Scarcely half an hour later the fire from the forts broke out furiously. It was answered, with greater speed and fury, from the shore, where the foe had posted his great guns to enfilade the harbor defenses.
At Fort Revere the commandant cut away concrete emplacements and succeeded in swinging one of his 12-inch guns around to fight the assailants, putting a heavy howitzer near Hingham out of action.
A second plunging shot fell near a gun behind Baker Hill; but the assailants, from howitzer batteries concealed under Turkey and Scituate Hills, concentrated a desperate bombardment on him that drove the Americans from the works.[103]
Firing from heavy caliber weapons at short range, pouring explosives and common shell and shrapnel from every vantage point along all the shore, the hostile army swept the rear of the harbor defenses with such blasts that the mere impact of the solid shells made a din like the pounding of monstrous rivetters’ hammers.[104]
From the sea all the big guns of the ships struck into the chorus. The vessels pressed in as closely as they dared and opened with every cannon that could get the range.
Boston Completely Isolated
Boston’s populace, listening to the clamour from the sea, scarcely noted that the bulletins were announcing that all the railroad lines of the Boston and Maine Railroad leading north and northwest to Portsmouth, Haverhill, Lawrence and Lowell had been seized, and that Boston was completely cut off.
Silent policemen appeared all at once followed by men with posters and paste-pails. The crowds saw posters go up on their walls, signed by the Boston Citizens’ Committee.
There was a poster in great red letters warning the inhabitants to deliver any firearms that they possessed in the City Hall within six hours.