We may point out, as another similarity, that certain flat boats, constructed by order of the Emperor, had nearly the same dimensions as those employed by Cæsar. “There required,” says the historian of the ‘Consulate and the Empire,’ “boats which would not need more, when they were laden, than seven or eight feet of water to float, and which would go with oars, so as to pass, either in calm or fog, and strand without breaking on the flat English shores. The great gun-boats carried four pieces of large bore, and were rigged like brigs, that is, with two masts, manœuvred by twenty-four sailors, and capable of carrying a company of a hundred men, with its staff, and its arms and munitions.... These boats offered a vexatious inconvenience, that of falling to the leeward, that is, yielding to the currents. This was the result of their clumsy build, which presented more hold to the water than their masts to the wind.”[380] Cæsar’s ships experienced the same inconvenience, and, drawn away by the currents in his second expedition, they went to the leeward rather far in the north. We have seen that Cæsar’s transport boats were flat-bottomed, that they could go either with sails or oars; carry if necessary 150 men, and be loaded and drawn on dry ground with promptness (_ad celeritatem onerandi subductionesque_). They had thus a great analogy with the flat-bottomed boats of 1804. But there is more, for the Emperor Napoleon had found it expedient to imitate the Roman galleys. “He had seen the necessity,” says M. Thiers, “of constructing boats still lighter and more movable than the preceding, drawing only two or three feet of water, and calculated for landing anywhere. They were large boats, narrow, sixty feet long, having a movable deck which could be laid or withdrawn at will, and were distinguished from the others by the name of pinnaces. These large boats were provided with sixty oars, carried at need a light sail, and moved with extreme swiftness. When sixty soldiers, practised in handling the oar as well as the sailors, set them in motion, they glided over the sea like the light boats dropped from the sides of our great vessels, and surprised the eye by the rapidity of their course.” The point of landing has been equally the subject of a host of contrary suppositions. St. Leonards, near Hastings, Richborough (_Rutupiœ_), near Sandwich, Lymne, near Hythe, and Deal, have all been proposed.