Found a site that will be of interest to those who want to know what
sort of guns were being used in the battle of the Bakumatsu and the
Boshin War and where they came from. Apparently Choshu, through
Satsuma, dealt with a British arms dealer named Thomas Blake Glover.
Choshu bought 4300 Minies and 3000 Gewehrs in October of 1865. Each
Minie cost 18 ryo and each Gewehr was about 5 ryo. The total bill
came to 92,000 ryo!
It also gives the original name of the gunboat Otchu-maru that Ryoma
commanded during the battle near Oshima-gun. It used to be the USS
Union of the (what else?) Union army. I did a search on the boat and
all I've been able to learn about her so far is that she was used to
stop Confederate blockade runners and therefore unlikely to have seen
any major action during our Civil War.
The boat cost the Choshu 37,000 ryo. The conservatives tried to get
Katsura to settle for a 60 horsepower vessel, but he stubbornly held
out for a 120 horsepower ship. (This would have been a steam engine
of course.)
There's a lot more here about Nagasaki at the time and Ishin leaders
and is in English.
http://www.uwvsh.edu/home_pages/faculty_staff/earns/meiji.html
I did some checking but could not find any gun called a "Gewehr" from
that time period. They do appear on searches from a slightly later
date. I assume that these could have been some sort of proto-type for
the later guns. Mauser, a German gunmaker, made the ones that I could
find info on:
http://www.mauserguns.com/mauserHistory.asp
As far as the Minie rifles are concerned my guess is since they were
dealing with a British arms merchant they would have most likely
bought the Enfield Rifle Musket, which was not only the most popular
weapon of the time with British soilders but saw a great deal of
action during the American Civil War. For further info on it go to
this site:
http://www.nps.gov/anti/rifles.htm
-MissB