disaster he had had his boats built for this expedition, shallow of
draft and with flat bottoms that they might be beached. But with the
Mediterranean in his mind and the certain weather of the south, Caesar,
seeing the August sky so soft and clear, had anchored and not beached
the ships after all. Perhaps the late landing, the necessity of
building a large camp, and finally the perilous lack of water had
prevented him from calling upon his men for a task so enormous as the
beaching of eight hundred ships. Whatever had prevented him, that
task was not undertaken. The eight hundred ships were anchored in the
shallows, when, upon that third night of the expedition, a great gale
arose.

Anxious though he must have been, very early in the morning of the
following day, he sent out three skirmishing parties to reconnoitre
and pursue the defeated Britons of the day before; but the last men
were not out of sight when gallopers came in to Caesar from Quintus
Atrius, at the camp by the shore, to report "almost all the ships
dashed to pieces and cast upon the beach because neither the anchors
and cables could resist the force of the gale, nor the sailors or
pilots outride it, and thus the ships had dashed themselves to pieces
one against another."

The appalling seriousness of this disaster, as reported to Caesar, was
at once understood by him. He recalled his three parties of
skirmishers, and himself at once returned to Quintus Atrius and the
ships. He tells us that "he saw before him almost the very things
which he had heard from the messengers and by letters"; but he adds
that only "about forty ships were lost, the remainder being able to be
repaired with much labour." This he at once began with workmen from the
Legions, and others he brought from the Continent, and at the same