orce that Caesar could get afloat. Moreover, Caesar had nothing but
rowboats, which he was obliged to build on the spot; while the Celts
had real ships, which towered above his rowboats by a good ten feet.
But, after cutting the Celtic rigging with scythes lashed to poles, the
well-trained Roman soldiers made short work of the Celts. The Battle
of the Loire seems to have been the only big sea fight the Celts of
Britain ever fought. After this they left the sea to their invaders,
who thus had a great advantage over them ashore.

The fact is that the Celts of the southern seaports were the only ones
who understood shipbuilding, which they had learnt from the
Phoenicians, and the only ones who were civilized enough to unite among
themselves and with their fellow-Celts in what now is France but then
was Gaul. The rest were mere tribesmen under chiefs who were often
squabbling with one another, and who never formed anything like an
all-Celtic army. For most of them a navy was out of the question, as
they only used the light, open-work, basket-like coracles covered with
skins--about as useful for fighting the Romans at sea as bark canoes
would be against real men-of-war. The Roman conquest of Britain was
therefore made by the army, each conqueror, from Caesar on, winning
battles farther and farther north, until a fortified Roman wall was
built across the narrow neck of land between the Forth and Clyde.
Along these thirty-six miles the Romans kept guard against the Picts
and other Highland tribes.

The Roman fleet was of course used at all times to guard the seaways
between Britain and the rest of the Roman Empire, as well as to carry
supplies along the coast when the army was fighting near by. This gave
the Romans the usual immense advantage of sea-transport over
land-transport, never less than ten to one and often very much more.
The Romans could thus keep their army supplied with everything it
needed. The Celts could not. Eighteen hundred years after Caesar's
first landing in Britain, Wolfe, the victor of Quebec, noticed the same
immense advantage enjoyed by King George's army over Prince Charlie's,
owing to the same sort of difference in transport, King George's army
having a fleet to keep it well supplied, while Prince Charlie's had
nothing but slow and scanty land transport, sometimes more dead than
alive.

The only real fighting the Romans had to do afloat was against the
Norsemen, who sailed out of every ha