Rainburrow

Rainburrow is a missionary in New Zealand whose certainty about Albert Bone’s fate collapses under questions from Joseph Dogg. He claims Bone was killed, directs Dogg toward Arana Palmer when asked about Jinot Sel’s grave, and insists he has not touched Bone’s money, although he has used more than a hundred pounds of it to build a flax storeroom. The episode makes him a figure in whom colonial religious authority, prejudice, and financial self-interest converge.

Identity and Colonial Outlook

Rainburrow’s appearance and manner are filtered through his own perspective when Dogg and Etienne Sel arrive at his sunny workroom. He judges them by their faces and expressions, treating their appearance as evidence of character before either man has explained his purpose. He greets them in the brusque voice he uses to dismiss time-wasters, an early sign that he expects to control the encounter.

His prejudice is not confined to private judgment. In an earlier exchange, he rejects a missionary’s appeal to the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge and sensibilities, dismissing them as unreliable and insisting that the missionary’s duty is to care for their souls, cultivate loyalty to the French king, and urge them to fight the English. The passage shows religious instruction joined to political service: Indigenous people are valued as instruments in a colonial conflict even as their own knowledge is denied.

Rainburrow likewise treats Indigenous relationships with the natural world as disorder to be corrected. The account attributed to him explains that Mi’kmaq lives follow the seasons and that they regard trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals. He opposes that outlook with the claim that trees exist for human use, urging cultivation, gardens, and regulated daily life instead. His position reduces a different system of knowledge to refusal of work and order.

Land, Labor, and Religious Authority

Rainburrow’s views become explicit in a letter about the Sel family, newcomers from Odanak. He objects that they speak French and that the older brothers can read and write using the Roman alphabet, abilities he fears will let them stir up trouble. He also resents their preference for seasonal trapping, hunting, river work, forestry, and other jobs rather than farming. Their choices are presented not as practical decisions but as resistance to the social order he wants imposed.

The letter makes his theory of land ownership plain: land belongs to the person who improves it. In this argument, clearing forest, building a house, and sheltering livestock establish a white settler’s right to claim cleared ground; Indigenous use of forests for sustenance is recast as failure to improve the land. Rainburrow then describes French possession as a moral title supposedly earned through labor and displacement. His religious language does more than express belief: it legitimizes settlement by treating colonization as divinely warranted.

That hierarchy also shapes his view of charity. When Aaron Sel seeks vegetables for starving Indigenous people, Rainburrow says that aid only delays what he regards as the inevitable disappearance of Indigenous people, who, in his view, must learn to work and store crops for winter. Yet he steps back when Aaron’s expression alarms him and permits the vegetables to be sold. The exchange reveals the limits of his hard doctrine in practice: he grants immediate assistance, but frames it as a concession within a supposedly unavoidable colonial outcome.

The Bone Inquiry

Years later, Dogg comes to Rainburrow’s workroom carrying Rainburrow’s own old letter, stained and torn at one corner. Dogg identifies himself as Bone’s foreman and acting manager of the axe works, and asks whether Bone has returned after his inquiries went unanswered. Rainburrow initially stammers, then says Bone never came back and that they are satisfied he was lured away and killed by a Māori man.

Dogg asks what supports that certainty. Rainburrow admits that he relies on unnamed people and cannot identify them, then repeats the allegation that Bone was killed and perhaps eaten. He also characterizes Bone as headstrong for entering the forest with someone he did not know, while making a sweeping claim about Māori deceit. The scene supplies no evidence for Rainburrow’s certainty; instead, it shows him substituting rumor and stereotype for proof.

The inquiry also concerns Jinot Sel, who has died in New Zealand. Rainburrow says Jinot died of blood poisoning after injuring his foot while working as a bushman, and points to Arana Palmer, Jinot’s friend, as someone who can give details. When asked about the grave, Rainburrow says he does not know where it is and directs the visitors to Arana, whom he believes buried Jinot. His answer leaves Etienne Sel’s purpose unresolved: Etienne has come to reclaim Jinot and, if he is dead, to return his remains to the land where he began.

Money, Exposure, and Narrative Role

Dogg’s questions turn from the missing men to Bone’s money box. Rainburrow says it is kept in a safe place in a cupboard in his sleeping room and promises to fetch it. When Dogg challenges him about whether he used the funds, Rainburrow indignantly denies having touched even a halfpenny. The narration directly exposes the denial as a lie: Rainburrow has used more than a hundred pounds of Bone’s money to build the flax storeroom where he keeps his bales.

Dogg is prepared to test the claim rather than accept it. He has Bone’s monthly accounts up to the point when their correspondence ceased three years earlier and knows the amount in the box down to the last penny. He demands access to the money and papers, as well as the evidence Rainburrow claims exists for Bone’s death. Rainburrow’s confident account thus meets a concrete audit, and the men leave him biting his thumbnail. The passage does not report the final accounting or a resolution of Bone’s fate; it ends with Rainburrow under scrutiny, his authority weakened by what the reader knows he has concealed.

Across these episodes, Rainburrow’s religious office coexists with political advocacy, a doctrine of land improvement that erases Indigenous claims, and the misappropriation of money entrusted to him. His repeated confidence is undercut by the narrative’s disclosure of his actions: the man who speaks of moral title and proper conduct cannot substantiate his allegation against Bone and has used Bone’s funds for his own building. His scenes connect colonial ideology not only to public claims about land and labor but also to the private handling of money and evidence.