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.
Boston’s Bombardment Begins
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.
Southeast, on the horizon, there sprang up a dull glow that became greatly red, and grew swiftly to pulsating flame. It was the town of Hull, burning.
The people in South Boston, looking seaward, saw lights appear in the sky over the outer harbor islands. They slipped slowly downward, leaving long trails of stars behind, that hung, burning, in the air as if they had been fixed there.
The falling lights opened, like monster flowers, into glaring, spectrally white flame just before they reached the earth. All the harbor where they fell stood revealed as in a lightning flash; but this flame did not go out like a lightning flash. It burned, steady, inextinguishable, for long minutes.
They were star-bombs that were being dropped on the forts by the great war-fowl, the iron breasted aeroplanes. The white lights glaring below, and the hanging lights in the air that stood like a lighted staff, pointed out the forts to the hooded cannon of their iron sisters out at sea.
Fired at from sea and sky, the forts replied and shook the earth. Faster and faster hurried the fire from the hidden ocean. Five ships were firing their secondary batteries to destroy an out-lying searchlight at a range of 6,000 yards. It was said afterward that at least five hundred projectiles were expended at that one mark alone.[90]