He also turned himself against the Veneti in Brittany, a seafaring people at the mouth of the Loire: on this river, he built a fleet with which he overpowered them. The whole of this campaign was conducted by him with remarkable skill; yet here also, as in the whole of the Gallic war, he behaved with great cruelty. Soon afterwards, he went on his first expedition to Britain, where the tin mines of Cornwall had already been known for ages. Tin is even now chiefly brought from England and the East Indies (from the peninsula of Malacca and the island of Banca); a little only is found in the Hartz and the Erzgebirge. The Phœnicians did not fetch it from India. An immense quantity of tin was used in ancient times, as it was by an alloy with it that copper was made fusible. Brass was only of late invention, considerably later than bronze, for the founding of which, however, tin is required. Bronze is very old indeed, being met with in the temple of Solomon, and even in the tabernacle of Moses already. The trade in tin was carried on through a twofold channel; either by Cadiz, which was by sea the whole way, or else by land, through Narbonne and Nantes. About the rest of Britain nobody cared. The country at that time was thought at Rome to be quite inaccessible, and Cæsar became smitten with the fancy of conquering these untrodden lands. Booty there was little to be gained in that undertaking, as he did not go near the tin districts, and Kent and Sussex, which he invaded, were very poor: the Romans are said to have found there neither gold nor silver, whereas in Gaul there was a good deal of money in circulation. He nearly lost his ships, which, being badly built, could hardly make their way in these foreign seas: the ebb and flow of the tides, especially the strong tides of the Channel, was what the Romans knew nothing about. After having defeated the half-naked and badly-armed barbarians, he made their seeming submission a pretext for going away again. A second expedition was as unsuccessful: yet he penetrated beyond the Thames, above London, very likely to the neighbourhood of Windsor, got some hostages, and returned. Scarcely, however, had he left the island, when that show of obedience ceased. Twice also did Cæsar cross the Rhine, and that in our own neighbourhood, against the Sigambri and the Sueves; both times, however, without obtaining any advantage. Yet that it was possible to advance so far into those wild forests, is much to be wondered at: as the _Westerwald_ is in fact the western part of that immense tract of forests, which reached to the heart of Poland, and for some time formed the southern border of the Germans against the Celts. Ambition only could have led Cæsar to seek for conquests in those countries.