Provocation
In November 1836 the Russian military brig Ajax detained the British schooner Vixen in (Adyghe: Цӏэмэз,Ts'emez) in the sea port Sudzhuk-Kale (nowadays Novorossiysk). At the moment of detention, 8 guns, 28,800 pounds of gunpowder, and a significant amount of other weapons had already been unloaded. This was deemed a provocation by the Russians, instigated by the first secretary of the British embassy in Constantinople David Urquhart. The Polish immigrants also participated in the organisation of the incident. The crew received instructions to go in Sudzhuk-Kale where meeting with a Russian cruiser was almost inevitable. The owner of a schooner was recommended not to avoid it, but, on the contrary, to search for this meeting in every possible way.
Read more about this topic: Mission Of The Vixen
Famous quotes containing the word provocation:
“The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)