Storming of the Pa at Ruapekapeka, 11th January 1846

This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024).
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.

Historian James Belich called the well-documented battle between Māori and British at Ruapekapeka a ‘paper victory’ because it so aptly demonstrated the British use of propaganda post-battle to claim a victory they had not earned.1 Here, the soldier-artist John Williams depicts the final stages of the battle when, on 11 January 1846, British troops stormed the fortifications, only to find the pā vacated. The smoky haze billowing over the pā indicates that, once inside, the troops were surprised by Māori attacking from outside the pā. Williams’ painting centres on a small group of British soldiers who have broken away from the main assault to defend one of their men, shot down by Māori armed with muskets, who are visible crouching in the bush on the left.

John Williams was one of several military personnel armed with paint and paper as well as weapons during the siege of Ruapekapeka;2 sketches were also made by Lieutenant George Hyde Page, Major Cyprian Bridge3 and Lieutenant-Colonel Wynyard. From the second half of the eighteenth century, topographical and landscape drawing was added to the curricula of most military academies, and soldiers became a prolific group of artists during the height of Britain’s imperial expansion.4 The ability to picture the landscape directly and simply was indispensable in surveying and mapping terrain, which was in turn crucial for developing military strategy in approaching battle sites, or for analysing them in retrospect.

Soldier-artists often also reveal the artistic nature of their training, many having been taught by highly proficient drawing masters. Paul Sandby, the ‘father of British watercolour’, was, for example, the chief drawing master to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich for nearly 30 years.5 Williams’ painting is based on sketches made hurriedly on site, which were later worked up into a meticulously executed view, carefully constructed according to the conventions of landscape painting; the cleared foreground, framed on each side by trees and scrub, offers up a stage-like platform on which to depict the storming of Ruapekapeka pā as he interpreted it.

1 Belich, The New Zealand Wars, p. 58. 
2 The identity of John Williams, sometimes referred to as lance-sergeant, other times as sergeant, is difficult to trace. Three John Williamses were registered with the 58th Regiment, but it is unclear from the records which were at Ruapekapeka. According to Thomas Morland Hocken, Williams moved to Auckland and was dead by 1890, when his work was included in the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition held in Dunedin. See ‘The Early History, Maori, and South Seas Court’, Otago Witness, 6 March 1890, p. 17. Other records have suggested a death date of c.1905, but the basis for this date has not been identified.
3 Indeed, Williams’ work is often confused with and difficult to separate from that of his superior, Cyprian Bridge. See, for example, Roger Blackley’s analysis of the John Williams–Cyprian Bridge relationship: ‘Lance-Sergeant John Williams: Military topographer of the Northern War’, Art New Zealand, no. 32 (Spring 1984) (art-newzealand.com/32-williams, accessed 3 August 2023).
4 In 1849 a ‘Complete guide to the Junior and Senior Departments of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst’ was written by ‘An experienced officer’ (published by CH Law, London). The key subjects for study were listed as: fortification; military surveying; mathematics and arithmetic; history, geography and classics; French and German; landscape drawing; military drawing. 
5 See John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels (eds), Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2009).