The Secret Attack on the Shore
Far northward, miles outside of Boston Harbor, beyond the system of the harbor defenses, two ships stood into Nahant Bay, until they were within a line drawn from Fishing Point south of Swampscott to Spouting Horn on Nahant. Here, in 7 fathoms of water, they stopped and lowered their boats.
Manned by crack bluejackets, whose oars were wrapped with cloth that they should not make a sound in the rowlocks, the cutters moved toward the beach at Little Nahant.
Far away the harbor searchlights played like summer lightning. The sailors moved on in utter darkness, toward the invisible beach. They rowed in, in irregular formation, till they could hear the surf. Then the foremost boats lay still, tossing on the swell, waiting for the others to draw abreast. Formless, vaguely gray in the night, the line made a dash.
They were on the first lifting swell of the long waves that tumble toward the land when a fierce white light tore terribly through the night, and blazed on them, and around them. It held them, intangibly, tightly, like the hand of a ghost.
Orange flashes ripped through it. Little Nahant Beach quaked with explosion. In the white light, as if the tossing boats were spectral pictures in a dissolving view, they melted amid the roar of the shore-guns. Black fragments whirled through the steady glare, and shells chopped the sea where there were bobbing heads and clutching hands.
The light stabbed the night, in and out. It veered to sea with enormous speed. A long, black silhouette with three funnels appeared full in the circle of its artificial day. A funnel vanished, and another. A spout of water lifted alongside from a shell that had fallen short. Another, the next instant, smashed into its side and made it reel. The destroyer turned suddenly and rushed at the land. Its steering gear had been shot away. Almost instantly it straightened out again; but Little Nahant was raving. Little Nahant was flaming without pause. The searchlight held the ship. It staggered, like a stumbling animal, pitched twice, each time a little more wildly, and went down bow first.
“Have repulsed attack on search-light station and observers at this point,” went the word
