His answer was instantaneous and effective. The battery 'blazed with cannon, swivels, and small-arms,' which fired point-blank at the men ashore and with true aim at the boats crowded together round the narrow landing-place. Undaunted though undisciplined, the men ashore rushed at the walls with their scaling-ladders and began the assault. The attempt was vain. The first men up the rungs were shot, stabbed, or cut down. The ladders were smashed or thrown aside. Not one attacker really got home. Meanwhile the leading boats in the little cove were being knocked into splinters by the storm of shot. The rest sheered off. None but the hundred and fifty men ashore were left to keep up the fight with the garrison. For once the odds were entirely with the French, who fired from under perfect cover, while the unfortunate Provincials fired back from the open rocks. This exchange of shots went on till daylight, when one hundred and nineteen Provincials surrendered at discretion. Their total loss was one hundred and eighty-nine, nearly half the force employed. Despairing Louisbourg naturally made the most of this complete success. The bells were rung and the cannon were fired to show the public joy and to put the best face on the general situation. Du Chambon surpassed himself in gross exaggerations. He magnified the hundred and fifty men ashore into a thousand, and the two hundred and fifty afloat into eight hundred; while he bettered both these statements by reporting that the whole eighteen hundred had been destroyed except the hundred and nineteen who had been taken prisoners. Du Chambon's triumph was short-lived. The indefatigable Provincials began a battery at Lighthouse Point, which commanded the island at less than half a mile. They had seized this position some time before and called it Gorham's Post, after the colonel whose regiment held it. Fourteen years later there was another and more famous Gorham's Post, on the south shore of the St Lawrence near Quebec, opposite Wolfe's Cove. The arming of this battery was a stupendous piece of work. The guns had to be taken round by sea, out of range of the Island Battery, hauled up low but very dangerous cliffs, and then dragged back overland another mile and a quarter. The directing officer was Colonel Gridley, who drew the official British maps and plans of Louisbourg in 1745, and who, thirty years later, traced the American defences on the slopes of Bunker's Hill. Du Chambon had attempted to make an attack on Gorham's Post as soon as it was established. His idea was that his men should follow the same route as the British guns had followed--that is, that they should run the gauntlet between the British fleet and army, land well north of Gorham's Post, and take it by surprise from the rear. But his detachment, which was wholly inadequate, failed to strike its blow, and was itself very nearly cut off by Warren's guard-boats on its crest-fallen return to Louisbourg.