eventy rowers, ten sailors to handle the sails,
fifty light-armed archers and slingers, and one hundred and fifty
soldiers cased in iron from top to toe.

When the galleys had pulled out from shore, the praetor, military
commandant of the fleet, told Albinik, through an interpreter, to steer
for the lower part of the bay of Morbihan, in the neighborhood of the
town of Vannes, where the Gallic army was assembled. Albinik with his
hand at the tiller was to convey to the interpreter his orders to the
master of the rowers. The latter beat time for the rowers, according to
the pilot's orders, with an iron hammer with which he rapped on a gong
of brass. As the speed of the Pretoria, whose lead the rest of the Roman
fleet followed, needed quickening or slackening, he indicated it by
quickening or slowing the strokes of the hammer.

The galleys, driven by a fair wind, sailed northward. As the interpreter
had done before, so now the oldest sailors admired the bold manoeuvre
and quick sight of the Gallic pilot. After a sail of some length, the
fleet found itself near the southern point of the bay of Morbihan, and
knew that now it was to enter into those channels, the most dangerous on
all the coast of Brittany because of the great number of small islands,
rocks and sand banks, and above all, because of the undercurrents, which
ran with irresistible violence.

A little island situated in the mouth of the bay, which was still more
constricted by two points of land, divided the inlet into two narrow
lanes. Nothing in the surface of the sea, neither breakers nor foam nor
change in the color of the waters gave token of the slightest difference
between the two passes. Nevertheless, in one lay not a rock, while the
other was strewn with danger. In the latter channel, after a hundred
strokes of the oars, the ships in single file, led by the Pretoria,
would have been dragged by a submarine current toward a reef of rocks
which was visible in the distance, and over which the sea, calm
everywhere else, broke tumultuously. The commanders of the several
galleys could perceive their peril only one by one; each would be made
aware of it only by the rapid drifting of the galley ahead of him. Then
it would be too late. The violence of the current would drag and hurl
vessel upon vessel. Whirling in the abyss, fouling the bottom, and
crashing into one another, their timbers would part and they would sink
into the watery depths with all on board, o