item details
Overview
This is a muzzle-loading Flintlock 'Brown Bess' Land Pattern 57 calibre, single-barrelled, 'trade musket' complete with all original fittings and ramrod. The handgrip of the stock has a small oval plate engraved with 'Capt. R J Otway RN (1808-1884)', and the maker's name Ketland is stamped on the lock plate with stamped marks along the barrel and at the end of the trigger guard plate. The flint is held in position with a piece of modern leather. The butt plate, ramrod strips, and trigger guard are all brass. Ketland Company manufactured the musket about 1820.
History
This musket is in excellent condition for its age. The stock is embellished with a brass plate engraved with the words 'Taken in Kawittis [sic] Pah, Ruapekapeka, New Zealand January 11th 1846'. After a ferocious bombardment that lasted two weeks, the Northern War (waged between Māori and the British during the 1840s) came to an abrupt end on Sunday 11 January 1846 when the British captured Ruapekapeka. Robert Jocelyn Otway, a First Lieutenant on HMS Castor, led a storming party of seamen, consisting of the Pioneer axemen whose task it was to cut their way through the outer palisades of the pā and clear an entry for the main assault force.
The British assumed the pā would be heavily defended, but they entered to find it occupied only by Kawiti and a dozen warriors, who fired one volley and fled (pursued by some of the British). The apparent abandonment of Ruapekapeka was in fact part of the Māori strategy to lure the British into heavy bush, where they could be ambushed. Heavy fighting then took place outside the pā, with casualties on both sides. Otway captured this musket during the assault on the pā. In recognition of his services that day, he was mentioned in despatches and promoted to the rank of Commander.
Through the Otway family
The musket passed from Vice-Admiral Robert Jocelyn Otway (1808-1884) of Castle Otway, County Tipperary, Ireland, by descent to his only child and heiress, Frances Margaret, Mrs Otway-Ruthven, (?-1907) of Castle Otway. It then passed to her son Captain Robert Mervyn Bermingham Otway-Ruthven (1867-1919) RGA, then to his son Captain Robert Jocelyn Oliver Otway-Ruthven (1901-1974) RN, DSO, and then to a private collection in Dublin. Te Papa purchased it in 2000 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds.
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 Michael Fitzgerald.
Robert Jocelyn Otway (1808–1884) was first lieutenant of Her Majesty’s 36-gun frigate Castor, which arrived at Kororāreka from China on 12 December 1845.1 The Royal Navy played an important part in the Northern War, ensuring that the Crown controlled access by sea, hindering attempts to supply Kawiti and Hōne Heke’s forces with weapons, ammunition and food.2
On 11 January 1846, Otway commanded the ‘storming party’ of seamen and Royal Marines which led the assault on Ruapekapeka pā . . . Otway’s naval career benefited from his actions at Ruapekapeka. His promotion to the rank of commander a few months later was backdated to 11 January, and he eventually retired as an admiral.3 Otway kept this musket, which must have been the prized possession of one of the defenders, as a souvenir. At some point he had a plaque engraved and placed on the musket, and the small dents on the musket’s stock suggest it may have been hung on a wall, possibly as a trophy in his ancestral home in Ireland.
Its almost pristine condition suggests that it may have been recently imported to New Zealand, despite Governor FitzRoy’s warnings to traders not to sell arms and gunpowder to Māori and the navy’s blockade.4 The maker, Ketland & Co. of Birmingham, England, specialised in ‘trade muskets’ and supplied markets in North America, Africa and other ‘frontier’ regions around the globe.5
1 ‘Otway, Robert Jocelyn’, A Naval Biographical Dictionary(en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Naval_Biographical_Dictionary/Otway,_Robert_Jocelyn, accessed 19 February 2020); P Dennerly, ‘The Navy in the Northern War: New Zealand 1845–46’, in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds), Tutu te Puehu: New perspectives on the New Zealand Wars (Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2016), p. 74.
2 Dennerly, ‘The Navy in the Northern War’, p. 74.
3 ‘Otway, Robert Jocelyn’, A Naval Biographical Dictionary.
4 Ward, The Shadow of the Land, p. 196.
5 See, for example, Carl P Russell, Guns on the Early Frontiers: A history of firearms from colonial times through the years of the western fur trade (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE and London UK, 1957).