"Bringing to his work the utmost vitality of a strong race and the highest aspirations for economic property, albeit attained through a Homeric struggle, man in the Amazon (...) will quite soon regret his own daring, upon the destruction of all his accumulated energies. Entire waves of people from Ceará, valiant people who exemplify our national resistance and tenacity, are decimated by malaria in a short space of time! Those who do not perish, those whose uncertain fate was less brutal, these return, bearing the remains of their sickness in the form of permanent organic lesions."