 He wrote his friend Luciano Cordeiro, ""I am an invalid and poor.I have no bread and look to the supreme consolation...to die in the Fatherland"".In 1877, the Geographic Society had made an appeal to an entitlement for the merchant/explorer (specifically a pension), in order to support his desire to return to Portugal, where he could "die in the Fatherland which he had honorably and dedicatedly served".