rather an integral part of the ship 's design. And he said they had sai ls: leather sai ls, which he supposed were better able to drive the heavy hull s through their boisterous native waters than sai ls of flax would have been. And we learn that these were real sai ling ships, not driven by oar power, becau se of the way the Romans defeated these dreadnoughts of their day. Impervious to conventional ramming attack, the ships were rendered helpless by cutting away their halyards with long scythes so that their yards and sails fell to the deck, leaving the ships unable to move. Then, two or three Roman galleys (Caesar, not I, cites those odds!) would surround the Yeneti ship, and Roman soldiers "swarmed aboard in a rush." Luckily for the Romans, a flat calm came on the scene, leaving even the undamaged Veneti powerless to evade the sw ift Roman galleys, and very few escaped as night fell.
A Very Different Navigation
_,.
the wind gets up. Putting out into the Channel from Cowes in April 1951, in the first-class ocean racing yawl Bloodhound, we found after a brutal night's sailing that we were twelve miles behind the Needles, where we ' d first put our nose out! Others have more sinister tales to tell of the tide-wracked , gale-lashed Channel, and Caesar himself at one point found hi s army marooned , out of supply on the English shore because an overnight gale had wrecked the fleet he had built to take him across from France and To prove that the Promised Land reached in support his legions once ashore. St . Brendan's Navigatio over a thousand years ago could have been America, Tim Severin built an ox-hide curragh named Brendan, shown here at her launch in January 1976, and sailed her across the Atlantic in 1976-7. As she set forth , an onlooker remarked: "Sure they' II make it-but they' II need a miracle."
The Yeneti are consistentl y described as Celts, and the Celts swept into Gaul only a few hundred years before Caesar's arrival; so the Veneti could not have been the seafaring race who handled the long-haul Phoenician trade, going back some ten centuries before this encounter. But they may well have learned to sai l from a predecessor group. And what remarkable things the encounter reveals! Here are a people in high-topsided, heavi ly built sailing ships, a good five hundred years or more before any other northern people we know of consistently traverses the sea under sail. The waves of Germanic and later Danish invaders who assaulted Britain as the Roman power ebbed from Britai n in the400sADcrossed from the mai nl and in clumsy open rowing boats, vessels built without keels or much developed internal structure, lacking even the "cross-beams"¡ 'hich Caesar observed in the Yeneti boats-beams which l 'ecame a crucial element in the oceanic sailing ship hundreds of years after the Yeneti sai led and awed Caesar with their ships. It 's worth pausing a moment to reflect on some other observations of our astute Roman actor and observer on thi s scene. Almost everything Caesar wrote in hi s account checks out against later, painstakingly developed information from other sources (w ith the exception of mythical animals natives told him dwelt in remote German forests-but he did accurately describe the massive, buffalo-like aurochs, disbelieved by later ages because the animal had by then become extinct!). There is, first, Caesar's forthright observation that "navigation on the vast, open ocean was very different from that in a landlocked sea." He learned this seei ng the tough Veneti ships survive and flourish in conditions his light-built Roman galleys could not cope with. But to remove any fa lse impression that thi s stem, effective soldier was omniscient, one reads that he ordered the galleys built for the invasion of England to have lower topsides than was normal in the Mediterranean, since he had observed "that the waves were smaller because of the frequent ebb and flow of the tides ." As anyone who has sai led the English Channel can tell you, SEA HISTORY 75, AUTUMN 1995
precisely the opposite is true! The strong
,...-.,._.=~~::-o-t 1-1r...~'11"iilllii.,;;;;;....-r1 tidal currents breed steep, vicious seas as
The Matter of Britain
The Roman occupation of Britain, which began with Caesar's invasion, had consequences important in world history a thousand and more years down the road. If one has the patience---0r perhaps the moral fortitude-to let the deep sea of historic experience bear him up, as Conrad has the ambiguous Stein advise Lord Jim , then it is perhaps well to consider the matter of King Arthur, for the sake of things that rolled in on a very long ground swell, long after Arthur's time. Roman power faded away in Britain in the early 400s AD as the sti ll unconquered, practically invincible legions were called away to defend Gaul's frontiers against growing German pressure, or to play their role in the divisive power politics afflicting Rome itself. Toward 500AD, Arthur appears on the scene leading a cavalry force which, apparently acti ng as a kind of strategic reserve in support of local forces, succeeds in beating back the waves of Germanic peoples crowding into Britain. The Germanic peoples crossed the North Sea and the Channel in the big, open rowing boats I've mentioned as typical of thi s era, of which some remains have been found in our own day. In previous centuries, during the Roman occupation, this Germanic surge had been restrained by active fleets of Roman galleys. The galleys must have had a much easier time smashing these primitive German boats than they had , a few hundred years earlier, with the heavy oaken sailing ships of the Yeneti. Thi s sea defense of fast, oared galleys was backed by fortifications built along the south shore of England, which was designated "the Saxon [or German] Shore." Arthur's victorious campaigns arrested the Germanic invasions and re-establi shed Celtic (or Romanized British) authority in much of Britain. Then, in the late 500s AD, the Germanic invasions resumed in a chaotic scene in which, according to the contemporary chronicler Gildas, a British king invited the invaders in to help defend his turf against the Picts and Scots to the north. Germanic peoples proceeded to overrun the land we now cal I England, named for one of their tribes, the Angles. Historians of the hard "scientific" school (they actually used to call themselves that!) have had problems with thi s whole business of Arthur, due to the absence of documentary 13