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A Lesson from Cæsar

"Storm and sea were Britain's bulwarks,

Long ere Britons won their name;

Mightier far than pikes and halberds

Wind and wave upheld her fame;

Storm and sea are Britain's brothers,

Keep, with her, their sleepless guard;

Britain's sons, before all others,

Share with them their watch and ward.

Chorus— "'Forward! On!' the sea-king's war-word Ages back—to do or die.[1] 'Ne'er a track but points us forward!'[2] Ages on—our lines reply." E. H. H. In Officers' Training Corps and Naval Cadets' Magazine, March, 1913.

Whenever we want to find out anything about the early history of Great Britain, we have, almost invariably, to turn to the writings of our old friend Julius Cæsar. In attempting to trace the beginnings of the Royal Navy, that magnificent organization "whereon", point out the Articles of War, "under the good Providence of God, the Wealth, Safety, and Strength of the Kingdom chiefly depend", we have to conform to the same rule, and consult this authority. From Cæsar's De Bello Gallico we learn that in his time the Ancient Britons made use of boats with a wooden frame, supporting wicker-work instead of planking, and rendered watertight by a covering of skins—just such boats, in fact, though probably larger—as, under the name of "coracles", are used to this day on the Wye and some other rivers and estuaries.

The portability and rapid construction of these boats commended them to Cæsar's military eye, and later on, in one of his Continental wars, he ordered his soldiers to make some light boats in imitation of those he had seen in Britain, in order to carry his army across a river. But, though Cæsar especially mentions these vessels, he does not say that the British of his day had no other or larger vessels. Though they made use of hides and wicker, they must have known something of wooden vessels. There is no doubt that they or their ancestors had large "dug-outs", hollowed from huge trunks of trees in the same way as Robinson Crusoe constructed his famous boat. We know this because many of these have been discovered buried in the mud of our rivers. One of them, found in the bed of the Rother in 1822, was 60 feet in length and 5 feet wide. Others have been found in Lincolnshire, Scotland, and Sussex, though none of them was nearly as long as the Rother boat. We must remember, too, that the Phœnicians had traded to Cornwall for tin, probably for centuries, and the Britons must have been familiar with their comparatively advanced types of shipbuilding.

But many writers on naval matters are of the opinion that our British ancestors, whose coracles are described by Cæsar, had, even at that time, really stout and formidable ships. The reason is this. The Veneti, a race who inhabited western Brittany, and the country at the mouth of the Loire, were a kindred race, and when attacked by Cæsar received assistance from Britain. Now the strength of the Veneti seems to have been in their ships, which gave the Roman galleys considerable trouble, and it seems more than likely that the British assistance they received came in the form of a squadron of similar vessels.

According to Cæsar, the ships of the Veneti "were built and fitted out in this manner: their bottoms were somewhat flatter than ours, the better to adapt them to the shallows, and to sustain without danger the ebbing of the tide. Their prows were very high and erect, as likewise their sterns, to bear the hugeness of the waves and the violence of the tempests. The hull of the vessel was entirely of oak, to withstand the shocks and assaults of that stormy ocean. The benches of the rowers were made of strong beams about a foot wide, and were fastened with iron bolts an inch in thickness. Instead of cables they used chains of iron, and for their sails, utilized skins and a sort of thin, pliable leather, either because they had no canvas and did not know how to make sailcloth or, more probably, because they thought that canvas sails were not so suitable to stand the violence of the tempests, the fury and rage of the winds, and to propel ships of such bulk and burden". It is evident that these ships were for that period quite up to date. They were strongly built and iron-bolted, and had already discarded hempen cables for iron ones.

Above all, they were specially constructed to battle with the heavy weather of the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea, and to take refuge from its fury in the rivers and creeks of the western coasts of Europe. The Roman galleys, relying principally on their oars, and therefore comparatively long and light, were not so seaworthy in Northern waters, and the same difference, in construction, between the ships of the Mediterranean and those of the Northern nations may be traced right down to comparatively modern ages. One gets very bad weather in the Mediterranean at times, notwithstanding its traditional blue skies and sapphire seas, but the big Atlantic rollers are absent.

These ships of the Veneti proved a tough morsel for our old school acquaintance, but his generalship was equal to the task of overcoming them in the end. As he says, "in agility and a ready command of oars, we had the advantage", for the Veneti trusted entirely to their sails. But, against that, the beaks of the Roman galleys could make no impression on the stout timber of the enemy's ships, they were at a special disadvantage in bad weather, and the bulwarks of the Venetan ships towered so high above their heads, even when they erected their fighting-towers, that the Roman soldiers could not hurl their darts on board them, while the Venetan enemy showered their missiles down upon their heads. For the same reason they found it almost impossible to grapple with and make fast to the big ships, and so carry them by boarding. However, "there are more ways than one of killing a cat", and so the Venetans found to their cost. For the Romans, fastening sharp hooks or sickles to the end of long poles, pulled alongside, hooked them over the halyards of their yards and sails, and, rowing away for all they were worth, contrived to cut them through, when down came the yards, and the Venetan vessels became unmanageable. To make matters worse, when a flat calm fell they could not get away to their hiding-places on the coast, and the Romans obtained a complete victory—probably by boarding and fighting at close quarters, when their armour and discipline would tell heavily in their favour. It is interesting to note, by the way, that, according to Vegetius, a fifteenth-century writer on naval and military matters, they painted their scouting-vessels blue, masts, sails, and all, and dressed their crews in the same colour. He adds that Pompey, after defeating Cæsar, called himself "The Son of Neptune", and "affected to wear the blue or marine colour". As for the Veneti, we may, perhaps, regard them as the original "Bluejackets", Veneti being the plural of the Latin venetus, "bluish", "sea-coloured".