London

London is the city where Jinot Sel’s expected passage home gives way to Mr. Bone’s New Zealand expedition. It is both a waypoint in Jinot’s journey and a place from which the novel maps the wider timber trade: London’s docks and emigration plans connect distant forests to shipping, labor, and commercial ambition, while the city’s own poverty and industrial bustle unsettle the promise of orderly colonial development.

Arrival and the City

Jinot arrives expecting London to be a larger Boston, but finds a city that does not fit that comparison. He stays with Mr. Bone, who has leased rooms for a month in a shabby-genteel neighborhood about a mile from the wharves. The lodging offers a comfortable sitting room and a carved mahogany bedstead, while Jinot’s own adjoining room is small and dark; Mr. Bone invites him to use the sitting room. The temporary household places the two travelers close together before the journey’s next turn, even as the city outside overwhelms Jinot’s expectations.

On their first walk, they leave a street of decaying Georgian residences for ironmongers, heaps of metal, and coal. Jinot is struck by a family of ragged adults and emaciated children. Mr. Bone attributes their condition to people driven from rural land by enclosure, making displacement part of the city’s visible landscape rather than an abstraction. Around them, workers rush through their tasks: navvies and dockworkers, men laying cobbles, scavengers, and sweeps emptying their buckets into the river. London’s commercial activity appears not as a smooth machine but as a crowded world of labor and hardship.

Wharves, Emigration, and Colonial Plans

The wharves are the destination Mr. Bone has promised to show Jinot, but their walk is diverted by the noise of a street fight. Mr. Bone takes it as evidence of a national disposition toward fighting; Jinot compares the spectacle to the drunken barkskins he has known. The encounter briefly sets the two men’s interpretations beside one another: Mr. Bone speaks with relish, while Jinot measures what he sees against another world.

A newspaper hawker and a warehouse wall then turn their attention from London’s streets to the routes leading out of them. Among the posted bills is a conspicuous notice advertising emigration to New Zealand. Mr. Bone praises Edward Wakefield and the New Zealand Company’s program of systematic colonization, contrasting its planned social order with what he regards as the disorder of the American colonies and Canada. His approval reveals the assumptions behind the expedition: settlement is presented as an exercise in rational organization, with society arranged in designated classes from the outset.

At a meeting attended by a dozen travelers, New Zealand becomes a destination measured in months, ports, and cargo. The voyage from London may take five months or longer, depending on weather; Port Jackson is named as the first port of call and as the departure point for New Zealand. Convict transports, the travelers are told, carry convicts onward and return to England with masts. The timber is already part of the route’s commercial logic before Jinot has seen the forest: the colony is imagined through transportation, labor, and the quality of its trees.

Mr. Bone’s Expedition and Jinot’s Objections

The London meeting also exposes the competing stories through which Europeans interpret the Māori. One correspondent’s letter depicts them as exceptionally violent and describes their appearance and clothing in disparaging terms. Another missionary, Mr. Boxall, offers a different account, describing them as intelligent and spiritual and as wanting messages of peace. These are not neutral descriptions: both are European voices speaking about Māori people, and the disagreement unfolds within a gathering organized around the prospect of travel and colonization.

Jinot asks to return to Boston because he does not want to meet the people characterized as wild. Mr. Bone, however, is eager to continue. He doubts the sailors’ stories of cannibalism and recognizes that Māori may be defending land that outsiders intend to seize. Yet his proposed remedy is still assimilation: he imagines that kind treatment will lead them to appreciate the advantages of the white man’s inventions. His response therefore combines a rejection of one colonial stereotype with confidence in another colonial promise.

Although Jinot objects, Mr. Bone takes passage on the Doublehail, a convict transport, and Jinot finds himself aboard with him. The London plan thus becomes an actual departure rather than a discussion: a month’s lodging near the wharves leads into a voyage shared with missionaries and chained convicts. Mr. Rainburrow remains active throughout the journey, while Mr. Boxall follows him with a notebook. Jinot’s reluctance does not prevent the expedition from carrying him onward.

A Node in the Timber Economy

London’s significance extends beyond Jinot’s immediate departure. Earlier, Charles Duquet had concluded that the fur trade could not provide the permanent fortune he wanted: animal populations and markets were too uncertain. He turned instead to forests, which he regarded as an enduring commodity capable of supplying ships, houses, and fuel. The English colonists’ pine-mast trade offered a precedent, and Duquet proposed building capital in furs before shifting to timber. His plan connects the novel’s early ambitions in New France to the later routes passing through London.

The city’s wharves also belong to a broader exchange network. In India, Captain Verdwijnen traded ceramics and silks for provisions and spices, and acquired Patna opium for medicinal trade in Amsterdam. Duquet noticed the possibility of adapting such a triangular route to lumber, while also considering the growing Chinese market for opium. These commercial possibilities echo through London’s shipping and migration scenes: goods, people, and plans travel through linked ports, even when the people moved by those plans do not share equal power over them.

The later logging of New Zealand forests shows what the commercial map means on the ground. Shore stations combine logging camps and trading posts; associated warehouses, sawmills, shipyards, and chandlers draw Europeans to harbors where timber is available. Operators take the best forest and move on, leaving waste and cleared ground behind. The forest is treated as though it exists for commercial use, while the consequences fall on the landscapes and communities in which extraction occurs. London’s emigration notice, its wharves, and the promised cargo of masts are therefore not incidental scenery: together, they frame the passage from metropolitan appetite to colonial resource-taking.

From London to Later Timber Markets

The connection persists into the later history of the timber firms. When Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of best pine to Sydney, an Australian buyer seeks a decade-long supply contract and proposes finding a logging partner in New Zealand to establish efficient lumber camps. The exchange revives in corporate form the earlier London itinerary: timber is dispatched across oceans, new forests are sought as sources of supply, and the language of efficiency presents expansion as commercial good sense.

Across these episodes, London functions as an entrepôt of expectation. It is a place of urban labor and displacement, a departure point for planned settlement, and a meeting ground where travelers discuss ports, forests, and colonial peoples before reaching the lands they intend to use. Jinot’s discomfort prevents the expedition from appearing entirely as Mr. Bone’s adventure; his objections register the distance between the traveler who is carried along and the people whose land is already being incorporated into European plans. The city’s most consequential role is thus connective: it joins the family fortunes imagined through timber to the overseas routes and extractive practices that make those fortunes possible.