How often during that night must Caesar have awakened and thought of the sea and his transports. It was, as he would remember, just such a storm which had ruined him in the previous summer. To avoid a like disaster he had had his boats built for this expedition, shallow of draft and with flat bottoms that they might be beached. But with the Mediterranean in his mind and the certain weather of the south, Caesar, seeing the August sky so soft and clear, had anchored and not beached the ships after all. Perhaps the late landing, the necessity of building a large camp, and finally the perilous lack of water had prevented him from calling upon his men for a task so enormous as the beaching of eight hundred ships. Whatever had prevented him, that task was not undertaken. The eight hundred ships were anchored in the shallows, when, upon that third night of the expedition, a great gale arose. Anxious though he must have been, very early in the morning of the following day, he sent out three skirmishing parties to reconnoitre and pursue the defeated Britons of the day before; but the last men were not out of sight when gallopers came in to Caesar from Quintus Atrius, at the camp by the shore, to report "almost all the ships dashed to pieces and cast upon the beach because neither the anchors and cables could resist the force of the gale, nor the sailors or pilots outride it, and thus the ships had dashed themselves to pieces one against another." The appalling seriousness of this disaster, as reported to Caesar, was at once understood by him. He recalled his three parties of skirmishers, and himself at once returned to Quintus Atrius and the ships. He tells us that "he saw before him almost the very things which he had heard from the messengers and by letters"; but he adds that only "about forty ships were lost, the remainder being able to be repaired with much labour." This he at once began with workmen from the Legions, and others he brought from the Continent, and at the same time he wrote to Labienus at Portus Itius "to build as many ships as he could." Then he proceeded to do what he had intended to do at first; with great difficulty and labour he dragged all the ships up on the shore and enclosed them in one fortification with the camp. In these matters about ten days were spent, the men labouring night and day. Then he returned to the main army upon the Stour. But that delay of ten days had given the Britons time to recover themselves and to gather all possible forces. Caesar returned to his army to find "very great forces of the Britons already assembled" to oppose him, and the chief command and management of the war entrusted to Cassivellaunus, who, though he had been at war with the men of Kent, was now placed, so great was the general alarm, in command of the whole war.