" The Chinese fleet was equally vulnerable. The war junks were half the size of the Nemesis, or one tenth that of a first rate British battleship. They were armed with small cannons that were hard to aim, and with boarding nets, pots of burning pitch, and handguns. Without much difficulty the Nemesis sank or captured several junks; the rest were frightened off with Congreve rockets. The Chinese also relied on fire-rafts filled with gunpowder and oil-soaked cotton that were set ablaze and pushed toward enemy ships. The steamers, however, quickly grappled them and towed them out of reach. The previous year Commissioner Lin Tse-Hsu had purchased the 1080-ton American merchantman Cambridge but for lack' of sailors who knew how to handle the ship, she was kept idle behind a barrier of rafts. She was soon lost to the Nemesis. "

― , The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century