people. The exchange exposes the difference between a report and a verified conclusion—and the racial assumptions being used to make an unverified conclusion sound plausible.

Jinot, Bone, and the estate

Dogg’s questions extend beyond Bone’s fate to the property left behind. He asks Rainburrow about Bone’s money box, and the missionary says it is secured in a cupboard in his sleeping room, promising to fetch it. The promise does not settle Dogg’s concern. He also asks whether Rainburrow has used any of the funds, prompting an indignant denial: Rainburrow swells with offense at being called a thief. In the scene, control of the money box is inseparable from control of the missing man’s story; Dogg demands both the property and an accountable explanation.

Etienne’s question is more personal and more urgent: where is Jinot Sel? He wants to see him. Rainburrow replies that Jinot died of blood poisoning after hurting his foot or leg while working as a bushman. He names Arana Palmer, Jinot’s friend, as someone who can provide details. Rainburrow’s account shifts between a specific cause of death and uncertainty about the injury, leaving the visitors with another claim that requires corroboration.

Dogg then corrects Rainburrow’s characterization of Jinot. Jinot was not Bone’s servant, as the missionary assumes, but a favored friend and business associate. Bone had willed his works and possessions to Jinot, including the ax factory in Massachusetts. If Bone and Jinot are both dead, Dogg explains, Bone’s holdings are likely to pass into Jinot’s estate and ultimately to Jinot’s son, Aaron. Dogg has undertaken to bring the details back to Aaron, who could not make the long journey. The question of what happened to Jinot therefore carries a material consequence: it may determine who inherits the factory and the rest of Bone’s property.

Kinship and the search for a grave

Etienne identifies himself as Jinot’s uncle, though Jinot was many years older than he was. He and Dogg, he says, have come to reclaim Jinot and take him back to his home country. If Rainburrow’s account is true, they need to find the bones so Jinot can be returned to the land where he began. His purpose is not satisfied by being told that Jinot died; the physical return of his remains matters to the family’s effort to bring him home.

Rainburrow says he does not know where Jinot was buried and directs the visitors to Arana Palmer, one of the sons of the trader Orion Palmer. He believes Arana was Jinot’s friend and buried him, but does not know where. By ending the interview with directions and a courteous dismissal, Rainburrow sends the men elsewhere without resolving either the location of the grave or the accuracy of his own account. Dogg, meanwhile, makes clear that the money box must be handed over before they leave. Their encounter ends not with a finding, but with two outstanding tasks: pursue the evidence through Arana and secure the property for the rightful estate.

The novel has already shown the fate of the grave Rainburrow cannot locate. Arana and Shuttercock buried Jinot near the river at the edge of a hay field where they had cut rickers two years before. Rain began before the grave was covered; then a violent storm sent torrents down the bare slope, carrying rocks, logs, soil, the old cookhouse, and Jinot’s body into the Pacific. The reader thus knows more than the men do when they ask Rainburrow where Jinot lies. Their search for his bones faces a brutal obstruction: the burial site has been washed away, and Jinot’s remains have been carried out to sea.

Departure and return toward Aaron

The journey does not end at Rainburrow’s refusal or at the vanished grave. On their travels, Etienne encounters a landscape in which Maori stories connect plants and insects to gods and their vengeful lives. Aihe warns Dogg about the poisonous sting of ongaonga, telling of a white sailor who ran into the forest at night, fell among the plants, and died from their stings. She also gives Etienne a pepekemataruwai, glossed as an “insect with a silly face”; he flings it away, laughing. These encounters make the landscape legible through knowledge and stories that the visitors are encountering rather than controlling.

Etienne is struck by how everything they see, hear, or smell is linked to Maori gods. He promises himself that, when he returns to K’taqmkuk, he will seek out elders and ask for stories of the ancestors. Looking at the ocean below through the trees, he feels that it looks back at him; he reflects that the Atlantic had never fixed him with such a watery eye. He wonders whether this is a sign, but the narrative leaves the question open. The ocean’s presence also acquires a concrete and painful meaning in the story: Jinot’s body has been swept into the Pacific, beyond the recovery Etienne hopes for.

At the new moon, Dogg and Etienne work their passage to Port Jackson. After a long wait, they sign on to a ship bound for London and continue onward to Boston. Their stated aim is to find Aaron. The route carries them away from New Zealand without the bones Etienne sought and without a fully established account of Bone’s disappearance, but with Dogg’s information about the estate to deliver to Jinot’s son. The search therefore concludes not in recovery or certainty, but in a return journey whose next obligation is to bring the unresolved news home.