Fort Jervois on Rīpapa Island is a legacy of New Zealand’s Russian Scare. No not that scare, the other one.
On February 17, 1873 some alarming news came out of Auckland. According to the Daily Southern Star, an iron-clad Russian warship, the Kaskowiski, had entered the Waitematā Harbour, discharged a fatal “mephitic water gas apparatus” and “seized our principal citizens as hostages, demanded a heavy ransom for the city, and emptied the coffers of the banks of all the gold and specie they contained.” Had the Russians invaded?
Actually, it was fake news. The article, which careful readers might have noticed was dated three months in the future, was a hoax, though the issues behind it were genuine. The paper’s editor, David Luckie, was concerned about the potential threat to the South Pacific posed by hostile Russians, and the “Cask o’ Whiskey” warship story was a warning: this could happen. (Careful readers might also have noticed the pronunciation of the ship’s name.) Fake or not, it stirred the pot. New Zealand’s Russian Scare was on.
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An island is visible from the coastal walking track between the township of Diamond Harbour, near Christchurch, and the seaside community of Purau. It’s so close to the mainland it’s hard, at first, to tell it’s an island; in fact, it sits only 50 metres from the southern shoreline of Whakaraupō, or Lyttelton Harbour. From a distance, it looks like any of the hundreds of small islands that hover off Aotearoa’s mainland. But something about it catches the eye. It’s a little too square-edged to be all natural.
Rīpapa Island is fortified. It has been since the early 1800s, when Taununu, the Ngāi Tahu chief from Kaikōura, came south and established a pā on the island. Complete with bastions, ramparts and ditches, it was the first pā in the South Island designed to withstand musket attacks. Nonetheless, according to Kā Huru Manu, Rīpapa was hit by warriors from Ōtākou and Murihiku after Taununu became involved in the Ngāi Tahu civil war of the 1820s. The pā fell, and by 1832 it was abandoned.
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Later, colonial authorities used Rīpapa as both a quarantine station for newly-arrived British ships and as a prison. In 1880, about 150 prisoners from the pacifist settlement at Parihaka were transported from Taranaki. They were held in the quarantine barracks for six months without trial in, according to historian Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa), “miserable conditions”.
But it was the Russian Scare of the 1880s that really put Rīpapa on the map, specifically a map of 14 sites around New Zealand where coastal defences were to be erected. The idea was to safeguard the country’s four main ports at Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin and Lyttelton. Some of these sites, like the Harington Point gun emplacements on the Otago Peninsula, are better known now for their World War II history, which saw the country on high alert due to the fear of a Japanese invasion. But they were originally built to protect Aotearoa from Tsarist Russia, and they’ve become known as the “Russian-scare forts”.
This begs a few questions. For one, were the nineteenth-century Russians really going to attack a tiny pair of islands 10,000 kilometres away? Probably not. But there was a whole empire versus empire thing going on that had potential to involve various British colonies. During the 1850s, the Crimean War had seen the United Kingdom allied with the Ottomans against the Russian Empire. Then, in 1859, a Russian port was established at Vladivostok, with the country’s Pacific Fleet (then called, marvellously, the Siberian Military Flotilla) relocating there in 1871. Russia’s east coast is a long way away, but still, Vladivostok is due north of Darwin. And a Russian advance on Afghanistan in 1885, which at the time was seen as a potential threat to British interests in India, almost erupted into a full-blown war between the British and the Russians.
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s harbours were vulnerable. Despite being part of the British Empire, as a “self-governing colony” New Zealanders were responsible for protecting their own ports. Afghanistan was the last straw, and by the mid-1880s earthworks were underway for a network of coastal fortifications. As the Christchurch Star put it, “since the Russian war scare … a spasmodic effort was made to put our principal ports in a state of defence, so that they might not be at the mercy of the first hostile cruiser that should visit us.”
Four fortresses went up in Lyttelton Harbour: at Erskine Point, to the west of the township of Lyttelton, Spur Point and Battery Point to the east, and Fort Jervois on Rīpapa Island. Taununu hadn’t been the only person to note Rīpapa’s strategic advantages. Set about a third of the way into the harbour with uninterrupted views of its mouth, the one-hectare island is a perfect vantage point from which to spot, and intercept, anyone approaching from the sea.
Built in part with the help of prison labour, Fort Jervois on Rīpapa Island is an elegant basalt stone complex complete with parapet walls, barracks, a courtyard and cutting-edge firepower. It is even adorned with arrowslits and crenellations. A visiting journalist at the time called it, “the strongest fort south of the equator”, while historian
Gavin McLean, writing for Manatū Taonga, noted it was “the colony’s most complete single fortress.” It’s also an example of the fact that, when it comes to architecture, war and religion make excellent, and problematic, muses (see Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China, Windsor Castle and the Basílica de la Sagrada Família).
But Jervois’ highlight was the guns. The fort was equipped with four breech loading hydro-pneumatic Armstrong Disappearing Guns, two 6-inch and two 8-inch. Mounted on what looks like a steampunk cherry picker, Disappearing Guns used the force of their own recoil to move back and down into a protective pit cover in shell-proof steel, where they could be reloaded under cover, hidden from enemy eyes, and enemy fire.
They were groundbreaking at the time, literally; but, as McLean wrote, they never fired a shot in anger.
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Anyone who was around during the final years of the Cold War will remember the way Soviet Russia was framed by the media. The evening news in the 1980s was basically the plot of Rocky IV over and over. Captain Ivan Drago, the very tall, very doped up, very blonde Communist super soldier against plucky Rocky Balboa, who trained honestly, by hand-sawing logs and running around with them on his shoulders like he was personally carrying capitalism to safety. The eighties saw the final scares of the Red Scares. It was the end of that time between World War II and the Gorbachev era when it felt like, at any moment, the Russians were going to, at best, attack the West, kidnap our children, and enrol them all in state-run schools, or, at worst, dispatch a flock of ICBMs to vaporise us all.
They didn’t and nor did we. Nor did the Victorian-era Russians ever invade, or try to invade, or indicate that they were planning to invade, Aotearoa New Zealand. Now just another military artefact, Fort Jervois and Rīpapa Island have been managed by the Department of Conservation since 1990. You can visit by boat and explore the tunnels, crank the handle on one of the two remaining guns, mount the ramparts and scan the horizon for ships.
It’s fascinating, quite beautiful, and, once you understand its history, unsettling. The principal engagements of the Crimean War took place on the Crimean Peninsula, the same place Vladimir Putin occupied and annexed in 2014, eight years before he invaded the Ukrainian mainland. And one of the flashpoints of the Crimean War was a disagreement over religious rights in Palestine. Meanwhile, both the Taliban and al-Qaida have their roots in Afghanistan’s long history of fighting off and fighting with prospective conquerors, including the British, the Soviets and the Americans, all hungry for a slice of what is the gateway between Europe and Asia.
From afar, it’s hard to tell Rīpapa is an island. Up close, it’s hard to imagine that something so solid and distinguished was built to protect us from a fleet of steamships moored on the other side of the planet. But it’s also a reminder that the wars go on and on and on.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
Header image: Fort Jervois, arrowslits and all. PHOTO: Michael Hayward/DOC
