Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

Long maintains, further, that, although Caesar does not say directly that the passage from the Portus Itius to Britain was actually the shortest, yet he does so indirectly; for he tells us that he went to the country of the Morini ‘because the shortest passage to Britain was from their country’; and the port in their country which he selected was the Portus Itius.[2796] But, as all who are familiar with the Commentaries will admit, Long throws an undue strain upon Caesar’s language. Caesar tells us, in general terms, that the shortest passage to Britain was from the country of the Morini: but it is bad logic to conclude from this statement that the passage from the Portus Itius must have been actually the shortest as the crow flies. Caesar would never have chosen the passage which was in this sense the shortest if it had been on other grounds objectionable: obviously what he meant to say was that of the regular passages to Britain that from the country of the Morini was the shortest; and the passage from the Portus Itius being, as he says, ‘the most convenient,’ was, for all practical purposes, the shortest.

It is clear, then, that Long failed to establish the identity of the Portus Itius with Wissant. Let us see what better informed advocates of the same theory have to say.

2. Not to mention the arguments which are common to him and Long, Dr. Guest gives the following reasons for his belief:—that the (assumed) harbour of Wissant was large enough to hold Caesar’s fleet; that it lay beneath Cape Grisnez, which he identifies with the Itian promontory; and that William of Poitiers, a chronicler of the eleventh century, called it ‘Portus Icius’.[2797] He will not admit that William was simply stating his own opinion: ‘I think,’ he says, ‘this name may have been handed down to him by the Romanised Gauls, inasmuch as the name of Ician seems to have been long kept afloat in the recollection of the Celtic population of these islands’; and he points out that ‘the old Irish name for the English Channel is Muir n’ Icht’, or ‘the Itian sea’. But the fact on which he lays most stress is the proximity of Wissant to Cape Grisnez. He freely admits, indeed, that Cap d’Alprech may, in Caesar’s time, have been a more considerable promontory than it is at present;[2798] but he cannot conceive that the promontory which Ptolemy selected for especial mention should have been any other than the famous cape which is and must always have been the most conspicuous feature of the north-eastern coast of France, and which marks the point where the coast, making a sharp angle, begins to trend towards the east. ‘Cape Grisnez,’ he concludes, ‘there can hardly be a doubt, was the Ician promontory, and if so, the great port which lay beneath it must have been the Ician Port.’[2799]

‘The great port which lay beneath it,’—these words, Dr. Guest, beg the whole question. That the harbour of Wissant was large enough to hold Caesar’s fleet would be true, if Dr. Guest’s conjectural tracing of its outline were correct: but the fact, if it were a fact, would simply remove one of the objections which have been brought against Wissant; it would not prove that Wissant was the Portus Itius. For the harbour of Boulogne was also large enough, and was also, as will presently appear, in other respects far more convenient. The argument that William of Poitiers called Wissant the Portus Itius has no weight. Maistre Wace, who wrote about a century after William of Poitiers, believed that Caesar had sailed from Boulogne.[2800] Moreover, Hericus, a monk of the ninth century,[2801] identified Bibracte with Autun; but it is now universally admitted, and it is certain, that Hericus was wrong.[2802] It may be admitted that a priori it would seem much more likely that the Itian promontory was Cape Grisnez than that it was Cap d’Alprech; but if the former identification is to be accepted, it is necessary to assume that Ptolemy made a gross blunder. It is of course quite true, as Dr. Guest says,[2803] that Ptolemy did make mistakes; but still the fact remains that the geographical position which he assigns to the Itian promontory is, allowing for a slight error in longitude, that of Cap d’Alprech. As Mr. Peskett puts it, ‘Ptolemy, proceeding northward, places the headland between the Somme and Boulogne’;[2804] and I may add that if you only know Cap d’Alprech by the map, you will be surprised, when you actually see it, to find how bold a headland it is. Moreover, even if Ptolemy was mistaken, it does not follow that the Itian harbour was Wissant. Professor Rhys, who believes that the Gauls as well as the Irish called the Channel ‘the sea of Icht’, remarks that ‘in that case Portus Ictius would designate Caesar’s place of embarcation, somewhat in the same way that Dover might in English be termed the Channel Harbour. The former probably had a Gaulish name of its own, which may have become the Latin one also as soon as the Romans began to be a little more at home in the north of Gaul; so that it would be labour in vain to try to detect Ictius in any place-name still current on the French coast.’[2805] Let us, however, assume, for the sake of argument, that Professor Rhys is mistaken. Even then it does not follow that the Portus Itius was Wissant. For it will not be denied that Boulogne was, in Caesar’s time as in the time of the emperors, a frequented harbour; and it is certain that Wissant was not a harbour capable of containing Caesar’s fleet. Therefore Boulogne, which is only nine statute miles south of Cape Grisnez, was obviously the nearest important harbour to that promontory. Why, then, if Cape Grisnez was the Itian promontory, should Boulogne not have been called the Itian harbour? Even on the desperate theory that when Caesar spoke of a harbour, he did not mean a harbour but only a roadstead, that roadstead was not at Wissant; for if Caesar’s ships had waited there, either at anchor or on the beach, exposed to the north-west winds for twenty-five days, they would have been in extreme peril.

Dr. Guest admits of course that Boulogne, not Wissant, was the permanent harbour of the Romans in North-Eastern Gaul under the empire; but in this fact he sees no objection to his theory. He believes that the Romans, when they had to choose a permanent harbour, rejected Wissant and chose Boulogne because of the sterility of the country in the neighbourhood of the former. ‘Wissant,’ he remarks, ‘or rather the port adjacent to Wissant, may have answered Caesar’s purpose, when he had hundreds of ships to supply the wants of his commissariat; but when a port was to be provided to meet the ordinary purposes of traffic, it was necessary to select one that possessed local resources.’[2806]

The reason which Dr. Guest gives for the choice of Boulogne is sound enough as far as it goes; but what support does it lend to the theory that Caesar used Wissant as a temporary harbour? The sterility of the neighbourhood would hardly have recommended it. It must have had some great advantage to compensate for this defect if it was really to be preferred, even as a temporary harbour, to Boulogne. But it is impossible to point out one single advantage which Wissant could have had, for Caesar’s purpose, over Boulogne, save only that, as the crow flies, it was a little nearer to Britain.

Dr. Guest, indeed, assures us that ‘Caesar had no time for weighing the comparative merits of the ports north and south of him, and for determining which of them was “the most convenient”’.[2807] No time! Had he not five days to spare for Volusenus’s reconnaissance? A single day would have sufficed to ride along the coast from Wissant to Boulogne; a few minutes spent at each of those places would have sufficed ‘for determining which of them was “the most convenient”’: but the greatest general of Rome could not spare even one day for a duty which the worst would not have neglected; so he pitched upon Wissant, because, as Dr. Guest tells us, ‘it afforded him the shortest passage’! So argued the man who, according to Freeman, ‘settled the whole matter,’ the man who, from Freeman’s point of view, appeared to stand, side by side with Stubbs, ‘at the head of living students of English history.’[2808]

3. Heller is not as ardent an advocate of Wissant as Guest; but he has written some very ingenious papers in defence of Guest’s view. Many of his reasons are virtually identical with those of the English scholar; but from Caesar’s narrative of his second voyage he deduces a fresh argument, which deserves special attention. Caesar, as we have seen, set sail about sunset with a light south-westerly wind. About midnight the wind dropped: the fleet, borne by the tide, drifted out of its course;[2809] and ‘at daybreak Caesar saw Britain lying behind on the port quarter’ (orta luce sub sinistra Britanniam relictam conspexit[2810]). From the last statement Heller infers that Caesar’s ship must have drifted to some point off the North Foreland: otherwise, he argues, the word relictam would be meaningless. For, he remarks, Caesar believed that one side of Britain faced the north. Therefore it must be assumed that he had no knowledge of that part of the coast which trends northward beyond the mouth of the Thames: he must have thought that the coast, at the North Foreland, turned sharply towards the west. Otherwise he could not have believed that he had left Britain behind; nor could he have believed this unless he had drifted to some point off the North Foreland. Now Caesar started on his voyage about the 6th of July.[2811] On that day the sun set about 8.16; and on the following morning it rose about 3.54. There must have been light enough to show the British coast as early as 3.15 or 3.20. Heller maintains that Caesar could by daybreak have reached a point about 2 German [or 9½ English] miles south-east of the North Foreland, not quite as far north as the latitude of Ramsgate, if he had sailed from Wissant; but he insists that if he had sailed from Boulogne, he could not have drifted further northward than the latitude of Deal, in which case he could not have said that he ‘saw Britain left behind on the port quarter’.[2812]

This argument rests upon a strained interpretation of the word relictam. It is probably true that Caesar could not have drifted as far north as the latitude of Ramsgate if he had sailed from Boulogne;[2813] but even if he had only drifted as far north as the latitude of Walmer, he would have been perfectly justified in using the word relictam. For that word does not imply that Caesar believed himself to have left the northern coast of Britain behind: it simply implies that, as the current was carrying him in a north-easterly direction[2814] and therefore sweeping him every minute further and further away from Britain, ‘he saw Britain lying behind on the port quarter.’ There is a parallel passage in the twenty-first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which shows that this was his meaning. In the second and third verses of that chapter the writer, after describing the voyage of himself and St. Paul from Ephesus by way of Cos and Rhodes to Patara, says, ‘Having found a ship crossing over unto Phoenicia, we went aboard, and set sail. And when we had come in sight of Cyprus, leaving it on the left hand, we sailed unto Syria, and landed at Tyre’ (καὶ εὑρόντες πλοῖον διαπερῶν εἰς Φοινίκην ἐπιβάντες ἀνήχθημεν, ἀναφάναντες δὲ τὴν Κύπρον καὶ καταλιπόντες αὐτὴν εὐώνυμον ἐπλέομεν εἰς Συρίαν καὶ κατήλθομεν εἰς Τύρον). If the reader will look at his map, he will see that the writer of the Acts, when he came in sight of Cyprus and left it on the left hand, was in precisely the same position with regard to Cyprus as Caesar would have been in with regard to Britain if, drifting in a north-easterly direction, he had descried the coast of Britain from some point in the latitude of Deal.[2815] And if Heller will use his common sense he will see that if a ship about the latitude of Deal were drifting away from Britain, that ship would have left Britain behind just as really as if it had passed Cape Wrath and were drifting towards Iceland.

Lastly, even if Heller’s explanation of the word relictam were correct, the argument which he builds upon it would be unsound; for obviously that argument would only hold good if Caesar had drifted north of the latitude of the North Foreland. Heller himself admits that he had hardly drifted so far north as the latitude of Ramsgate; and at this point, on Heller’s own theory, he could no more have said that he had left the northern coast of Britain behind than if he had been in the latitude of Deal.