Ripapa - Fort Jervois Historic Reserve

The most impressive relic of 19th century efforts to protect Lyttelton is Fort Jervois on Ripapa Island. The island was the site of an early 19th century "musket pa" (a fortification constructed to protect the defenders against fire from muskets) built by a local chief, Taununu. In the 1880s New Zealand was gripped by fears that Russian ships might attack New Zealand ports. Construction of a fort on Ripapa, by prison labour, began early in 1886. All traces of Taununu's pa were obliterated. The fort was named Jervois after the Governor of the day. Four Armstrong disappearing guns were in place by 1889. The fort was abandoned between 1925 and 1936, but was manned again during World War II. Since 1990 the island has been an historic reserve.- JW

Xenophobia’s ramparts on the sea?

By Gavin McLean

New Zealanders thrilled to their first ‘Russian Scare’ more than a century before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1873 the Daily Southern Cross ran a hoax story about a Russian cruiser bombarding Auckland. For most of that time we relied on the Royal Navy, but from the 1880s to 1957 we also maintained coastal defence batteries.

Ngai Tahu had last used Ripapa (‘mooring rock’) as a refuge pa in the late 1820s. Identified as a potential battery site in 1857, Ripapa became a quarantine station for Vogel’s immigrants in 1873. They called it Humanity Island, a name Taranaki Maori held prisoner here in 1880 may have found ironic.

In the mid-1880s tension between the British and Russian empires drove New Zealand to fortify its main ports. Ripapa formed part of Lyttelton’s defences, along with Battery, Spur and Erskine Points. Down came the quarantine buildings and the top 5 m of the island itself. Workers completed a submarine mining depot in 1886 but funding cuts slowed other work, forcing the use of prison labour, the ‘Devil's Own Brigade’. Although the big guns, two 8-inch rifled muzzle-loaders and two 6-inch hydro-pneumatic disappearing guns, were in place by 1889, construction work dragged on until 1895 and finishing work took even longer. At Fort Jervois, as it was named after former Governor Sir William Jervois, an imperial expert on coastal defences, crenellations and mock crossed-arrow slits gave a theatrical look to the colony’s most complete single fortress. Experts complained that the guns were bunched too closely together.

Fort Jervois never fired a shot in anger. For a while it was a detention centre for the ‘Ripapa Island martyrs’, young conscientious objectors who staged a hunger strike here in 1913. During the First World War it was battery HQ for Lyttelton and the examination battery, and it also briefly held Lieutenant Commander Graf Felix von Luckner, a noted German navy raider. It was downgraded from fort to magazine in 1922 and abandoned three years later. The army reinstated it as a magazine in 1936 and in 1941 returned one 55-year-old gun to marginal operational status. In 1943, however, the weapon was declared ineffective and three years later the army left the fort to the harbour board and then the Navy League’s sea cadets.