These disasters, that might have been appalling to a lesser sea-power, left the great navy of the Coalition unshaken. Steadily, imperturbably, it kept on its way.
So there came the day when coasters and small craft sped wildly into the shelter of Boston and New York Harbors, into Long Island Sound and into the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. They had seen the enemy.
Next morning, in a gray, transparent, peaceful April dawn, watchers on the coast, gazing across the empty, flat Atlantic, to the immense half-circle of the horizon, saw innumerable tiny objects just sticking up above the rim of the sea. Through the glass they seemed to be little perches of skeleton iron built in the deep ocean.
Set at beautifully precise distances apart, they dotted the sharply outlined edge of water and sky, north and south, far beyond vision.
Innocent and quiet they appeared, as they stood there, growing slowly, very slowly, up out of the far sea.
And the roaring presses, spouting forth extra editions east, west, north and south, told the United States of America:
Never, even in after years, was it determined whence the news of the enemy ships came first. Almost as easily might a land invaded by locusts have decided what eye first saw the coming cloud, or at what precise spot.
“Warship on horizon. Standing in. Slowly.” It came from the keeper of Peaked Hill Bar Life-Saving Station at the far end of Cape Cod’s sweeping sand-arm. From the crest of the Navesink Highlands, standing steep out of the Atlantic at New York’s harbor entrance, men saw ships. On the high place their eyes commanded a view eighteen miles out to sea. At that extreme distance were the tops of fighting craft, lying safely outside of the zone of fire from the big guns in Sandy Hook’s harbor-defenses.
From his lantern 163 feet high the lighthouse keeper of Barnegat on the New Jersey coast, forty miles south of the Navesink, saw tops above his horizon. “Ships standing off here,” came the word from Cape Ann, north of Boston.
Philadelphia heard from Absecon Light and cried to Washington that the enemy was preparing to land on its coast. Boston cried to Washington for ships and men. New York telegraphed and telegraphed again and sent delegations on a special train.