Another difficulty with which M. de Lesseps and his colleagues have had to contend from the beginning has been the unhealthy character of the climate. In this respect Panama has always had a most unenviable notoriety. The danger was therefore not unknown. Dampier, nearly 200 years ago, spoke of the “malignity of the waters draining off the land, through thick woods, and savannas of low grass and swampy grounds;” and Wafer reported about the same time that “the country all about here is woody, low, and very unhealthy, the rivers being so oozy that the stinking mud infects the air.” Walton, again, expressly declared that the unhealthiness of the isthmus was one of the greatest obstacles to the opening of a canal between the two oceans. “Disease,” he said, “is a barrier against settling on the isthmus to improve it,” and he found that “persons who have withstood every other climate there became languid.” Humboldt appears to have made the climate of Panama a special subject of inquiry, and reports that “for fifty years back the _vomito_ (black vomit of the yellow fever) has never appeared on any point of the coast of the South Sea, with the exception of the town of Panama.” This is explained by the fact that “the tide, when it falls, leaves exposed for a great way into the bay a large extent of ground covered with _Fucus ulvæ_ and _Medusæ_, the air is infected by the decomposition of so many organic substances, and miasmata, of very little influence on the organs of the natives, have a powerful effect on Europeans.” Accounts of the extraordinary mortality at the works of the canal have from time to time been circulated in Europe, which read like the description of a pestilence, or of a devastating war. To Europeans especially the climate has been highly fatal. M. de Lesseps and his friends have tried, not unnaturally, to reassure the public, both European and American, on this score. Even he, however, has been compelled to admit a serious mortality. In his report on the progress of the works in 1885, he stated that during the previous twelve months more than 1100 deaths had occurred, of which some 320 were Europeans.[184] In some of the rainy months the mortality was frightful. In October and November it rose to nearly fifty per week. The Canal Executive declared that this large number was swollen considerably by the mortality of sailors arriving at Panama, but, however this may be, the climate is without doubt one of the most malarious and deadly to European constitutions that exists in the world.