#poyais

[verecunda]

The con artist who sold rich investors a fake country

Nearly 200 years ago, Gregor MacGregor pulled off one of the most brazen real estate scams in history.

um. holy shit???

[dailyhistoryposts]

Did You Know?

In the early 19th century, General Gregor MacGregor tricked hundreds of French and British men to invest in the fictional country of "Poyais", selling land and government bonds. Poyais would have been part of what is now Honduras.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

1. Anna Anderson as Anastasia Romanov

In 1918, Bolshevik revolutionaries murdered the Russian princess Anastasia, along with the rest of her family.

However, rumors persisted of her alleged survival for decades and over the years, several different impostors claimed to be Anastasia Romanova.

None gained as much fame as Anna Anderson.

The would-be royal first surfaced in the early 1920s in a Berlin mental asylum, where she announced that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the deceased Czar Nicholas II.

Although most of the surviving Romanovs dismissed her as a fraud, the girl bore a striking resemblance to the princess and even knew many personal details of her life.

She soon won the support of a coterie of wealthy Russian emigrants, many of whom believed she was the legitimate heir to the throne.

The supposed princess eventually moved to America in 1968 and took the name Anna Anderson.

But while her story inspired several books and even a Hollywood movie, she failed to win recognition in court due to a lack of evidence.

Her story remained the source of much debate until 1994, when a posthumous DNA test finally proved she was not related to the Romanov family.

Anderson was likely a Polish factory worker who disappeared in 1920, but her true identity has never been confirmed.

2. Gregor MacGregor as the "Cazique of Poyais"

In the early 1820s, a dashing Scotsman named Gregor MacGregor rose to the top of London’s high society on the basis of a most unusual claim.

A former soldier and mercenary who had fought in South America, MacGregor presented himself as the “cazique” or prince, of a small Central American country he called Poyais.

As evidence, the faux royal produced several maps, drawings and even a book, all of which described the mysterious country as a fertile paradise with a working government and friendly native population.

MacGregor’s tiny principality seemed the perfect destination for European settlers, except for one small detail: It didn’t exist.

Far from being a “cazique,” MacGregor was actually a con man who had cooked up a fairy tale country as a way of bilking investors out of huge sums of money.

He eventually sold thousands of pounds worth of land rights for his phantom nation.

In 1822, the first would-be “Poyers” set sail across the Atlantic Ocean.

Arriving in Central America and finding only unsettled jungle, the pioneers—many of whom had converted their life savings into phony Poyais currency—soon realized they had been swindled.

The stranded colonists were eventually rescued but not before some 180 people perished from disease.

Not surprisingly, MacGregor fled the country soon after the news reached England.

He later resurfaced in France but was arrested after he tried to set up a second Poyais-related scheme.

3. False Dmitry I

The man known as False Dmitry I not only successfully posed as a prince, he managed to con his way onto the royal throne of Russia.

The pretender first became known to history in the early 1600s, when he appeared in Poland declaring himself to be Dmitry, the youngest son of the deceased Ivan the Terrible.

The real Dmitry had supposedly been assassinated as a boy, but the imposter claimed he had escaped his would-be murderers and fled the country.

The alleged royal went on to charm the Russian people, eventually riding a wave of public support all the way to Moscow.

False Dmitry was crowned czar in July 1605, but his rule was ultimately short-lived.

The pretender’s policies proved too radical for Russia’s elites, and he was overthrown and assassinated less than a year later.

Many have since speculated that his real name may have been Grigory Otrepyev, but this has never been proved.

Amusingly, he was not the only impostor who claimed to be the real Dmitry.

Two more pretenders emerged over the next decade, though neither succeeded in winning the throne.

4. Perkin Warbeck as Richard of York

Not only did young Perkin Warbeck masquerade as a prince, he nearly succeeded in overthrowing King Henry VII of England.

In 1491, Warbeck appeared in Ireland claiming he was Richard of York, the youngest son of the former King Edward IV.

The real Richard was most likely murdered in the Tower of London as a boy, but at the time, there was still much speculation about his fate.

Capitalizing on this mystery, Warbeck presented himself as the missing prince and eventually won support among Henry VII’s political enemies, who included such powerful figures as James IV of Scotland and Maximilian I of Austria.

Warbeck landed in Cornwall in 1497, and he soon galvanized his supporters into a rebel army of several thousand men.

But when faced with the possibility of a battle with the king’s forces, the pretender lost his nerve and fled to the coast.

He was eventually captured and later admitted he was an impostor before being executed by hanging in 1499.

Warbeck is widely regarded as a famous fraud, but some historians have noted that Henry VII could have fabricated the pretender’s backstory in an attempt to discredit him.

With this in mind, there remains at least a small possibility that Warbeck may have actually been Richard of York.

5. Mary Baker as “Princess Caraboo”

For several months in 1817, the village of Almondsbury, England fell under the spell of a phony island princess.

The young woman had first appeared in the town clad in a black turban and speaking a mysterious language.

Through a Portuguese translator, she identified herself as Princess Caraboo, a member of the royal family of Javasu, a small Indian Ocean atoll.

Even more astonishing, she claimed she had been kidnapped from her homeland by pirates, and had only escaped by plunging into the freezing Bristol Channel and swimming ashore.

The story of Princess Caraboo quickly took the town by storm.

People flocked to get a look at the visiting royal, who slept on the floor, swam naked in a nearby lake and climbed trees to pray to a god called “Allah Tallah.”

The fascination continued until a woman from a neighboring town noticed that Her Highness Princess Caraboo was in fact Mary Baker, an English girl who had previously been employed in her house as a servant.

Baker later admitted that she had invented the princess and her bizarre language as part of an elaborate con, and the story of the hoax went on to become a minor sensation in the British press.

6. Yemelyan Pugachev as Peter III

In 1773, a royal impostor sparked one of the largest revolts in Russian history.

Capitalizing on his striking resemblance to the murdered Peter III, a former soldier named Yemelyan Pugachev took on the identity of the late emperor and incited a massive peasant uprising against Catherine the Great.

As Peter III, Pugachev promised populist reforms, including autonomy for Russia’s Cossack population and an end to the feudal system.

Soon, thousands of serfs had rallied to his standard.

Initially catching the empress by surprise, Pugachev’s army laid siege to the city of Orenburg in late 1773 then proceeded to raze Kazan the following year.

Despite these early successes, by late 1774, Catherine’s generals had started to turn the tide of the conflict.

Following a decisive defeat at Tsaritsyn, a group of Pugachev’s lieutenants betrayed him and turned him over to the empress.

The impostor was executed in early 1775, and his revolt crumbled soon thereafter.

7. Karl Wilhelm Naundorff as Prince Louis-Charles

Although he spent his life as a watchmaker and clock salesman, German swindler Karl Wilhelm Naundorff went to his grave insisting he was the rightful King of France.

Naundorff arrived in Paris in the 1830s claiming to be Prince Louis-Charles, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, both of whom were beheaded during the French Revolution.

Naundorff was only one of several men who professed to be the long-dead dauphin, but he soon succeeded in winning the confidence of many high profile figures including the prince’s former governess.

Despite having several physical characteristics in common with the Prince Louis-Charles, Naundorff never provided sufficient evidence for his assertion, and he was eventually branded a fraud.

Even Princess Marie Therese—his supposed sister—refused to meet with him.

After being expelled from France, Naundorff lived out his later years in the Netherlands, where he was recognized as Louis-Charles until his death in 1845.

The mystery of his true identity would endure for another 150 years, but Naundorff was finally exposed as an impostor in the early 21st century, when DNA evidence proved he was not related to Marie Antoinette.

[rvexillology]

The flag of Poyais, a made up country in Central America imagined by a Scotsman to defraud investors and colonists

from /r/vexillology Top comment: The fictitious state of Poyais was promoted in the 1820's by General "Sir" Gregor MacGregor as a means of raising fraudulent loans. He had obtained a land grant from a local Indian king in what would now be Belize, and on this basis created an entirely fictitious state with himself as ruler. To bolster his claims he provided detailed accounts not only of the country's geography and economic resources but of its state coat of arms, military uniforms etc., including the national flag, which was a green St. George's Cross on a white background. He went so far as to send out colonists (most of whom never returned) and this flag was actually hoisted on the ship wich carried them.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Beginning in 1821, the city of London was overrun with reports of a previously unknown nation nestled on the Caribbean coastline of what is now Honduras.

Called Poyais, it was supposedly a lush and untapped paradise of fertile farmland, rolling hills and gold-rich streams.

Its native “Poyers” were described as friendly and hardworking people, and its capital, St. Joseph, was a European-style settlement dotted with public buildings and even an opera house.

Poyais boasted a deep-water port and a pleasant climate that made it immune to the scourge of tropical disease.

It was, as one guidebook claimed, “one of the most healthy and beautiful spots in the world.”

It was also a complete and total fraud.

By the time it finally ran its course several years later, it had duped scores of unsuspecting investors and led to the deaths of over 150 people.

The mastermind behind the Poyais fairy tale was Gregor MacGregor (24 December 1786 – 4 December 1845), a Scottish adventurer with a colorful past.

Born in 1786, he had spent his youth in the British army before heading to South America in the 1810s to fight as a soldier of fortune in the Venezuelan War of Independence against Spain.

MacGregor served as a general under the legendary Simón Bolivar—whose cousin he married—and later led a series of independent military campaigns in the Caribbean.

One of his notorious actions came in 1817, when he raised a small army of freebooters and briefly captured Florida’s Amelia Island from the Spanish.

MacGregor was not a particularly brilliant military commander—he had a tendency to desert his men whenever defeat looked imminent—but he did have a knack for self-promotion and deception.

His greatest swindle seems to have materialized in 1820, when he convinced a native Indian king to grant him some 8 million acres of territory along Central America’s Mosquito Coast.

The plot was little more than an undeveloped jungle, yet by the time he returned to London the following year, MacGregor had reinvented it as the obscure but prosperous nation of Poyais.

He claimed he was the country’s “Cazique,” or prince, and announced that he had returned to Europe on a mission to solicit investments and recruit prospective settlers.

It didn’t take long for “His Highness Gregor” to become a fixture in London’s high society.

A wealthy aristocrat set him and his wife up in a country estate, and the city’s Lord Mayor held a banquet in his honor.

MacGregor inspired trust by using charm and citing his past military achievements—which he greatly exaggerated—but he also came armed with a series of official documents, nearly all of which were fabricated.

He produced a handwritten land grant from the Mosquito King, a national flag, charts and maps showing Poyais’ borders, and even a copy of a proclamation he had made to the country’s natives before taking off for Europe.

Combined with the slow speed of news and the unstable political situation in South America, the documents were enough to convince most people of Poyais’ existence.

After drumming up interest in his country, MacGregor cashed in by floating a 200,000 pounds sterling Poyais bond in the London money market.

He also started peddling land and titles to would-be colonists.

The recruitment blitz was largely centered in MacGregor’s native Scotland, where enterprising settlers were told they could purchase 100 acres of pristine Poyais farmland for just £11.

The more well-to-do bought officers’ posts in the Poyais military, while other investors were lured with the promise of posts as merchants, government employees and bankers.

In his role as the venerable “Cazique,” MacGregor may have raked in several hundred thousand pounds in profits.

The con reached its high-water mark in September 1822, when a ship called the Honduras Packet set sail from London with several dozen Poyais-bound pilgrims.

Four months later, a second ship carried nearly 200 more settlers out of Leith, Scotland.

Most of the aspiring “Poyers” had invested their entire life savings in the journey.

Some had even converted all of their cash to Poyais dollars, which MacGregor had begun printing in Scotland.

Yet after being deposited on the coast of Central America, the passengers made a startling discovery:

Not only was there no capital of St. Joseph, there seemed to be no Poyais at all.

Instead of the settlement they’d been promised, they found only mile after mile of dense, insect-infested jungle.

The confused settlers built ramshackle huts and tried to survive while they waited for help, but it wasn’t long before malaria and other diseases spread through their ranks.

“Sickness and despondency were so general, that few were able or willing to make any exertion,” a Scottish pilgrim named James Hastie wrote.

Help finally arrived in May 1823 in the form of a British ship from a nearby colony in Belize.

The surviving Poyers were evacuated, but the misadventure had taken its toll.

Of the roughly 250 emigrants that had left England and Scotland, two-thirds eventually died from tropical diseases.

Even after the first Poyais survivors returned home, MacGregor still wasn’t brought to justice.

His supporters—including some of the unfortunate pilgrims—even defended him in the press and argued that the colony’s failure must have been the fault of his agents and collaborators.

In the autumn of 1823, the “Cazique” quietly fled England and set up shop in Paris, where he attempted to repeat the Poyais con all over again.

He published a Poyais constitution, secured a bank loan and once again began recruiting settlers.

This time, however, his phantom country attracted suspicion from the French authorities.

MacGregor was thrown in jail in December 1825 and tried for fraud and conspiracy, but was acquitted due to lack of evidence and released eight months later.

Despite his brush with law, MacGregor continued promoting his Poyais schemes—and continued getting away with it—for another decade.

In 1827, he resurfaced in London and issued a new £800,000-bond.

The following year, he once again started selling bogus Poyais land certificates.

MacGregor finally retired his mythical country in the late 1830s and took off for Venezuela, which had awarded him a full military pension for his participation in its wars of independence.

The “Cazique of Poyais” died there in 1845, having never been found guilty of a single crime.

[poyaisgroup-blog]

[poyaisgroup-blog]

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[joestreckert]

In 1820 a Scotsman named Gregor MacGregor pulled off one of the most audacious cons of all time. MacGregor claimed to be descendant of Rob Roy and ancient kings

In 1820 a Scotsman named Gregor MacGregor pulled off one of the most audacious cons of all time. MacGregor claimed to be descendant of Rob Roy and ancient kings of Scotland, and also claimed to have been granted a certain amount of land in what is now modern day Honduras. Calling his new (and entirely fictional) country “Poyais,” MacGregor began to solicit investments for his new, up-and-coming Central American country.