Odd this day

Ah, 13 April: anniversary of the day in 1821 when Gregor MacGregor made his PROCLAMATION To the Inhabitants of the Territory of Poyais, or Poyers, as he called them, that he was now Cazique of Poyais, because the King of the Mosquito Shore said so.

He had, you see, been given eight million acres of what is now the shore of Honduras by

George Frederick Augustus, king of the Mosquito Indians, a ferocious people who were descended from shipwrecked black slaves and local[s]

There is, you may not be surprised to hear, not a shred of evidence to suggest that he ever issued such a proclamation, but the ‘king’ in question did exist, and had made some kind of agreement with Gregor “in exchange for rum and trinkets”. So Gregor, naturally, assured the good people of London and Edinburgh that everything was above board, and:

At №1 Dowgate Hill, London, he established the Poyaisian Legation, where he displayed a parchment map showing the territory of Poyais, neatly marked out into squares of 540 acres each. He advertised the sale of lands at one shilling an acre cash, and one cent an acre annual quit rent. He issued banknotes promising to pay “on demand, or three months after sight, in the option of the Gov- ernment of Poyais, One Hard Dollar”. He then took steps to float a loan of 200,000 pounds sterling for the service of the “State of Poyais”. Neatly engraved bonds were issued en- titling the purchaser to four per cent interest, payable semi- annually. These bonds bore the signature of “Gregor the First, Sovereign Prince of the Independent State of Poyais and its Dependencies, Cazique of the Poyer Nation, etc., etc., etc.”

…or, to put it another way, started making a shitload of cash selling land he didn’t own. He was quite a plausible person to invest in: a self-confident, swashbuckling type with an impressive military record — as long as you didn’t look too closely.

He had fought for Venezuelan independence from Spain alongside Simón Bolívar (and married Bolívar’s niece) and with the 57th (West Middlesex) Regiment of Foot — who were known as ‘The Diehards’ after their ferocity at the 1811 Battle of Albuera… but Gregor had left said regiment a year or so before that particular battle.

To him, of course, this was mere detail. What was important was how marvellous a place Poyais was. He released a book: Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, Including the Territory of Poyais:

in which…

There were more than 350 pages of praise for this other Eden, this demi-paradise. It had fertile soil, capable of supporting three crops of maize a year. It had beautiful architecture. It had welcoming natives and a three-chambered parliament…

The Quarterly Review of February 1823 tried to persuade people that this sales pitch was balls, mocking this place

To no avail. Ballads had been sung in the streets to promote a promised land where the rivers were not just pure, they had nuggets of gold in them. Prospective settlers had been given titles of nobility and army commissions. So, dissenting voices were ignored, and the too-good-to-be-true story was swallowed whole.

At least two shiploads of people departed in late 1822 and early 1823, and, on arrival, found what the Quarterly Review described as “a paltry town of huts and ‘log-houses’”, and what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography now calls “only jungles, swamps, and disease”.

A 1927 telling of the story suggests that “Most of the emigrants were Highlanders who had been driven from their homes by the encroachments of the sheep farmers”. Gregor took them for £50,000 (something in the region of £4m today). He even kindly exchanged their savings for Poyaisian currency before they left. (Yes, that does mean he sold them bits of paper he’d had printed to look like real money. It was worth the paper it was printed on. And nothing more.)

The people he’d conned tried to make the best of it for a few months — although there was some infighting — and, according to one account:

Then the King of the Mosquito Nation got in touch. General McGregor

had assumed the title of Cacique in violation of specific prohibitions and since he had failed to fulfil his engagement with his Majesty, the grant of land made to him was now declared null and void.

So, they could pay for the land again with money they now didn’t have, or they could leave. In one account, a passing ship came to the rescue, and it was either that or:

Unfortunately, conditions in Belize were — amazingly — worse. As David Sinclair tells it, in The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History,

Fevers and other diseases spread rapidly among people already seriously weakened by their ordeal

…and

When word of this reached Britain, MacGregor did what such people tend to: blamed everybody else, sued people for libel, was arrested thanks to the efforts of “some dupes of his previous financial operations”, bought his freedom again for £6,200, and ran off to Paris.

Where he saw the error of his ways and stuck to the straight and narrow?

No, where he ran the exact same scam again and got himself nicked. Incredibly, after several months in prison, he was tried and acquitted.

So, obviously, he finally gave up?

No, he “returned to London and for the next twelve years travelled between London, Paris, and Edinburgh selling Poyais land grants” — albeit with ever-decreasing success.

Now, I’ve already been going on at some length, and if you haven’t already bailed, you’re welcome to do so now, but let’s be honest. This doesn’t sound unlike certain persons in our own era, does it? So, how do these fuckers keep getting away with it…?

Well, a write-up of Gregor’s story in The Economist a few years ago covered this very question:

Staggeringly, David Sinclair’s The Land That Never Was says that when the survivors got back to their homeland, several of them set about defending Gregor from the attacks on him in the press, saying, among other things:

Maybe this is the sunk cost fallacy, in human form: we want to believe in people, long after they’ve shown us who they really are.

Anyway, in the late 1830s, after his wife died, Gregor went back to Venezuela, and asked to be made a general because of his previous service. This was granted, along with a pension and a lump sum, and he

died peacefully in bed on 4 December 1845 [and] was buried in the cathedral with full military honours, with the president of the republic, cabinet ministers, and the diplomatic corps in attendance.

None of which suggests to me that that guy — you know the one — is likely to end his days behind bars. Ah, well — I have something lighter in a couple of days’ time…