Gregor MacGregor’s Poyais scam: How a Scottish soldier faked an entire country
In the 1820s, Gregor MacGregor offered his countrymen an irresistible chance to move to Poyais, a distant land of plenty. Except that it didn’t even exist…
Image: Gregor MacGregor | Public Domain
For many of us in rainy, blustery Britain, the prospect of emigrating to somewhere warmer and more exotic, like Florida or Spain, is immediately appealing. In the 1820s, it was no different for hundreds of Brits who jumped at the chance to start new lives in Poyais. This secluded spot of Central America was advertised as a beautiful land rich in untapped resources, from farmland to gold.
The only problem with Poyais? It didn’t exist. Its reported location on the Mosquito Coast was little more than inhospitable jungle. Even its allegedly bustling capital ‘St Joseph’ was pure fabrication. For many, ‘Poyais’ would instead turn out to be life-threatening. Who could possibly have been shameless and duplicitous enough to set up this death trap?
The name that soon started circulating in London newspapers was Gregor MacGregor. This Scottish soldier had posed as the ruler of Poyais and created publicity materials extolling its supposed merits as an emigration destination. Sky HISTORY examines how he pulled off one of the 19th century's most audacious deceptions.
Gregor MacGregor’s time in the military
Gregor MacGregor was born in Stirlingshire on 24th December 1786. He was a member of the historic MacGregor clan, which had played a contentious role in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. The 16-year-old Gregor joined the British Army in 1803, the first year of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1805, he married Maria Bowater, an admiral’s daughter.
The Bowater family’s wealth and prestige enabled Gregor to elevate his own social standing. The young lieutenant’s career path wasn’t exactly the most meritocratic, as he opted to leapfrog into a captaincy rank by simply buying it. After leaving military service in 1810, Gregor started moving in London circles and styling himself as a ‘Sir’. However, Maria’s death in 1811 left her widower financially beleaguered.
How could Gregor restore his respectability in Britain? The Venezuelan general Francisco de Miranda provided a clue, having been welcomed like a celebrity during a recent visit to London. It inspired Gregor to head across the Atlantic to join Latin American revolutionaries fighting to throw off the shackles of Spanish colonial rule. After leading several military expeditions where he disgracefully abandoned his troops, Gregor fled back to Britain to escape punishment.
Excitement turns into tragedy
In the British society of the 1820s, Gregor’s military adventures had earned him (rightly or wrongly) a reputation as a war hero. He soon spotted a way to deviously exploit this goodwill. He claimed to have been granted eight million acres (12,500 square miles) of land in Central America. More than that, he was now apparently the ruling ‘prince’ of this newly carved-out territory, ‘Poyais’. It was a utopia where fruit was plentiful and gold flowed in rivers…or so his story went.
To make the ploy all the more convincing, Gregor distributed copies of a 355-page guidebook about Poyais. The writing of the book was credited to a mysterious ‘Thomas Strangeways’, possibly a pseudonym for Gregor himself. Across Britain, Gregor opened offices that would sell parcels of Poyaisan land. He raked in money (the equivalent of more than a billion pounds today) from investors and buyers.
Hundreds of aspiring Poyaisan colonists boarded ships bound for this promising land. However, the first batch of 70 found it deserted. Had they been dropped in the wrong place? Searches for St Joseph came to nothing, and more than 150 further emigrants from Scotland landed months later. A British ship from Honduras was just happening to pass by when it caught sight of the stranded settlers, and a rescue mission ensued.
The Poyais scam starts to unravel
Of the roughly 270 who initially left British shores for Poyais, less than 50 returned. At least 180 perished as tropical diseases like dysentery and yellow fever took hold, while some survivors settled elsewhere in the Americas. Before the British judiciary could try Gregor, he legged it to France. There, he sought to ship yet more unwitting victims to Poyais, but their visa applications were cancelled by suspicious French authorities.
Though Gregor was put on trial in France, the prosecution decided that the blame lay with one of his associates. Gregor would live out the last of his days in Venezuela, where he received a pension in recognition of his military service there decades earlier. He died on 4th December 1845, having amazingly never been brought to justice for orchestrating the Poyais scam.
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