Sitting in Caesar's Prickly Seat: Schooner Days MLXX (1070)

by C. H. J. Snider

ON THE MORBIHAN

August, A.D., 1052

PLAYING hookey among strange islands and old stones and good people has brought this truant from Schooner Days to Caesar's seat.

Gaius Julius Caesar was a friend long ago in Jarvis Collegiate when "Banty" Crawford ruled the podium. He made us translate from the Bellum Gallicum (word for word with all cribs barred) Caesar's campaign against the Veneti in B.C. 56. We thought the Veneti were Venetians, and learned they were not, the hard way, which was Banty's. They were a tribe of seagoing Gauls, inhabitants of Armorica, which is the present Brittany.

Their ships were better than the Roman row-galleys, for being built high fore and aft they towered above the Roman boarding parties and could shower down stones, darts, arrows and fireballs. Having sails they, were superior in speed to the rowboats in a breeze. They were better seaboats, and could plough through the tide-rips and be beached when necessary, in surf that destroyed galleys. They led Caesar a wild dance. They shifted the Veneti from headland to headland, where they fought with advantage of position and had their retreat secured.

Caesar solved the problem by catching the fleet in a calm, and attacking with scythes and sickles on the ends of oars and poles. These shore away their leathern sails from the yards, and cut their halliards and rigging so that they were sitting birds for the galleys to ram with their beaks and destroy with their sling and catapults.

The battle took all day.

Here, right under my eyes, was it fought two thousand years ago. Here Caesar sat and watched it, and made his notes for the Commentaries. Here, two thousand years later, stand I, glad that old Banty hammered so much love for himself and his Latin into my youthful head.

It's a steep gorse-bracken-and-broom-clad hillock a hundred feet high, overlooking the Lake Simcoe-like Morbihan or "Little Sea," and also the Atlantic Ocean, from which the Morbihan is cut off by peninsulas.

The French name it the Butte de Cesar, the English, Caesar's Seat— but the gendarmerie of Sarzeau had to be called out to find it.

None of the Bretons asked on the way from Vannes had ever heard of the Butte de Cesar or Caesar's Seat either of the guidebooks. Nor had the state police. But when the tumulus of Thumiac was mentioned the smart French captain—as efficient as an American traffic cop, and as polite as an inspector of Scotland Yard—whipped out a large scale map and showed the Thumiac and all the roads leading thereto. This sent me on the way with Gallic blessings.

You see, some prehistoric potentate had been buried here long before Caesar was born. Caesar's observation post was the great mound of earth and stones piled up by thousands of prehistoric Kelts, or the barrow people before them, to do honor to the dead hero, Thumiac of the Thousand Tribes, or whatever his name might be. Caesar had never heard of him, but the Bretons, who go right back to Noah's son Japhet have remembered Thumiac long after, they have forgotten imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay.

If Caesar's Seat was as gorse covered then as now he was literally on pins and needles while the battle progressed. Nevertheless, I felt a great reverence for the privilege of being allowed to be alone here on the top of this mound and muse upon the Morbihan, and upon Thumiac, who had been one with the prickly gorse and the green bracken and the butter-yellow broom for unknown millenniums.

It was all unspoiled.

All lush green orchard and pasture land, the state highway emptier of traffic than the Yonge street subway.

The only sound was the whisper of the Little Sea, the far off murmur of the Atlantic tide, and the soft brushing of polished horns against flowering hedges in the lane below. Becasinne, the Bretanne cowgirl, was leading a pair of timid ewes and driving ahead of her, with the help of PouPou the sheepdog, half a dozen red and white and half a dozen black and white cows to the milking.

Thumiac was dust, and Caesar was dagger meat, and the Veneti had been driven from their light-hulled ships and their impregnable headlands. But the Little Sea lives on, and the Veneti survive in the Breton apple orchards and in the quaint and gracious city of Vannes, to which they gave their name.

Indeed, I had seen their white-robed great-great-grandchildren, and their velvet gowned, lace coiffed great-geat-grandmother in the annual fete of the first communions only the day before. And believe it or not, grandma rode into town on her bicycle, velvet gown, embroidery, lace coif, rosary and all.

And the ship, those gallant ships of the Veneti, which relied on the winds of Lir, the sea god, against the oars of Rome? What of them? Had they gone the way of most other sail, and succumbed to power - steam, gas, oil or jet?

Not so. I could see them there on the Little Sea, fitting to and fro across its Niagara-like tidal currents, a distinct type of sailing vessel which has survived the ages. At that this distance they seemed to have "skins for sails, and hides thinly dressed," just as Caesar had written, for their wings flashed a rich rust red or glowing black and crimson, in the sunshine and the shadow. They were really canvas, tanned and dyed in oak or hemlock bark.

These sails hang from yards or crossarms, as Caesar said. They are flat-headed or high-peaked lug-sails, with little luff forward of the mast. The foremast is stepped right abaft the stem, the mainmast forward of amidships, so that they suggest the little "barques" and "butts" of the Gaspe fishermen in Canada. The mainmast is much the loftier spar, the mainsail the largest sail. The bow, slightly raking, is high and bold, again as Caesar said. The stern, however which was of yore built up into a castle, has been modified. Both keel and sternpost rake sharply, and the rudder is outboard, giving a long after overhang.

The succeeding Veneti call these vessels sinagots, pronounced "seen ago." Yes, seen a long time ago; even perhaps by Caesar. Each carries a curved timber, made of two young trees spliced together at the butts, and lashed below the gunwale, on the port side. It looks like an inherited fend-off against the attack of the old galley beaks. But it is only the spreader for a net trawl.

Most of the sinagots are used in fishing, but many have been converted into yachts. They sail like witches, either with their loosefooted lug rig, or marconied into schooners. I'd like to bring one home.