of British vessel that was anything more than a raft. There seems to have been generally no sail or mast; and the instrument of propulsion was, almost without doubt, the paddle.
Yet, although the hide canoe appears to have been the earliest craft known to our ancestors, it is difficult to believe that, as late as the days of Cæsar, the islanders had nothing better. Pytheas,[1] about 330 b.c., found, in what is now Kent, a degree of civilisation which surprised even his highly civilised companions from Massilia. Posidonius, who was Cicero's tutor, describes the tin-workers of the island as being civilised and clever at their work, and as possessing waggons of some sort. In those times there were certainly iron-works in the valley of the Severn, and British princelings certainly coined money in distant imitation of Greek originals. Moreover, it is incredible that the Britons, who for generations had seen Phœnician ships and craft from the Greek colonies in the Mediterranean, visiting their coasts for tin, could have omitted to copy the superior foreign types. Nor is it probable that if our ancestors owned only hide canoes, they could have habitually crossed the British Channel, as Cæsar himself suggests that they did cross it.
There is no evidence that any prince of Britain, inspired by principles of general policy, organised a combination of his fellow princes, either to send maritime assistance to the mainlanders who resisted the Roman seizure of the continental shores of the Channel, or to repel the threatened invasion of his own country. Indeed, the evidence is rather to the effect that the more powerful princes were on such ill terms among themselves that they could not combine, at least for operations by sea. Yet there was some combination for offensive defence, if not among the princes of Britain, then among the merchants and shipowners of the seaboard. It was, no doubt, dictated by considerations of common interests, rather than by the formal behests of people in authority; and the probable explanation is that the fishermen and traders of the southern British coasts, who had long had some maritime traffic with the tribes ever against them on the coasts of Gaul, apprehended in some vague way that a Roman conquest would deprive them of it. We may even suppose blood ties to have existed between the two races, and the menaced mainlanders to have appealed, in their hour of peril, to the friendship of the islanders. Be this as it may, both Cæsar and Strabo, as well as native traditions, declare Britain and Gaul to have had
- ↑ Fragments of his 'Periplus', ed. Arwedson.
