This was the point where he feared a landing most. He built an armored train, seizing the material from the town of Hull, and armed it with quick-firers that it might be sent to threatened places.
Outposts were sent as far as Nantasket, for fear the enemy should try to land there or cross the narrow neck and take boats over it into the bay behind.
Beyond Fort Revere he destroyed certain houses that would interfere with the firing. At the far outlying islands called The Graves he posted men with signal rockets. He sent scout boats to lie at sea beyond the fire zone, from Nahant to the spot where the Light-ship was moored in times of peace.[88]
Within forty hours he had doubled the strength of his defense because he had the men. He looked up at a hostile aeroplane, flying well beyond gunshot. They had become almost commonplace objects in Boston’s sky during the past days. “Well, come on!” he said. “You and your ships! We’ll give you a whirl.”
He was awakened at one o’clock that morning. The “whirl” had begun. Ships were standing in toward Nahant Bay in the north and off Cohasset in the south. Fifteen minutes afterward the people of Boston and Charlestown and Brookline, of Quincy and Weymouth, Hingham and Lynn, were brought out of their beds by explosions that shook the houses. They came from the sea, northeast and southeast and east. They were not only incessant, but they came two and even three so close together at times that they made a sustained roar as if the very air itself had turned to thunder.
Battleships with 15- and 16-inch guns were bombarding Fort Revere and the fort was answering with its 12-inch guns. Armored cruisers were firing on Standish. Armored cruisers and battle cruisers were throwing 12- and 14-inch shells into Deer Island and on Winthrop. Battleships lying north of Nahant in Nahant Bay, and thus invisible to the Boston defenses and not to be reached by searchlights, were bombarding Forts Banks and Heath.[89]
Fort Warren was firing at them, over Boston Light. Fort Andrews loosed its batteries.
There was bombardment from 3-inch guns along the beaches, north and south, where destroyers were attacking the coast stations, under heavy fire in reply from the defenders on the land.