Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/359

 provender, water, and attendants, could not well be conveyed in a vessel of less register than one hundred tons, even on so short a voyage as from Boulogne to Romney or Lymne, performed, as this voyage was, with a fair wind, in fifteen hours, or at the rate of about two miles an hour. The ships of burden or transports were all flat-bottomed, that they might float in shallow water, and be more expeditiously freighted.

Although the facts preserved with regard to the ships which Cæsar employed on his first invasion are of the most meagre description, they are sufficient to show that they drew comparatively little water, or the men could not have "jumped" out of them, and made good their footing on the beach with their standard and arms against the whole British force: most likely, they were rather good stout-decked or half-decked barges than the ordinary sea-*going coasting vessel, which, if one hundred tons burden, would draw, when laden, from seven to eight feet of water. There is no record of the ports where these vessels were constructed; but some of them, Cæsar tells us, had been employed by him, earlier in the same year, in his war with the Veneti.

The vessels employed in Cæsar's second invasion were somewhat similar in form to those in the first; but his army on this occasion consisted of five legions, with two thousand cavalry, for the transport of which he had about six hundred boats; there were also twenty-eight war-galleys. If we appropriate