Dirty rotten......

[LissaJous]

Wasn't this the first use of a steam warship? Scoundelery and innovation - it was and still is a powerful mix.

You may be right there depending what you mean by used, paddle steamer gunboats were used there, and also deployed in Canada a few years earlier (according to wiki).

Amusingly you just caused me to discover the naval Battle of Lissa. Two of them in fact, both of them bizarre against-the-odds victories. 1811 was the outnumbered British against the French & Italians. Even more peculiar, 1866 when the Austrian navy defeated a larger Italian force, both fleets having some ironclads and some woods, and with much use of ramming. The ramming led to something of a dead-end in marine architecture in the form of bigger iron rams, which never sunk any enemy ships but occasionally took out friendly ships in accidental collisions.

[noel]

If you assume that:
wars are fairly inevitable
nations that lose wars tend not to survive
ware bring out the nasty side of nations...
I think most countries that are around today will have committed horrible things in the past.

I'd suggest tiny states like Tuvalu, but I guess they will have massacred the inhabitants of some neighbouring islands in the past.

[mr brightside]

The ramming led to something of a dead-end in marine architecture...

An evening in my Opium den would have sorted them out.

[shaunaneto]

If you assume that:
wars are fairly inevitable
nations that lose wars tend not to survive
ware bring out the nasty side of nations...
I think most countries that are around today will have committed horrible things in the past.

I'd suggest tiny states like Tuvalu, but I guess they will have massacred the inhabitants of some neighbouring islands in the past.

The problem is people, just that some have been more successful at being gits than others.

We'd be a whole lot better off if we stopped thinking of ourselves in 'them and us' terms. And just thought of ourselves as 'us'.