He himself set sail from Portus Itius, which we may take to be Boulogne, at sunset, that is to say about half-past seven; but he must, it might seem, have devoted the whole day to getting so many ships out of harbour.  The wind was blowing gently from the south-west, bearing him, his fortunes and ours.  At midnight the second of those small disasters which met him at every turn upon this expedition fell upon him.  The wind failed.  In consequence his great fleet of transports was helpless, it drifted along with the tide, fortunately then running up the Straits, but this bore him beyond his landing-place of the year before, and daybreak found him apparently far to the east of the North Foreland.  What can have been the thoughts of the greatest of men, helpless in the midst of this treacherous and unknown sea?  To every Roman the sea was bitter, even the tideless Mediterranean, how much more this furious tide-whipt channel.  Caesar cannot but have remembered how it had half broken him in the previous year.  Very profoundly he must have mistrusted it.  But his Gaulish sailors were doubtless less disturbed; they expected the ebb, and when it came, every man doing his utmost, the transports were brought as swiftly as the long ships to that “fair and open” beach where Caesar had landed in the previous summer, the long beach which Deal and Sandwich hold.

Caesar himself, as it happens, does not tell us that he landed in the same place upon this his second invasion of Britain as he had done before; it is to Dion Cassius that we owe the knowledge that he did so.  It is Caesar, however, who tells us that he landed about mid-day and that all his ships held together and reached shore about the same time.  He adds that there was no enemy to be seen, though, as he afterwards learned from his prisoners, large bodies of British troops had been assembled, but, alarmed at the great number of the ships, more than eight hundred of which, including the ships of the previous year and the private vessels which some had built for their convenience, had appeared at one time, they had retreated from the coast and taken to the heights.  The heights must have been the hills to the south of Canterbury, nearly a day’s march from the sea.

If Caesar landed, as we know from Dion Cassius that he did, in the same place as he had done in the previous year, he must have known all there was to know about the natural facilities there for camping, about the supply of fresh water for instance.  But perhaps he had not considered the dryness of the summer.  In any case it might seem to have been some pressing need, such as the necessity for a plentiful supply of fresh water, which forced him immediately to make a night march with his army.  Leaving as he tells us, under Quintus Atrius, ten cohorts, that is, as we may suppose, two cohorts from each of his five legions, and three hundred horse to guard the ships at anchor, and to hold the camp, hastily made between