To this Warren replies, with some appearance of pique, “I am very sorry that no one plan of mine, though approved by all my captains, has been so fortunate as to meet your approbation or have any weight with you.” And to show his title to consideration, he gives an extract from a letter written to him by Shirley, in which that inveterate flatterer hints his regret that, by reason of other employments, Warren could not take command of the whole expedition,--“which I doubt not,” says the governor, “would be a most happy event for his 129 Majesty’s service.”[140] Pepperrell kept his temper under this thrust, and wrote to the commodore with invincible courtesy: “Am extremely sorry the fogs prevent me from the pleasure of waiting on you on board your ship,” adding that six hundred men should be furnished from the army and the transports to man the “Vigilant,” which was now the most powerful ship in the squadron. In short, he showed every disposition to meet Warren halfway. But the commodore was beginning to feel some doubts as to the expediency of the bold action he had proposed, and informed Pepperrell that his pilots thought it impossible to go into the harbor until the Island Battery was silenced. 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; 130 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. Against that near and peculiarly dangerous neighbor, the advanced battery, or, as they called it, the _Batterie de Francœur_, they planted three heavy cannon to take it in flank. “These,” says Duchambon, “produced a marvellous effect, dismounted one of the cannon of the Bastonnais, and damaged all their embrasures,--which,” concludes the governor, “did not prevent them from keeping up a constant fire; and they repaired by night the mischief we did them by day.”[141]