The labourers worked in relays, as did the rest of the soldiers.
High grass had grown almost up to the fort walls, and had to be cut down.

While this was being done, skeletons and corpses in all states of decomposition were met with.

Almost all had died of starvation.

At first the bodies of those who died had been buried, but latterly their friends had become too weak to perform this office; and the poor wretches had crawled a few yards into the jungle, to die quietly.

Such numbers of bodies were found that they had, at last, to be burned in heaps.