In Victory at Yorktown, Richard Ketchum states that "early the next morning [the 10th] the French Grand Battery opened with eighteen- and twenty-four-pounders and mortars...the defenders could find no refuge in or out of the town. Residents fled to the waterfront and hid in hastily built shelters on the sand cliffs, but some eighty of them were killed and others wounded - many with arms or legs severed - while their houses were destroyed...A British officer reported that the allied cannonade was so intense that his men could scarcely fire a gun of their own since 'fascines, stockade platforms, and earth, with guns and gun-carriages [were] all pounded together in a mass."
This same day part of the French batteries opened on the remaining British ships in the York River, using "hot shot", cannonballs heated to red hot before being fired. At least one shot was entirely successful; it set the three-year-old, 44-gun, Charon on fire. She was abandoned, drifted to the Gloucester side of the river, where she sank. Artifacts since recovered are displayed today in the NPS museum. Two or three other smaller vessels were sunk the same way that night.
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