Scipio was greatly astonished when he found that Hannibal had marched north, as he believed that the Alps were impassable for an army, and had reckoned that Hannibal would certainly march down the river and follow the seashore.

Finding that the Carthaginians had left he marched his army down to his ships again, re-embarked them, and sailed for Genoa, intending to oppose Hannibal as he issued from the defiles of the Alps, in the event of his succeeding in making the passage.
Four days' march up the Rhone brought Hannibal to the point where the Isere runs into that river.

He crossed it, and with his army entered the region called by Polybius "The Island," although the designation is an incorrect one, for while the Rhone flows along one side of the triangle and the Isere on the other, the base is formed not by a third river, but by a portion of the Alpine chain.
Malchus and his band had been among the first to push off from the shore when the army began to cross the Rhone.

Malchus was in a roughly constructed canoe, which was paddled by Nessus and another of his men.
Like most of the other canoes, their craft soon became waterlogged, for the rapid and angry current of the river, broken and agitated by so large a number of boats, splashed over the sides of the clumsy canoes, which were but a few inches above the water.

The buoyancy of the wood was sufficient to float them even when full, but they paddled slowly and heavily.
The confusion was prodigious.