Still the curtain was not yet to fall on this awful drama. The military force was now so much reduced that four of the eight regiments were drafted into the other four, and only the Fifteenth, Twenty-fourth, Wolfe's, and Fraser's were left. The yellow fever continued to rage unchecked. Two hundred and fifty of the men left in hospital by Wentworth on his departure for Cuba died in a single fortnight.[154] Then in February 1742 there came a reinforcement of three thousand men, namely, one battalion of the Royal Scots, the Sixth, and the Twenty-seventh Foot. They arrived healthy, but began to sicken at once.[155] All kinds of new projects were now debated, an attack on Guatemala, on Yucatan, on Panama; but the troops continued to die at the rate of fifteen men a day, and it was of little profit to discuss plans in the presence of such a general as yellow fever. At length, after much delay, the expedition put to sea for the third time, and sailed against Porto Bello. The voyage was protracted by inclement weather to nineteen days, and at the end of those nineteen days, although none but healthy and selected men had been embarked, the Sixth regiment alone had thrown ninety-eight corpses overboard, and of the whole force nearly a thousand were sick or dead.[156] In such circumstances the enterprise was abandoned, and the expedition, once more delayed by unfavourable weather, returned again to Jamaica. There the hospitals were emptier and the graveyards fuller than at Wentworth's departure, for five hundred of the sick which he had left behind him had succumbed. The survivors who returned from Porto Bello soon filled up the hospital again, and by the end of July it was crowded with eight hundred men. One hundred and fifty of these died in August, and three hundred more were dead by the middle of October. By this time such few men as remained of the four thousand Americans had been discharged, the survivors numbering little more than three hundred, and all hope of further operations had been abandoned. The commanders indeed still met and discussed their plans with each other and with Governor Trelawny, the contention growing so hot between them that Trelawny and Sir Chaloner Ogle drew their swords upon each other, and were with difficulty prevented by Wentworth from adding to the death-roll. But when yellow fever is killing men before they can arrive within range to kill each other, councils of war are even less than ordinarily profitable. Of the regiments that had sailed from St. Helen's under Cathcart in all the pride and confidence of strength, nine men in every ten had perished.[157]