Volusenus had evidently failed to find a suitable harbour, which would have prevented the damage Caesar's exposed ships would suffer at high tide.
The great natural harbour at Richborough, a little further north, was used by Claudius in his invasion just 100 years later, but we do not know whether Volusenus travelled that far, or indeed whether it existed in a suitable form at that time (our knowledge of the geomorphology of the Wantsum Channel that created that haven is limited).
[5] When the legate Titus Labienus suspected Commius, the formerly loyal king of the Atrebates, of conspiring against them in the winter of 54 or 53 BC, he invited him to a meeting and sent Volusenus and some centurions to execute him for his treachery.
The death of Volusenus was meant to render Pompey useful service, but the task proved too difficult, and they were forced to defect without any such token.
[9] Ronald Syme noted that Volusenus's decade-long tour of duty might have been uncommon for a man of his equestrian social rank, many of whom "owed their commissions less to merit than to the claims of friendship and influence or the hope of procuring gain and political advancement."
[11] Based on a "hopelessly corrupt" reading[12] of one of Cicero's speeches against Mark Antony,[13] Volusenus was sometimes identified by 19th-century scholars as a tribune of the plebs in 43 BC.