But during that winter time, when the gathering of food for the armies had made the Roman officers in Gaul send out messengers and embassies for the gathering of grain, the seafaring men of Brittany, always in a way apart from other men, and hard, and keeping their own counsel, and difficult to subdue, had secretly prepared revolt and had sent all up the Channel past by what is Normandy to-day, and by what is the Boulonnais to-day, and Ponthieu and the Artois, summoning to their aid any of the sailors that would dare to come, men knowing the rough seas, well provisioned with many ships. They sent also over the sea to Britain for aid, and from all these parts upon either side of the Narrow Seas they found alliances, for they were preparing a great thing. Cæsar, far off in the south, heard nothing of all this, and the great officers, his lieutenants in Gaul, were also ignorant of what was toward, so silently and rapidly did the Bretons work. Until, as the year turned, young Crassus, who was in command over the Seventh Legion and had cantoned it for the winter in the country about the lower Loire, and who, like the others, had sent out his messengers to get wheat from the tribes around, heard that his embassy to the Veneti (by that name were these Bretons then called), Velanius and Silius, had been detained, and that the tribes farther on to the north in Normandy held also other deputies whom he had sent thither to levy food. Even as he heard this, young Crassus learnt from those whom the Veneti had sent to him with the news of their proud act, that if he would have his legates back he must himself give up the Breton hostages whom he had in his camp. Now these Bretons, the Veneti of Vannes, in thus detaining the Roman officers and in sending to their general such a message, knew that they had thrown down a challenge of life and death against all the power of Rome. Out from that coast to the north and to the south of the Loire’s mouth stretches for ever all away to the west the great ocean, here stormy beyond most seas and filling and emptying the rocky bays with swift irregular tides, and beating upon islands and many heaped boulders of stone that are islands at high water, and at low water joined to the mainland by spits of sand.