December 3rd 1845 saw the death in Venezuela of Gregor MacGregor, Prince of Poyais.
Poyais. I hear you say? Never heard of it? Well that’s because it doesn’t exist now, in fact it never existed back then either, oor Gregor was a conman he invented it and persuaded many British and, later, French to invest in, and in many case emigrate to the non-existent colony he said was on the Bay of Honduras in central America.
Gregor McGregor had joined the Royal Navy in 1803 and was a Colonel in the Venezuelan War of Independence, fighting under Simon Bolivar who had fought in Florida in 1817.
In 1820, he returned to London and announced that had been named the Cacique (Prince) of the Principality of Poyais. The country was located on the Bay of Honduras and the land had been bestowed upon him by native chief King Frederic Augustus I of the Mosquito Shore and Nation. The country included over 12,500 square miles of untapped, rich lands which only lacked settlers to develop.
To help promote his cause, he published a book, Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, including the Territory of Poyais, supposedly written by Captain Thomas Strangeways. The book said English settlers had founded the capital of St. Joseph in the 1730s, had untapped gold and silver mines, fertile soil, and other ample resources which settlers could profit from. The country had a civil service, a bank, an army, a democratic government, and natives eager to work for their British masters. The book can be downloaded for free from Google Books and you can read for yourself the wonders of this non-existent country. Unfortunately, the most fertile thing about Poyais was Gregor McGregor’s imagination.
In reality, King Frederic Augustus had signed the document granting the land to Gregor McGregor in April 1820 after being plied with whisky and rum. The land only had four run-down buildings in it, and was surrounded by uninhabitable jungle with no fertile lands, gold or silver mines and the other assets describe by McGregor in his book. But to a fraudster, facts are irrelevant. It was his fiction that fed his cause.
MacGregor began selling shares in his new country, and in October 1822 raised a loan of £200,000, he even opened offices in London as well as Glasgow, Stirling and Edinburgh to sell land to his fellow Scots, and printed Poyais dollars. This was no small scale fraud, shares for the company were even sold on The London Stock exchange!
By January 1823, two ships carrying around 240 passengers had arrived in Poyais to find not a thriving town as promised, but untamed jungle. Disease and malnutrition soon set in and about 180 of them died; some even after the settlers were rescued by a passing ship in May 1823. Word of MacGregor’s fraud quickly reached England. He escaped to France, where he was imprisoned but ultimately acquitted. In its October 25, 1823 story about the scheme, The Guardian called MacGregor, “a person of whom we do not choose to say all that we think.” However many of the “settlers” defended MacGregor, blaming other advisors for the failure of the enterprise.
MacGregor returned to London in 1826 and went on to try to raise an £800,000 loan for Poyais. But by now potential investors were wary and, besides, other conmen had moved in on his non-existent country: MacGregor found himself in competition with others trying to sell Poyais by the acre.
He was still trying to sell Poyais land certificates in Edinburgh as late as 1837 and apparently gave up not long afterwards, returning to Venezuela in 1839. Here he was awarded the pension of an army general for his service during the war for independence. He died there on this day in December 1845.
Pics of Gregor, an n engraving from Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, purporting to depict the "port of Black River in the Territory of Poyais" and the currency of Poyais.
