In fact, there
was danger that if the ships got in while that battery was still alive and
active, they would never get out again, but be kept there as in a trap,
under the fire from the town ramparts.
Gridley's artillery at Lighthouse Point had been doing its best, dropping
bombshells with such precision into the Island Battery that the French
soldiers were sometimes seen running into the sea to escape the explosions.
Many of the Island guns were dismounted, and the place was fast becoming
untenable. At the same time the English batteries on the land side were
pushing their work of destruction with relentless industry, and walls and
bastions crumbled under their fire. The French labored with energy under
cover of night to repair the mischief; closed the shattered West Gate with
a wall of stone and earth twenty feet thick, made an epaulement to protect
what was left of the formidable Circular Battery,--all but three of whose
sixteen guns had been dismounted,--stopped the throat of the Dauphin's
Bastion with a barricade of stone, and built a cavalier, or raised battery,
on the King's Bastion,--where, however, the English fire soon ruined it.
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