Quotes About Gunboats

That was the ace hidden up the sleeves of the Jardines, Mathesons and Dents of the world. Despite all their cacklings about Free Trade, the truth was that their commercial advantages had nothing to do with markets or trade or more advanced business practices – it lay in the brute firepower of the British Empire's guns and gunboats.

But the British fleet assembled to oppose them was much more powerful. It included three large ships disassembled into sections, transported overland, and rebuilt on the lake; twenty gunboats; a thirty-ton gondola; a great two-masted scow; thirty longboats; and four hundred bateaux

Arnold, forced to declare the meeting a failure, returned to West Point. André, it turns out, had been in the vicinity, but the vigilant gunboats had made crossing the river quite perilous in risking both his life and recognition by some of his own soldiers. He returned to New York to arrange a second attempt at meeting

The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats.

I imagine that Carlos knew that Jack was ex-military when he was searching for idiots to go to Cuba, and I also wondered if Jack would be up for a late-in-life adventure. Carlos said that Jack's life would not be in danger, which was true regarding the fishing tournament, but not true regarding sailing out of Cuba with sixty million bucks onboard if Cuban gunboats were on our ass. If we made it that far.

Forrest indeed performed the very remarkable feat of capturing, with cavalry, two gunboats and a number of transports, something the accomplishment of which is very hard to account for.

The bateaux canonniers were more seaworthy, but could not traverse their guns.

The Occidental snobbery which is invading us, the gunboats, rapid-fire guns, long-range rifles, explosives... what else? Everything which makes death collective, administrative and bureaucratic - all the filth of your progress, in fact - is destroying, little by little, our beautiful traditions of the past.