While the ships were being ranged in line of battle, the English stood at their guns in silence till "Old Eliott" took his stand on the King's Bastion, and gave the signal for the roar of earth and hell to begin. Instantly the floating batteries answered from the whole line, and their fire was taken up along the shores of the bay, till there were four hundred guns playing on the devoted town. No thunderstorm in the tropics ever shot out such lightnings and thunderings. As the hills echoed the tremendous reverberations, it seemed as if the solid globe was reeling under the shock of an earthquake. The ships at first aimed their guns a little too high, so that balls and shells flew over the line-wall and fell in the rear; but they soon got the range, and lowering their guns to almost a dead-level, fired point-blank. "About noon their firing was powerful and well-directed." Guns were dismounted, and the wounded began to fall and to be carried to the rear. But others took their place at the guns, and kept up the steady fire, never turning from the one object directly in front. Although the batteries on the land tried to divert their fire, the Governor disdained to answer them with a single gun. "Not there! not there!" was the danger. His keen eye saw that the fate of Gibraltar was to be decided that day by the answer given to those battering ships that were pouring such a terrific fire into his lines. In the midst of it all he was as cool as if on parade. A large part of the day he kept his place on the King's Bastion, the centre at which the enemy's fire was directed, and his presence had an inspiring effect upon his men. To do them justice, the soldiers, who had served under such a commander for three years, were worthy of their leader. As he looked along the lines they were wrapped in a cloud of smoke, and yet now and then, by the flashing of the guns, he could see their heroic features glowing "with the light of battle in their faces." On that day, as with Nelson twenty-three years later, "England expected every man to do his duty," and did not expect in vain. But for a time all their courage and skill seemed to be without result. For hours the battle raged with doubtful issue. Though the English fired at such short range, they did not produce much effect. Their thirty-two-pound shot could not pierce the thick-ribbed sides of the battering-ships, while their heaviest shells were seen to rebound from the roofs, as the shots of the Congress and the Cumberland rebounded from the roof of the Merrimac. Apparently the fire of the garrison produced as little impression on the ships as the fire of the ships produced on the rocks of Gibraltar.