He claimed “the entire mortality of Ceará” was nearly “500,000, or more than half the population.”[63] Smith also states, in an article written for the New York Herald, that “by the 20th of December, [1878] the death rate was 400 per day” in Fortaleza, a popular city for emigration within Ceará.[2] But, as asserted by the Wellington Post, Fortaleza did not provide sanction for all: “at least 200,000 refugees,” were forced to “encamp about the larger town,” where the “famine mortality… [had] reached twenty per day.”[64] In total, the Wellington Post found that the “whole drought” resulted in “as high as 300,000” deaths.[64] Further variation within the statistics is seen through a New York Times’ article, “Pestilence and famine in Brazil,” which avows “150,000 persons died” from malnutrition, a consequence of the drought.[65]