The horrors of that time are quite indescribable. By the care of Cathcart hospital-ships had indeed been provided for the expedition, but these had neither nurses, surgeons, cooks, nor provisions. "The men," wrote Smollett, himself a surgeon on board a man-of-war, "were pent up between decks in small vessels where they had not room to sit upright; they wallowed in filth; myriads of maggots were hatched in the putrefaction of their sores, which had no other dressing than that of being washed by themselves in their own allowance of brandy; and nothing was heard but groans and lamentations and the language of despair invoking death to deliver them from their miseries." So these poor fellows lay in this sickly, stifling atmosphere, with the raging thirst of fever upon them, while the tropical sun burnt fiercely overhead or the tropical rain poured down in a dense, gray stream, filling the air with that close clammy heat which even by a healthy man is grievous to be borne. The sailors also suffered much, though less heavily, being many of them acclimatised; and surgeons could have been spared from the men-of-war for the transports could Wentworth have been brought to ask them of Vernon, or Vernon to offer them to Wentworth. So while the commanders quarrelled the soldiers perished. Officers died as fast as the men, all discipline on the transports came to an end, and the men gave themselves up to that abandoned listlessness which was seen in Schomberg's camp in Ireland, when the bodies of dead comrades were used to stop the draughts in the tents. Day after day the sailors rowed ashore to bury their boats' loads of corpses, for there was always order and discipline in the ships of war; but the raw soldiers simply dragged their dead comrades up on deck and dropped them overboard, without so much as a shroud to their bodies or a shot to their heels. Vernon railed furiously at this nastiness, as he called it,[151] not reflecting that men untrained to the sea might know no better. So after a few hours the bodies that had sunk beneath the water came up again to the surface and floated, hideous and ghastly beyond description, about the transports, while schools of sharks jostled each other in the scramble to tear them limb from limb, and foul birds with ugly, ragged wings flapped heavily above them croaking for their share. Thus the air was still further poisoned, sickness increased, and the harbour became as a charnel-house. At length, on the 5th of May, it was resolved to return to Jamaica; and two days later the fleet sailed away from the horrors of Carthagena. By that time the men nominally fit for service were reduced to seventeen hundred, of whom not above a thousand were in a condition to be landed against an enemy.[152] [Sidenote: August 12/23.] [Sidenote: August 18/29.]