To Cæsar, far off in the Illyrian mountains, this news had been sent by young Crassus post-haste, and he heard it as he was setting out to watch in Italy his rivals and his friends; for Cæsar, while he conquered Gaul, was thinking much more of how later he might rule Rome. He saw what peril lay to him and all his fortunes in this sudden pride of the Veneti, and in all this rising of the sailors who knew the Northern Sea from the Straits to the two Cornwalls. First he ordered, and that immediately, the subject tribes round about the Loire’s mouth, and especially those who held the valley of the Charente and the harbours thereabout, and the men who lived upon the banks of the Loire itself, to build a fleet speedily and to send up such vessels as they had, that Crassus might have some weapon at least to his hand, and he sent up from the Roman shores--from the Mediterranean, that is--and from the Roman province which to-day we call Provence, rowers and men skilled in piloting, and a levy of the seafarers of the inland sea. But with all this he knew that he was attempting a doubtful thing, for his ships had no great strength, nor their sailors the skill of the Veneti, and their hulls were small and weak; and as for the Mediterranean rowers, they knew nothing of the Atlantic sweep, with its great rollers of Biscay under the south-west wind, nor of the heaving of the tides. Next Cæsar, when he had laid his plans for Italy at Lucca, upon the road to Rome, came northward quickly into Gaul, and was himself upon these coasts of the Veneti at the moment when spring breaks over the wind-harried land and the wide heaths of the Bretons. And with his armies he laboriously worked up the coast, beleaguering first one stronghold of theirs and then another, but all the summer through (during which heavy storms broke continually, for that season was a wild one) he failed, and the Veneti kept him at bay. _They_ could hold the sea in spite of weather; their stores and camps were on the islands and peninsulas to be approached only by the painful thrusting out of causeways from the shore, and when at last any one of these should be taken the sailor folk had only to put their people and their goods aboard and to sail to some other not yet conquered refuge. Until he had the better of their fleet--if, indeed, he could ever hope to master it--Cæsar must despair of conquest, and with this successful stand of all the northern shores he would lose Gaul. At last, towards the end of that summer, there came a day in which his fortunes and those, therefore, of France and all the world were decided. For a gentler air was upon the sea coming up from the southward, and the Roman fleet, which wild westerly weather had kept imprisoned in the Loire for all these weeks, could clear at last. It was upon a day when the sea was thus friendly, but the wind strong enough and steady to fill their sails, that the boats came out from the Loire mouth, making for the open sea.