In the 1820s, Gregor MacGregor sold land, money and dreams in Poyais, a country that existed only in his imagination.
Hundreds of settlers sailed to Central America, only to find jungle, disease and a terrible truth.
Tap a purple word for its meaning. Tap a time to play from there.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's part two of our three-part mini-series on famous con artists.
[00:00:29] In part one, we met Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower.
[00:00:35] In part three, we'll meet Charles Ponzi, the man whose scheme was so spectacular that his name became forever associated with it.
[00:00:45] But today, it's time to talk about Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a country.
[00:00:52] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:59] In the early 1820s, if you walked through the City of London, you could stop at a smart office and buy land in a country called Poyais.
[00:01:11] Poyais was a small, fertile paradise on the coast of Central America.
[00:01:17] There was a 355-page guidebook describing it, full of maps and illustrations. There was a capital city called St Joseph, with wide paved boulevards, a theatre, an opera house, a cathedral, and a bank.
[00:01:36] You could buy Poyaisian government bonds on the London Stock Exchange.
[00:01:41] You could exchange your British pounds for Poyaisian dollars, crisp, beautifully printed banknotes. If you were feeling adventurous, you could even buy a ticket, board a ship, and settle there.
[00:01:56] Around 250 men, women and children did exactly that.
[00:02:02] And when they arrived, after two months at sea, they found no boulevards, no opera house, no bank, no signs of civilisation whatsoever.
[00:02:15] They found an empty jungle.
[00:02:19] Poyais, after all, did not exist. It had never existed. Every map, every banknote, every bond and every page of that guidebook had come from the imagination of one man: a Scottish soldier named Gregor MacGregor.
[00:02:39] He was born on Christmas Eve, 1786, beside Loch Katrine in the Scottish Highlands.
[00:02:47] He was a member of Clan Gregor, the same clan as the famous outlaw Rob Roy, a fact that he would make sure to point out to anyone he met.
[00:02:58] At sixteen, he joined the British Army. His family bought him the rank of junior officer, which was a normal practice at the time, and a couple of years later he married into a well-off family, marrying the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral.
[00:03:16] Her money bought him the rank of captain.
[00:03:21] And his fellow officers noticed two things about him. He was competent enough; not a bad soldier, but not particularly remarkable. One thing that did seem strange was that he was extraordinarily fond of uniforms, medals and titles. He loved them, and kept a small collection.
[00:03:44] The army wasn't for him, though, and in 1810, aged 23, he left, after getting into a dispute with a senior officer.
[00:03:54] As a regular citizen back in Edinburgh, he continued to refer to himself by his military title, but he decided to give himself a little upgrade: "Colonel" MacGregor sounded good, so that was how he introduced himself.
[00:04:11] Colonel, by the way, is three levels up from captain.
[00:04:16] Clearly, something about life in Edinburgh wasn't quite doing it for him, so he headed to where the action was really taking place: London. The capital.
[00:04:27] And when he arrived, he decided that he deserved yet another upgrade, and started introducing himself to people as "Sir Gregor MacGregor, baronet".
[00:04:39] He wasn't a Sir, he wasn't a baronet, he was just regular old Gregor MacGregor, but this was England of the 19th century and if people believed you when you told them you were a member of the Scottish aristocracy, well, certain doors would open that remained closed to regular members of society.
[00:05:00] But shortly after arriving in London, his wife died, and with her went his income. It was time for yet another reinvention.
[00:05:11] MacGregor sold what he had and sailed across the Atlantic, to Venezuela, where a war of independence had just broken out against Spain.
[00:05:22] If London was a place where not too many questions were asked about a man's past, South America was on an entirely different level. Say it with confidence and a straight face, and have a convincing enough backstory, and people would believe you.
[00:05:41] He offered his services to the revolutionary government, most likely greatly exaggerating the extent of his military career in the British Army.
[00:05:50] But the rebels needed anyone they could. MacGregor joined up and rose quickly through the ranks. He also married a local woman named Josefa.
[00:06:02] And she, in fact, did have genuine prestigious family connections; she was a cousin of Simón Bolívar himself, the great liberator of South America.
[00:06:15] And as for MacGregor, he actually did some real, half-decent soldiering.
[00:06:22] In 1816, he led a fighting retreat through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, pursued by a larger Spanish force for a month, and brought his army out intact.
[00:06:35] It was a real achievement, and he was promoted to general.
[00:06:40] Now, there's probably an entire episode we could make simply on MacGregor's time in Latin America. He tried to declare his own republic on an island off the coast of Florida, he spent time in Jamaica, he went all over the place. It was a mixture of bold plans, unrealistic expectations, and running for the hills when things went south.
[00:07:02] But we must get to the big trick, the main con.
[00:07:08] In 1820, MacGregor arrived on the Mosquito Coast, which is a wild stretch on the east of what is now Honduras and Nicaragua. It was ruled, loosely, by a local king called George Frederic Augustus, who had good relations with Britain and a fondness for European goods.
[00:07:30] MacGregor gave the king rum and jewellery, flattered him enthusiastically, and came away with a piece of paper granting him eight million acres of land, a territory bigger than Wales.
[00:07:45] The grant itself was real; the king really did sign it.
[00:07:49] But it was a grant of empty land, jungle, swamps and mangroves. There were no towns, no roads, no farms and barely anyone apart from a few scattered indigenous communities.
[00:08:05] And importantly, it came with no right to rule; the king had given him land, not a kingdom.
[00:08:14] That was not how MacGregor chose to describe it.
[00:08:18] The following year, he returned to London as a new man.
[00:08:23] He was no longer a colonel or a baronet. He was now, he told people, "His Serene Highness Gregor, Cazique of Poyais". A cazique, he explained, was a kind of prince.
[00:08:37] London society welcomed him with open arms. He was, after all, a decorated general of the South American wars, a clansman of Rob Roy, married into Bolívar's family.
[00:08:50] He dined with the Lord Mayor. His wife was received as the Princess of Poyais.
[00:08:57] He opened a Poyaisian legation in the City of London, which was a sort of embassy, and even began appointing officials. He created a Poyaisian order of chivalry, the Order of the Green Cross, and pinned it on a few friends.
[00:09:14] He even claimed to have attended the coronation of King George IV on behalf of his country.
[00:09:21] Nobody seemed to have asked whether anyone else had actually heard of this country, the mythical-sounding young nation of Poyais.
[00:09:30] It didn't seem to matter. This was a scam that came at the perfect time.
[00:09:37] Britain in the early 1820s was awash with money. The industrial revolution and the expanding empire had generated vast wealth for the country, and there was a lot of cash sloshing around looking for the next big investment opportunity.
[00:09:55] The Napoleonic Wars were over, and British government bonds paid very little.
[00:10:02] Meanwhile, the newly independent countries of South America were all raising loans in London at eye-wateringly high interest rates.
[00:10:11] Investors were hungry for anything South American.
[00:10:16] And it all seemed theoretical. Most Englishmen couldn't have identified Colombia or Peru on a map, so what did it matter if they hadn't heard of Poyais before?
[00:10:28] One more exotic-sounding name on the list raised no eyebrows at all.
[00:10:33] But MacGregor invented much more than the name. He thought of everything.
[00:10:40] There was a 355-page guidebook that came out in 1822 written by a "Captain Thomas Strangeways".
[00:10:50] Nice name for an adventurous travel writer, you might be thinking: Strangeways.
[00:10:55] There was no Captain Strangeways. No such man existed; the author was MacGregor and his small circle of helpers.
[00:11:04] Fake it might have been, but it was a wonderful piece of fantasy. The book described a land of astonishing richness, and described it in great detail.
[00:11:16] The soil of Poyais produced three harvests of maize a year. The forests were full of valuable timber, the waters full of fish, the land full of animals, to such an extent that "a man could hunt or fish for a single day and bring back enough to feed his family for a week".
[00:11:36] The rivers, it claimed, carried pure gold, actual small lumps of it, washing down from the mountains.
[00:11:43] The capital, St Joseph, had twenty thousand inhabitants, public buildings, an opera house, and the Bank of Poyais.
[00:11:51] The climate, the book insisted, was remarkably healthy for Europeans, a place where a colonist could relax and recover from all manner of diseases. Most areas around it were terrible when it comes to tropical disease but, according to the book, Poyais was a veritable oasis.
[00:12:11] And on the back of all this, MacGregor began to sell.
[00:12:17] Land certificates went on sale at two shillings and three pence per acre, roughly a day's wages for a working man. The price rose steadily, to four shillings, and still people kept buying. Around five hundred people bought Poyaisian land, with some people putting in their entire life savings.
[00:12:40] Then, in October 1822, came the masterpiece. A respectable City bank underwrote a loan of £200,000 for the government of Poyais, secured on the tax revenues of that non-existent government, and the bonds went on sale on the London Stock Exchange, sitting alongside the bonds of real countries.
[00:13:05] And to be fair to the investors, the other "real" South American bonds on the market were hardly safer. Within a few years, almost every one of those new countries had stopped paying its debts.
[00:13:20] The whole market was a bubble, a period of wild, unrealistic investment.
[00:13:26] If nobody checks whether a country can pay, why does the country need to exist after all?
[00:13:33] And there was one more detail. MacGregor had banknotes printed in Edinburgh, by the same company that printed notes for the Bank of Scotland.
[00:13:44] When emigrants prepared to sail, his agents helpfully explained that British pounds would be of little use in Poyais, and exchanged the settlers' real money for MacGregor's newly-minted Poyaisian dollars.
[00:13:59] Not only had these settlers bought land in a non-existent country, before leaving they handed over the last real currency they had, their last actual money, for worthless banknotes.
[00:14:13] And these people, the people who fell for the ruse, were not fools.
[00:14:18] Mostly, they were MacGregor's fellow Scots. Among them were doctors, lawyers, craftsmen and farmers, men with families and respectable careers.
[00:14:30] And they went all in. Many of them sold their homes and their furniture to pay for their piece of Poyais. They packed up their tools, said goodbye to friends and family, and sailed off into the sunset.
[00:14:46] MacGregor gave the more ambitious ones titles and government posts in the new land. A shoemaker from Edinburgh proudly accepted the position of Official Shoemaker to the Princess of Poyais.
[00:15:01] In September 1822, the first ship sailed from London with about seventy settlers aboard.
[00:15:09] In January the following year, a second ship left from just outside Edinburgh, with around two hundred more, and MacGregor proudly announced that women and children would travel free. The ship left harbour with a six-gun salute, the Poyaisian flag flying from the mast.
[00:15:29] All in all, around 250 people sailed for Poyais.
[00:15:34] The crossing took around two months, and you can imagine the mood on board.
[00:15:40] The settlers read and re-read their copies of the guidebook. They discussed which plots of land they would farm, and which trades would be most in demand in the capital. The Official Shoemaker checked over his tools.
[00:15:55] Somewhere below deck sat their furniture, their savings converted into Poyaisian dollars, and everything they would need for the new life waiting for them on the other side of the ocean.
[00:16:07] The first group reached the Mosquito Coast in November 1822, and found the mouth of the Black River, exactly where the maps said St Joseph should be.
[00:16:18] But... there was nothing there.
[00:16:22] No harbour, no city, no bank, no opera house. Just beach, swamp and jungle, and the crumbling remains of a few huts left by an earlier failed settlement.
[00:16:35] However, strangely enough, their first thought doesn't seem to have been, "oh no, we've been tricked".
[00:16:42] Perhaps that thought was too big to let in.
[00:16:46] They decided that St Joseph must be further inland, or that the government of Poyais would shortly send officials to receive them. They unloaded their supplies, set up camp on the beach, and waited for someone to come.
[00:17:00] The man MacGregor had put in charge of the expedition, an ex-army officer named Hector Hall, grandly titled Baron Tinto, kept sailing along the coast, supposedly to find help or to consult the Mosquito king. Of course, he never found him.
[00:17:19] The second ship arrived in March, and two hundred more people walked into the same trap. Fresh faces came ashore asking for directions to St Joseph, and the first group had to tell them there were no directions to give.
[00:17:35] Then the rainy season came.
[00:17:38] The camp flooded. Malaria and yellow fever swept through the settlers, and they, remember, had been promised a climate remarkably healthy for Europeans. With no proper medicine, people started to drop like flies.
[00:17:57] The man who had been appointed Official Shoemaker to the non-existent Princess of Poyais took a pistol and shot himself.
[00:18:06] Rescue, when it finally came, was almost accidental. A small ship was passing by the coast and saw this bunch of ragged Europeans. They took the survivors to British Honduras [which is now called Belize], and it was there that they learned the truth: there was no Poyais, there never had been, and nobody in this part of the world had ever heard of their Cazique.
[00:18:34] Word got back to the king who had granted MacGregor the land, and when he learned what the Scotsman had done, he publicly cancelled the grant.
[00:18:45] Of the roughly 250 settlers who sailed, at least 180 died. Fewer than fifty ever made it back to Britain.
[00:18:56] When the survivors' accounts reached the London newspapers in late 1823, there was an enormous scandal. But MacGregor had already slipped across the Channel to Paris.
[00:19:10] Strangely enough, though, some of the survivors of Poyais, some of the people who had been duped by MacGregor, publicly defended him.
[00:19:20] Six of them signed a public statement insisting that their Cazique was blameless, and that the disaster was the fault of the expedition's leaders on the ground.
[00:19:32] Perhaps this sounds impossible, but, just like with the victims of Victor Lustig, for some people it must have been too painful to admit that they had been tricked; it was easier to point to something else, to blame someone else.
[00:19:49] Now, if you've been having strange flashbacks, thinking "I'm sure I've heard a story of Scottish people trying to set up a colony in Central America before", you're right. A century and a quarter earlier, Scotland had tried to build its own colony in Central America, at Darién, in modern-day Panama.
[00:20:09] That too ended in disaster, and you can hear about that in episode 564. That, though, wasn't a con. A terrible idea, yes, but not one man's trick.
[00:20:23] Poyais was the invention of Gregor MacGregor.
[00:20:28] And even after being found out, the con continued.
[00:20:33] In Paris, MacGregor ran the same scheme again.
[00:20:38] He linked up with a French trading company, produced a new constitution for Poyais, and began recruiting French emigrants. This time, however, the authorities noticed. Officials became suspicious when a group of citizens applied for passports to travel to a country that didn't exist on any official map, and the whole network was arrested.
[00:21:03] In 1826, a French court tried MacGregor for fraud.
[00:21:08] But he had a plan. He hired excellent lawyers, presented himself as an honest soldier betrayed by dishonest associates, and was acquitted, found not guilty. One of his associates went to prison, but the mastermind of the operation walked free.
[00:21:28] He returned to London, and, incredibly, kept going. For almost a decade he continued to issue Poyaisian bonds and land certificates, in smaller and smaller schemes, to anyone who would still buy them.
[00:21:44] By 1838, his second wife had died, the money had dried up, and London had finally stopped listening. So the old soldier made his last move.
[00:21:57] He sailed to Venezuela, presented himself to the government as a hero of the war of independence, and asked for his old rank back, along with a general's pension. The Venezuelans said yes.
[00:22:11] Gregor MacGregor spent his final years in Caracas as a respected veteran, and when he died in 1845, he was buried with full military honours in Caracas Cathedral.
[00:22:25] He, of the three protagonists in this mini-series, is the only one to have truly "got away with it".
[00:22:32] And given the scale of the con, it is quite something.
[00:22:36] An entirely new country, invented. Guidebooks. Currency. Even persuading London banks to issue debt for it.
[00:22:45] On the list of the most ambitious con artists of all time, it's hard to find a more worthy number one than Gregor MacGregor, the Cazique of Poyais.
[00:22:56] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a country.
[00:23:02] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:06] Next up, in the final part of this mini-series, we'll be off to Boston in the summer of 1920, where an Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi discovered a magical way to double people's money, and got immortalised in the dictionary in the process.
[00:23:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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In the 1820s, Gregor MacGregor sold land, money and dreams in Poyais, a country that existed only in his imagination.
Hundreds of settlers sailed to Central America, only to find jungle, disease and a terrible truth.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's part two of our three-part mini-series on famous con artists.
[00:00:29] In part one, we met Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower.
[00:00:35] In part three, we'll meet Charles Ponzi, the man whose scheme was so spectacular that his name became forever associated with it.
[00:00:45] But today, it's time to talk about Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a country.
[00:00:52] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:59] In the early 1820s, if you walked through the City of London, you could stop at a smart office and buy land in a country called Poyais.
[00:01:11] Poyais was a small, fertile paradise on the coast of Central America.
[00:01:17] There was a 355-page guidebook describing it, full of maps and illustrations. There was a capital city called St Joseph, with wide paved boulevards, a theatre, an opera house, a cathedral, and a bank.
[00:01:36] You could buy Poyaisian government bonds on the London Stock Exchange.
[00:01:41] You could exchange your British pounds for Poyaisian dollars, crisp, beautifully printed banknotes. If you were feeling adventurous, you could even buy a ticket, board a ship, and settle there.
[00:01:56] Around 250 men, women and children did exactly that.
[00:02:02] And when they arrived, after two months at sea, they found no boulevards, no opera house, no bank, no signs of civilisation whatsoever.
[00:02:15] They found an empty jungle.
[00:02:19] Poyais, after all, did not exist. It had never existed. Every map, every banknote, every bond and every page of that guidebook had come from the imagination of one man: a Scottish soldier named Gregor MacGregor.
[00:02:39] He was born on Christmas Eve, 1786, beside Loch Katrine in the Scottish Highlands.
[00:02:47] He was a member of Clan Gregor, the same clan as the famous outlaw Rob Roy, a fact that he would make sure to point out to anyone he met.
[00:02:58] At sixteen, he joined the British Army. His family bought him the rank of junior officer, which was a normal practice at the time, and a couple of years later he married into a well-off family, marrying the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral.
[00:03:16] Her money bought him the rank of captain.
[00:03:21] And his fellow officers noticed two things about him. He was competent enough; not a bad soldier, but not particularly remarkable. One thing that did seem strange was that he was extraordinarily fond of uniforms, medals and titles. He loved them, and kept a small collection.
[00:03:44] The army wasn't for him, though, and in 1810, aged 23, he left, after getting into a dispute with a senior officer.
[00:03:54] As a regular citizen back in Edinburgh, he continued to refer to himself by his military title, but he decided to give himself a little upgrade: "Colonel" MacGregor sounded good, so that was how he introduced himself.
[00:04:11] Colonel, by the way, is three levels up from captain.
[00:04:16] Clearly, something about life in Edinburgh wasn't quite doing it for him, so he headed to where the action was really taking place: London. The capital.
[00:04:27] And when he arrived, he decided that he deserved yet another upgrade, and started introducing himself to people as "Sir Gregor MacGregor, baronet".
[00:04:39] He wasn't a Sir, he wasn't a baronet, he was just regular old Gregor MacGregor, but this was England of the 19th century and if people believed you when you told them you were a member of the Scottish aristocracy, well, certain doors would open that remained closed to regular members of society.
[00:05:00] But shortly after arriving in London, his wife died, and with her went his income. It was time for yet another reinvention.
[00:05:11] MacGregor sold what he had and sailed across the Atlantic, to Venezuela, where a war of independence had just broken out against Spain.
[00:05:22] If London was a place where not too many questions were asked about a man's past, South America was on an entirely different level. Say it with confidence and a straight face, and have a convincing enough backstory, and people would believe you.
[00:05:41] He offered his services to the revolutionary government, most likely greatly exaggerating the extent of his military career in the British Army.
[00:05:50] But the rebels needed anyone they could. MacGregor joined up and rose quickly through the ranks. He also married a local woman named Josefa.
[00:06:02] And she, in fact, did have genuine prestigious family connections; she was a cousin of Simón Bolívar himself, the great liberator of South America.
[00:06:15] And as for MacGregor, he actually did some real, half-decent soldiering.
[00:06:22] In 1816, he led a fighting retreat through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, pursued by a larger Spanish force for a month, and brought his army out intact.
[00:06:35] It was a real achievement, and he was promoted to general.
[00:06:40] Now, there's probably an entire episode we could make simply on MacGregor's time in Latin America. He tried to declare his own republic on an island off the coast of Florida, he spent time in Jamaica, he went all over the place. It was a mixture of bold plans, unrealistic expectations, and running for the hills when things went south.
[00:07:02] But we must get to the big trick, the main con.
[00:07:08] In 1820, MacGregor arrived on the Mosquito Coast, which is a wild stretch on the east of what is now Honduras and Nicaragua. It was ruled, loosely, by a local king called George Frederic Augustus, who had good relations with Britain and a fondness for European goods.
[00:07:30] MacGregor gave the king rum and jewellery, flattered him enthusiastically, and came away with a piece of paper granting him eight million acres of land, a territory bigger than Wales.
[00:07:45] The grant itself was real; the king really did sign it.
[00:07:49] But it was a grant of empty land, jungle, swamps and mangroves. There were no towns, no roads, no farms and barely anyone apart from a few scattered indigenous communities.
[00:08:05] And importantly, it came with no right to rule; the king had given him land, not a kingdom.
[00:08:14] That was not how MacGregor chose to describe it.
[00:08:18] The following year, he returned to London as a new man.
[00:08:23] He was no longer a colonel or a baronet. He was now, he told people, "His Serene Highness Gregor, Cazique of Poyais". A cazique, he explained, was a kind of prince.
[00:08:37] London society welcomed him with open arms. He was, after all, a decorated general of the South American wars, a clansman of Rob Roy, married into Bolívar's family.
[00:08:50] He dined with the Lord Mayor. His wife was received as the Princess of Poyais.
[00:08:57] He opened a Poyaisian legation in the City of London, which was a sort of embassy, and even began appointing officials. He created a Poyaisian order of chivalry, the Order of the Green Cross, and pinned it on a few friends.
[00:09:14] He even claimed to have attended the coronation of King George IV on behalf of his country.
[00:09:21] Nobody seemed to have asked whether anyone else had actually heard of this country, the mythical-sounding young nation of Poyais.
[00:09:30] It didn't seem to matter. This was a scam that came at the perfect time.
[00:09:37] Britain in the early 1820s was awash with money. The industrial revolution and the expanding empire had generated vast wealth for the country, and there was a lot of cash sloshing around looking for the next big investment opportunity.
[00:09:55] The Napoleonic Wars were over, and British government bonds paid very little.
[00:10:02] Meanwhile, the newly independent countries of South America were all raising loans in London at eye-wateringly high interest rates.
[00:10:11] Investors were hungry for anything South American.
[00:10:16] And it all seemed theoretical. Most Englishmen couldn't have identified Colombia or Peru on a map, so what did it matter if they hadn't heard of Poyais before?
[00:10:28] One more exotic-sounding name on the list raised no eyebrows at all.
[00:10:33] But MacGregor invented much more than the name. He thought of everything.
[00:10:40] There was a 355-page guidebook that came out in 1822 written by a "Captain Thomas Strangeways".
[00:10:50] Nice name for an adventurous travel writer, you might be thinking: Strangeways.
[00:10:55] There was no Captain Strangeways. No such man existed; the author was MacGregor and his small circle of helpers.
[00:11:04] Fake it might have been, but it was a wonderful piece of fantasy. The book described a land of astonishing richness, and described it in great detail.
[00:11:16] The soil of Poyais produced three harvests of maize a year. The forests were full of valuable timber, the waters full of fish, the land full of animals, to such an extent that "a man could hunt or fish for a single day and bring back enough to feed his family for a week".
[00:11:36] The rivers, it claimed, carried pure gold, actual small lumps of it, washing down from the mountains.
[00:11:43] The capital, St Joseph, had twenty thousand inhabitants, public buildings, an opera house, and the Bank of Poyais.
[00:11:51] The climate, the book insisted, was remarkably healthy for Europeans, a place where a colonist could relax and recover from all manner of diseases. Most areas around it were terrible when it comes to tropical disease but, according to the book, Poyais was a veritable oasis.
[00:12:11] And on the back of all this, MacGregor began to sell.
[00:12:17] Land certificates went on sale at two shillings and three pence per acre, roughly a day's wages for a working man. The price rose steadily, to four shillings, and still people kept buying. Around five hundred people bought Poyaisian land, with some people putting in their entire life savings.
[00:12:40] Then, in October 1822, came the masterpiece. A respectable City bank underwrote a loan of £200,000 for the government of Poyais, secured on the tax revenues of that non-existent government, and the bonds went on sale on the London Stock Exchange, sitting alongside the bonds of real countries.
[00:13:05] And to be fair to the investors, the other "real" South American bonds on the market were hardly safer. Within a few years, almost every one of those new countries had stopped paying its debts.
[00:13:20] The whole market was a bubble, a period of wild, unrealistic investment.
[00:13:26] If nobody checks whether a country can pay, why does the country need to exist after all?
[00:13:33] And there was one more detail. MacGregor had banknotes printed in Edinburgh, by the same company that printed notes for the Bank of Scotland.
[00:13:44] When emigrants prepared to sail, his agents helpfully explained that British pounds would be of little use in Poyais, and exchanged the settlers' real money for MacGregor's newly-minted Poyaisian dollars.
[00:13:59] Not only had these settlers bought land in a non-existent country, before leaving they handed over the last real currency they had, their last actual money, for worthless banknotes.
[00:14:13] And these people, the people who fell for the ruse, were not fools.
[00:14:18] Mostly, they were MacGregor's fellow Scots. Among them were doctors, lawyers, craftsmen and farmers, men with families and respectable careers.
[00:14:30] And they went all in. Many of them sold their homes and their furniture to pay for their piece of Poyais. They packed up their tools, said goodbye to friends and family, and sailed off into the sunset.
[00:14:46] MacGregor gave the more ambitious ones titles and government posts in the new land. A shoemaker from Edinburgh proudly accepted the position of Official Shoemaker to the Princess of Poyais.
[00:15:01] In September 1822, the first ship sailed from London with about seventy settlers aboard.
[00:15:09] In January the following year, a second ship left from just outside Edinburgh, with around two hundred more, and MacGregor proudly announced that women and children would travel free. The ship left harbour with a six-gun salute, the Poyaisian flag flying from the mast.
[00:15:29] All in all, around 250 people sailed for Poyais.
[00:15:34] The crossing took around two months, and you can imagine the mood on board.
[00:15:40] The settlers read and re-read their copies of the guidebook. They discussed which plots of land they would farm, and which trades would be most in demand in the capital. The Official Shoemaker checked over his tools.
[00:15:55] Somewhere below deck sat their furniture, their savings converted into Poyaisian dollars, and everything they would need for the new life waiting for them on the other side of the ocean.
[00:16:07] The first group reached the Mosquito Coast in November 1822, and found the mouth of the Black River, exactly where the maps said St Joseph should be.
[00:16:18] But... there was nothing there.
[00:16:22] No harbour, no city, no bank, no opera house. Just beach, swamp and jungle, and the crumbling remains of a few huts left by an earlier failed settlement.
[00:16:35] However, strangely enough, their first thought doesn't seem to have been, "oh no, we've been tricked".
[00:16:42] Perhaps that thought was too big to let in.
[00:16:46] They decided that St Joseph must be further inland, or that the government of Poyais would shortly send officials to receive them. They unloaded their supplies, set up camp on the beach, and waited for someone to come.
[00:17:00] The man MacGregor had put in charge of the expedition, an ex-army officer named Hector Hall, grandly titled Baron Tinto, kept sailing along the coast, supposedly to find help or to consult the Mosquito king. Of course, he never found him.
[00:17:19] The second ship arrived in March, and two hundred more people walked into the same trap. Fresh faces came ashore asking for directions to St Joseph, and the first group had to tell them there were no directions to give.
[00:17:35] Then the rainy season came.
[00:17:38] The camp flooded. Malaria and yellow fever swept through the settlers, and they, remember, had been promised a climate remarkably healthy for Europeans. With no proper medicine, people started to drop like flies.
[00:17:57] The man who had been appointed Official Shoemaker to the non-existent Princess of Poyais took a pistol and shot himself.
[00:18:06] Rescue, when it finally came, was almost accidental. A small ship was passing by the coast and saw this bunch of ragged Europeans. They took the survivors to British Honduras [which is now called Belize], and it was there that they learned the truth: there was no Poyais, there never had been, and nobody in this part of the world had ever heard of their Cazique.
[00:18:34] Word got back to the king who had granted MacGregor the land, and when he learned what the Scotsman had done, he publicly cancelled the grant.
[00:18:45] Of the roughly 250 settlers who sailed, at least 180 died. Fewer than fifty ever made it back to Britain.
[00:18:56] When the survivors' accounts reached the London newspapers in late 1823, there was an enormous scandal. But MacGregor had already slipped across the Channel to Paris.
[00:19:10] Strangely enough, though, some of the survivors of Poyais, some of the people who had been duped by MacGregor, publicly defended him.
[00:19:20] Six of them signed a public statement insisting that their Cazique was blameless, and that the disaster was the fault of the expedition's leaders on the ground.
[00:19:32] Perhaps this sounds impossible, but, just like with the victims of Victor Lustig, for some people it must have been too painful to admit that they had been tricked; it was easier to point to something else, to blame someone else.
[00:19:49] Now, if you've been having strange flashbacks, thinking "I'm sure I've heard a story of Scottish people trying to set up a colony in Central America before", you're right. A century and a quarter earlier, Scotland had tried to build its own colony in Central America, at Darién, in modern-day Panama.
[00:20:09] That too ended in disaster, and you can hear about that in episode 564. That, though, wasn't a con. A terrible idea, yes, but not one man's trick.
[00:20:23] Poyais was the invention of Gregor MacGregor.
[00:20:28] And even after being found out, the con continued.
[00:20:33] In Paris, MacGregor ran the same scheme again.
[00:20:38] He linked up with a French trading company, produced a new constitution for Poyais, and began recruiting French emigrants. This time, however, the authorities noticed. Officials became suspicious when a group of citizens applied for passports to travel to a country that didn't exist on any official map, and the whole network was arrested.
[00:21:03] In 1826, a French court tried MacGregor for fraud.
[00:21:08] But he had a plan. He hired excellent lawyers, presented himself as an honest soldier betrayed by dishonest associates, and was acquitted, found not guilty. One of his associates went to prison, but the mastermind of the operation walked free.
[00:21:28] He returned to London, and, incredibly, kept going. For almost a decade he continued to issue Poyaisian bonds and land certificates, in smaller and smaller schemes, to anyone who would still buy them.
[00:21:44] By 1838, his second wife had died, the money had dried up, and London had finally stopped listening. So the old soldier made his last move.
[00:21:57] He sailed to Venezuela, presented himself to the government as a hero of the war of independence, and asked for his old rank back, along with a general's pension. The Venezuelans said yes.
[00:22:11] Gregor MacGregor spent his final years in Caracas as a respected veteran, and when he died in 1845, he was buried with full military honours in Caracas Cathedral.
[00:22:25] He, of the three protagonists in this mini-series, is the only one to have truly "got away with it".
[00:22:32] And given the scale of the con, it is quite something.
[00:22:36] An entirely new country, invented. Guidebooks. Currency. Even persuading London banks to issue debt for it.
[00:22:45] On the list of the most ambitious con artists of all time, it's hard to find a more worthy number one than Gregor MacGregor, the Cazique of Poyais.
[00:22:56] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a country.
[00:23:02] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:06] Next up, in the final part of this mini-series, we'll be off to Boston in the summer of 1920, where an Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi discovered a magical way to double people's money, and got immortalised in the dictionary in the process.
[00:23:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's part two of our three-part mini-series on famous con artists.
[00:00:29] In part one, we met Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower.
[00:00:35] In part three, we'll meet Charles Ponzi, the man whose scheme was so spectacular that his name became forever associated with it.
[00:00:45] But today, it's time to talk about Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a country.
[00:00:52] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:59] In the early 1820s, if you walked through the City of London, you could stop at a smart office and buy land in a country called Poyais.
[00:01:11] Poyais was a small, fertile paradise on the coast of Central America.
[00:01:17] There was a 355-page guidebook describing it, full of maps and illustrations. There was a capital city called St Joseph, with wide paved boulevards, a theatre, an opera house, a cathedral, and a bank.
[00:01:36] You could buy Poyaisian government bonds on the London Stock Exchange.
[00:01:41] You could exchange your British pounds for Poyaisian dollars, crisp, beautifully printed banknotes. If you were feeling adventurous, you could even buy a ticket, board a ship, and settle there.
[00:01:56] Around 250 men, women and children did exactly that.
[00:02:02] And when they arrived, after two months at sea, they found no boulevards, no opera house, no bank, no signs of civilisation whatsoever.
[00:02:15] They found an empty jungle.
[00:02:19] Poyais, after all, did not exist. It had never existed. Every map, every banknote, every bond and every page of that guidebook had come from the imagination of one man: a Scottish soldier named Gregor MacGregor.
[00:02:39] He was born on Christmas Eve, 1786, beside Loch Katrine in the Scottish Highlands.
[00:02:47] He was a member of Clan Gregor, the same clan as the famous outlaw Rob Roy, a fact that he would make sure to point out to anyone he met.
[00:02:58] At sixteen, he joined the British Army. His family bought him the rank of junior officer, which was a normal practice at the time, and a couple of years later he married into a well-off family, marrying the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral.
[00:03:16] Her money bought him the rank of captain.
[00:03:21] And his fellow officers noticed two things about him. He was competent enough; not a bad soldier, but not particularly remarkable. One thing that did seem strange was that he was extraordinarily fond of uniforms, medals and titles. He loved them, and kept a small collection.
[00:03:44] The army wasn't for him, though, and in 1810, aged 23, he left, after getting into a dispute with a senior officer.
[00:03:54] As a regular citizen back in Edinburgh, he continued to refer to himself by his military title, but he decided to give himself a little upgrade: "Colonel" MacGregor sounded good, so that was how he introduced himself.
[00:04:11] Colonel, by the way, is three levels up from captain.
[00:04:16] Clearly, something about life in Edinburgh wasn't quite doing it for him, so he headed to where the action was really taking place: London. The capital.
[00:04:27] And when he arrived, he decided that he deserved yet another upgrade, and started introducing himself to people as "Sir Gregor MacGregor, baronet".
[00:04:39] He wasn't a Sir, he wasn't a baronet, he was just regular old Gregor MacGregor, but this was England of the 19th century and if people believed you when you told them you were a member of the Scottish aristocracy, well, certain doors would open that remained closed to regular members of society.
[00:05:00] But shortly after arriving in London, his wife died, and with her went his income. It was time for yet another reinvention.
[00:05:11] MacGregor sold what he had and sailed across the Atlantic, to Venezuela, where a war of independence had just broken out against Spain.
[00:05:22] If London was a place where not too many questions were asked about a man's past, South America was on an entirely different level. Say it with confidence and a straight face, and have a convincing enough backstory, and people would believe you.
[00:05:41] He offered his services to the revolutionary government, most likely greatly exaggerating the extent of his military career in the British Army.
[00:05:50] But the rebels needed anyone they could. MacGregor joined up and rose quickly through the ranks. He also married a local woman named Josefa.
[00:06:02] And she, in fact, did have genuine prestigious family connections; she was a cousin of Simón Bolívar himself, the great liberator of South America.
[00:06:15] And as for MacGregor, he actually did some real, half-decent soldiering.
[00:06:22] In 1816, he led a fighting retreat through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, pursued by a larger Spanish force for a month, and brought his army out intact.
[00:06:35] It was a real achievement, and he was promoted to general.
[00:06:40] Now, there's probably an entire episode we could make simply on MacGregor's time in Latin America. He tried to declare his own republic on an island off the coast of Florida, he spent time in Jamaica, he went all over the place. It was a mixture of bold plans, unrealistic expectations, and running for the hills when things went south.
[00:07:02] But we must get to the big trick, the main con.
[00:07:08] In 1820, MacGregor arrived on the Mosquito Coast, which is a wild stretch on the east of what is now Honduras and Nicaragua. It was ruled, loosely, by a local king called George Frederic Augustus, who had good relations with Britain and a fondness for European goods.
[00:07:30] MacGregor gave the king rum and jewellery, flattered him enthusiastically, and came away with a piece of paper granting him eight million acres of land, a territory bigger than Wales.
[00:07:45] The grant itself was real; the king really did sign it.
[00:07:49] But it was a grant of empty land, jungle, swamps and mangroves. There were no towns, no roads, no farms and barely anyone apart from a few scattered indigenous communities.
[00:08:05] And importantly, it came with no right to rule; the king had given him land, not a kingdom.
[00:08:14] That was not how MacGregor chose to describe it.
[00:08:18] The following year, he returned to London as a new man.
[00:08:23] He was no longer a colonel or a baronet. He was now, he told people, "His Serene Highness Gregor, Cazique of Poyais". A cazique, he explained, was a kind of prince.
[00:08:37] London society welcomed him with open arms. He was, after all, a decorated general of the South American wars, a clansman of Rob Roy, married into Bolívar's family.
[00:08:50] He dined with the Lord Mayor. His wife was received as the Princess of Poyais.
[00:08:57] He opened a Poyaisian legation in the City of London, which was a sort of embassy, and even began appointing officials. He created a Poyaisian order of chivalry, the Order of the Green Cross, and pinned it on a few friends.
[00:09:14] He even claimed to have attended the coronation of King George IV on behalf of his country.
[00:09:21] Nobody seemed to have asked whether anyone else had actually heard of this country, the mythical-sounding young nation of Poyais.
[00:09:30] It didn't seem to matter. This was a scam that came at the perfect time.
[00:09:37] Britain in the early 1820s was awash with money. The industrial revolution and the expanding empire had generated vast wealth for the country, and there was a lot of cash sloshing around looking for the next big investment opportunity.
[00:09:55] The Napoleonic Wars were over, and British government bonds paid very little.
[00:10:02] Meanwhile, the newly independent countries of South America were all raising loans in London at eye-wateringly high interest rates.
[00:10:11] Investors were hungry for anything South American.
[00:10:16] And it all seemed theoretical. Most Englishmen couldn't have identified Colombia or Peru on a map, so what did it matter if they hadn't heard of Poyais before?
[00:10:28] One more exotic-sounding name on the list raised no eyebrows at all.
[00:10:33] But MacGregor invented much more than the name. He thought of everything.
[00:10:40] There was a 355-page guidebook that came out in 1822 written by a "Captain Thomas Strangeways".
[00:10:50] Nice name for an adventurous travel writer, you might be thinking: Strangeways.
[00:10:55] There was no Captain Strangeways. No such man existed; the author was MacGregor and his small circle of helpers.
[00:11:04] Fake it might have been, but it was a wonderful piece of fantasy. The book described a land of astonishing richness, and described it in great detail.
[00:11:16] The soil of Poyais produced three harvests of maize a year. The forests were full of valuable timber, the waters full of fish, the land full of animals, to such an extent that "a man could hunt or fish for a single day and bring back enough to feed his family for a week".
[00:11:36] The rivers, it claimed, carried pure gold, actual small lumps of it, washing down from the mountains.
[00:11:43] The capital, St Joseph, had twenty thousand inhabitants, public buildings, an opera house, and the Bank of Poyais.
[00:11:51] The climate, the book insisted, was remarkably healthy for Europeans, a place where a colonist could relax and recover from all manner of diseases. Most areas around it were terrible when it comes to tropical disease but, according to the book, Poyais was a veritable oasis.
[00:12:11] And on the back of all this, MacGregor began to sell.
[00:12:17] Land certificates went on sale at two shillings and three pence per acre, roughly a day's wages for a working man. The price rose steadily, to four shillings, and still people kept buying. Around five hundred people bought Poyaisian land, with some people putting in their entire life savings.
[00:12:40] Then, in October 1822, came the masterpiece. A respectable City bank underwrote a loan of £200,000 for the government of Poyais, secured on the tax revenues of that non-existent government, and the bonds went on sale on the London Stock Exchange, sitting alongside the bonds of real countries.
[00:13:05] And to be fair to the investors, the other "real" South American bonds on the market were hardly safer. Within a few years, almost every one of those new countries had stopped paying its debts.
[00:13:20] The whole market was a bubble, a period of wild, unrealistic investment.
[00:13:26] If nobody checks whether a country can pay, why does the country need to exist after all?
[00:13:33] And there was one more detail. MacGregor had banknotes printed in Edinburgh, by the same company that printed notes for the Bank of Scotland.
[00:13:44] When emigrants prepared to sail, his agents helpfully explained that British pounds would be of little use in Poyais, and exchanged the settlers' real money for MacGregor's newly-minted Poyaisian dollars.
[00:13:59] Not only had these settlers bought land in a non-existent country, before leaving they handed over the last real currency they had, their last actual money, for worthless banknotes.
[00:14:13] And these people, the people who fell for the ruse, were not fools.
[00:14:18] Mostly, they were MacGregor's fellow Scots. Among them were doctors, lawyers, craftsmen and farmers, men with families and respectable careers.
[00:14:30] And they went all in. Many of them sold their homes and their furniture to pay for their piece of Poyais. They packed up their tools, said goodbye to friends and family, and sailed off into the sunset.
[00:14:46] MacGregor gave the more ambitious ones titles and government posts in the new land. A shoemaker from Edinburgh proudly accepted the position of Official Shoemaker to the Princess of Poyais.
[00:15:01] In September 1822, the first ship sailed from London with about seventy settlers aboard.
[00:15:09] In January the following year, a second ship left from just outside Edinburgh, with around two hundred more, and MacGregor proudly announced that women and children would travel free. The ship left harbour with a six-gun salute, the Poyaisian flag flying from the mast.
[00:15:29] All in all, around 250 people sailed for Poyais.
[00:15:34] The crossing took around two months, and you can imagine the mood on board.
[00:15:40] The settlers read and re-read their copies of the guidebook. They discussed which plots of land they would farm, and which trades would be most in demand in the capital. The Official Shoemaker checked over his tools.
[00:15:55] Somewhere below deck sat their furniture, their savings converted into Poyaisian dollars, and everything they would need for the new life waiting for them on the other side of the ocean.
[00:16:07] The first group reached the Mosquito Coast in November 1822, and found the mouth of the Black River, exactly where the maps said St Joseph should be.
[00:16:18] But... there was nothing there.
[00:16:22] No harbour, no city, no bank, no opera house. Just beach, swamp and jungle, and the crumbling remains of a few huts left by an earlier failed settlement.
[00:16:35] However, strangely enough, their first thought doesn't seem to have been, "oh no, we've been tricked".
[00:16:42] Perhaps that thought was too big to let in.
[00:16:46] They decided that St Joseph must be further inland, or that the government of Poyais would shortly send officials to receive them. They unloaded their supplies, set up camp on the beach, and waited for someone to come.
[00:17:00] The man MacGregor had put in charge of the expedition, an ex-army officer named Hector Hall, grandly titled Baron Tinto, kept sailing along the coast, supposedly to find help or to consult the Mosquito king. Of course, he never found him.
[00:17:19] The second ship arrived in March, and two hundred more people walked into the same trap. Fresh faces came ashore asking for directions to St Joseph, and the first group had to tell them there were no directions to give.
[00:17:35] Then the rainy season came.
[00:17:38] The camp flooded. Malaria and yellow fever swept through the settlers, and they, remember, had been promised a climate remarkably healthy for Europeans. With no proper medicine, people started to drop like flies.
[00:17:57] The man who had been appointed Official Shoemaker to the non-existent Princess of Poyais took a pistol and shot himself.
[00:18:06] Rescue, when it finally came, was almost accidental. A small ship was passing by the coast and saw this bunch of ragged Europeans. They took the survivors to British Honduras [which is now called Belize], and it was there that they learned the truth: there was no Poyais, there never had been, and nobody in this part of the world had ever heard of their Cazique.
[00:18:34] Word got back to the king who had granted MacGregor the land, and when he learned what the Scotsman had done, he publicly cancelled the grant.
[00:18:45] Of the roughly 250 settlers who sailed, at least 180 died. Fewer than fifty ever made it back to Britain.
[00:18:56] When the survivors' accounts reached the London newspapers in late 1823, there was an enormous scandal. But MacGregor had already slipped across the Channel to Paris.
[00:19:10] Strangely enough, though, some of the survivors of Poyais, some of the people who had been duped by MacGregor, publicly defended him.
[00:19:20] Six of them signed a public statement insisting that their Cazique was blameless, and that the disaster was the fault of the expedition's leaders on the ground.
[00:19:32] Perhaps this sounds impossible, but, just like with the victims of Victor Lustig, for some people it must have been too painful to admit that they had been tricked; it was easier to point to something else, to blame someone else.
[00:19:49] Now, if you've been having strange flashbacks, thinking "I'm sure I've heard a story of Scottish people trying to set up a colony in Central America before", you're right. A century and a quarter earlier, Scotland had tried to build its own colony in Central America, at Darién, in modern-day Panama.
[00:20:09] That too ended in disaster, and you can hear about that in episode 564. That, though, wasn't a con. A terrible idea, yes, but not one man's trick.
[00:20:23] Poyais was the invention of Gregor MacGregor.
[00:20:28] And even after being found out, the con continued.
[00:20:33] In Paris, MacGregor ran the same scheme again.
[00:20:38] He linked up with a French trading company, produced a new constitution for Poyais, and began recruiting French emigrants. This time, however, the authorities noticed. Officials became suspicious when a group of citizens applied for passports to travel to a country that didn't exist on any official map, and the whole network was arrested.
[00:21:03] In 1826, a French court tried MacGregor for fraud.
[00:21:08] But he had a plan. He hired excellent lawyers, presented himself as an honest soldier betrayed by dishonest associates, and was acquitted, found not guilty. One of his associates went to prison, but the mastermind of the operation walked free.
[00:21:28] He returned to London, and, incredibly, kept going. For almost a decade he continued to issue Poyaisian bonds and land certificates, in smaller and smaller schemes, to anyone who would still buy them.
[00:21:44] By 1838, his second wife had died, the money had dried up, and London had finally stopped listening. So the old soldier made his last move.
[00:21:57] He sailed to Venezuela, presented himself to the government as a hero of the war of independence, and asked for his old rank back, along with a general's pension. The Venezuelans said yes.
[00:22:11] Gregor MacGregor spent his final years in Caracas as a respected veteran, and when he died in 1845, he was buried with full military honours in Caracas Cathedral.
[00:22:25] He, of the three protagonists in this mini-series, is the only one to have truly "got away with it".
[00:22:32] And given the scale of the con, it is quite something.
[00:22:36] An entirely new country, invented. Guidebooks. Currency. Even persuading London banks to issue debt for it.
[00:22:45] On the list of the most ambitious con artists of all time, it's hard to find a more worthy number one than Gregor MacGregor, the Cazique of Poyais.
[00:22:56] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a country.
[00:23:02] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:06] Next up, in the final part of this mini-series, we'll be off to Boston in the summer of 1920, where an Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi discovered a magical way to double people's money, and got immortalised in the dictionary in the process.
[00:23:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's part two of our three-part mini-series on famous con artists.
[00:00:29] In part one, we met Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower.
[00:00:35] In part three, we'll meet Charles Ponzi, the man whose scheme was so spectacular that his name became forever associated with it.
[00:00:45] But today, it's time to talk about Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a country.
[00:00:52] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:59] In the early 1820s, if you walked through the City of London, you could stop at a smart office and buy land in a country called Poyais.
[00:01:11] Poyais was a small, fertile paradise on the coast of Central America.
[00:01:17] There was a 355-page guidebook describing it, full of maps and illustrations. There was a capital city called St Joseph, with wide paved boulevards, a theatre, an opera house, a cathedral, and a bank.
[00:01:36] You could buy Poyaisian government bonds on the London Stock Exchange.
[00:01:41] You could exchange your British pounds for Poyaisian dollars, crisp, beautifully printed banknotes. If you were feeling adventurous, you could even buy a ticket, board a ship, and settle there.
[00:01:56] Around 250 men, women and children did exactly that.
[00:02:02] And when they arrived, after two months at sea, they found no boulevards, no opera house, no bank, no signs of civilisation whatsoever.
[00:02:15] They found an empty jungle.
[00:02:19] Poyais, after all, did not exist. It had never existed. Every map, every banknote, every bond and every page of that guidebook had come from the imagination of one man: a Scottish soldier named Gregor MacGregor.
[00:02:39] He was born on Christmas Eve, 1786, beside Loch Katrine in the Scottish Highlands.
[00:02:47] He was a member of Clan Gregor, the same clan as the famous outlaw Rob Roy, a fact that he would make sure to point out to anyone he met.
[00:02:58] At sixteen, he joined the British Army. His family bought him the rank of junior officer, which was a normal practice at the time, and a couple of years later he married into a well-off family, marrying the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral.
[00:03:16] Her money bought him the rank of captain.
[00:03:21] And his fellow officers noticed two things about him. He was competent enough; not a bad soldier, but not particularly remarkable. One thing that did seem strange was that he was extraordinarily fond of uniforms, medals and titles. He loved them, and kept a small collection.
[00:03:44] The army wasn't for him, though, and in 1810, aged 23, he left, after getting into a dispute with a senior officer.
[00:03:54] As a regular citizen back in Edinburgh, he continued to refer to himself by his military title, but he decided to give himself a little upgrade: "Colonel" MacGregor sounded good, so that was how he introduced himself.
[00:04:11] Colonel, by the way, is three levels up from captain.
[00:04:16] Clearly, something about life in Edinburgh wasn't quite doing it for him, so he headed to where the action was really taking place: London. The capital.
[00:04:27] And when he arrived, he decided that he deserved yet another upgrade, and started introducing himself to people as "Sir Gregor MacGregor, baronet".
[00:04:39] He wasn't a Sir, he wasn't a baronet, he was just regular old Gregor MacGregor, but this was England of the 19th century and if people believed you when you told them you were a member of the Scottish aristocracy, well, certain doors would open that remained closed to regular members of society.
[00:05:00] But shortly after arriving in London, his wife died, and with her went his income. It was time for yet another reinvention.
[00:05:11] MacGregor sold what he had and sailed across the Atlantic, to Venezuela, where a war of independence had just broken out against Spain.
[00:05:22] If London was a place where not too many questions were asked about a man's past, South America was on an entirely different level. Say it with confidence and a straight face, and have a convincing enough backstory, and people would believe you.
[00:05:41] He offered his services to the revolutionary government, most likely greatly exaggerating the extent of his military career in the British Army.
[00:05:50] But the rebels needed anyone they could. MacGregor joined up and rose quickly through the ranks. He also married a local woman named Josefa.
[00:06:02] And she, in fact, did have genuine prestigious family connections; she was a cousin of Simón Bolívar himself, the great liberator of South America.
[00:06:15] And as for MacGregor, he actually did some real, half-decent soldiering.
[00:06:22] In 1816, he led a fighting retreat through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, pursued by a larger Spanish force for a month, and brought his army out intact.
[00:06:35] It was a real achievement, and he was promoted to general.
[00:06:40] Now, there's probably an entire episode we could make simply on MacGregor's time in Latin America. He tried to declare his own republic on an island off the coast of Florida, he spent time in Jamaica, he went all over the place. It was a mixture of bold plans, unrealistic expectations, and running for the hills when things went south.
[00:07:02] But we must get to the big trick, the main con.
[00:07:08] In 1820, MacGregor arrived on the Mosquito Coast, which is a wild stretch on the east of what is now Honduras and Nicaragua. It was ruled, loosely, by a local king called George Frederic Augustus, who had good relations with Britain and a fondness for European goods.
[00:07:30] MacGregor gave the king rum and jewellery, flattered him enthusiastically, and came away with a piece of paper granting him eight million acres of land, a territory bigger than Wales.
[00:07:45] The grant itself was real; the king really did sign it.
[00:07:49] But it was a grant of empty land, jungle, swamps and mangroves. There were no towns, no roads, no farms and barely anyone apart from a few scattered indigenous communities.
[00:08:05] And importantly, it came with no right to rule; the king had given him land, not a kingdom.
[00:08:14] That was not how MacGregor chose to describe it.
[00:08:18] The following year, he returned to London as a new man.
[00:08:23] He was no longer a colonel or a baronet. He was now, he told people, "His Serene Highness Gregor, Cazique of Poyais". A cazique, he explained, was a kind of prince.
[00:08:37] London society welcomed him with open arms. He was, after all, a decorated general of the South American wars, a clansman of Rob Roy, married into Bolívar's family.
[00:08:50] He dined with the Lord Mayor. His wife was received as the Princess of Poyais.
[00:08:57] He opened a Poyaisian legation in the City of London, which was a sort of embassy, and even began appointing officials. He created a Poyaisian order of chivalry, the Order of the Green Cross, and pinned it on a few friends.
[00:09:14] He even claimed to have attended the coronation of King George IV on behalf of his country.
[00:09:21] Nobody seemed to have asked whether anyone else had actually heard of this country, the mythical-sounding young nation of Poyais.
[00:09:30] It didn't seem to matter. This was a scam that came at the perfect time.
[00:09:37] Britain in the early 1820s was awash with money. The industrial revolution and the expanding empire had generated vast wealth for the country, and there was a lot of cash sloshing around looking for the next big investment opportunity.
[00:09:55] The Napoleonic Wars were over, and British government bonds paid very little.
[00:10:02] Meanwhile, the newly independent countries of South America were all raising loans in London at eye-wateringly high interest rates.
[00:10:11] Investors were hungry for anything South American.
[00:10:16] And it all seemed theoretical. Most Englishmen couldn't have identified Colombia or Peru on a map, so what did it matter if they hadn't heard of Poyais before?
[00:10:28] One more exotic-sounding name on the list raised no eyebrows at all.
[00:10:33] But MacGregor invented much more than the name. He thought of everything.
[00:10:40] There was a 355-page guidebook that came out in 1822 written by a "Captain Thomas Strangeways".
[00:10:50] Nice name for an adventurous travel writer, you might be thinking: Strangeways.
[00:10:55] There was no Captain Strangeways. No such man existed; the author was MacGregor and his small circle of helpers.
[00:11:04] Fake it might have been, but it was a wonderful piece of fantasy. The book described a land of astonishing richness, and described it in great detail.
[00:11:16] The soil of Poyais produced three harvests of maize a year. The forests were full of valuable timber, the waters full of fish, the land full of animals, to such an extent that "a man could hunt or fish for a single day and bring back enough to feed his family for a week".
[00:11:36] The rivers, it claimed, carried pure gold, actual small lumps of it, washing down from the mountains.
[00:11:43] The capital, St Joseph, had twenty thousand inhabitants, public buildings, an opera house, and the Bank of Poyais.
[00:11:51] The climate, the book insisted, was remarkably healthy for Europeans, a place where a colonist could relax and recover from all manner of diseases. Most areas around it were terrible when it comes to tropical disease but, according to the book, Poyais was a veritable oasis.
[00:12:11] And on the back of all this, MacGregor began to sell.
[00:12:17] Land certificates went on sale at two shillings and three pence per acre, roughly a day's wages for a working man. The price rose steadily, to four shillings, and still people kept buying. Around five hundred people bought Poyaisian land, with some people putting in their entire life savings.
[00:12:40] Then, in October 1822, came the masterpiece. A respectable City bank underwrote a loan of £200,000 for the government of Poyais, secured on the tax revenues of that non-existent government, and the bonds went on sale on the London Stock Exchange, sitting alongside the bonds of real countries.
[00:13:05] And to be fair to the investors, the other "real" South American bonds on the market were hardly safer. Within a few years, almost every one of those new countries had stopped paying its debts.
[00:13:20] The whole market was a bubble, a period of wild, unrealistic investment.
[00:13:26] If nobody checks whether a country can pay, why does the country need to exist after all?
[00:13:33] And there was one more detail. MacGregor had banknotes printed in Edinburgh, by the same company that printed notes for the Bank of Scotland.
[00:13:44] When emigrants prepared to sail, his agents helpfully explained that British pounds would be of little use in Poyais, and exchanged the settlers' real money for MacGregor's newly-minted Poyaisian dollars.
[00:13:59] Not only had these settlers bought land in a non-existent country, before leaving they handed over the last real currency they had, their last actual money, for worthless banknotes.
[00:14:13] And these people, the people who fell for the ruse, were not fools.
[00:14:18] Mostly, they were MacGregor's fellow Scots. Among them were doctors, lawyers, craftsmen and farmers, men with families and respectable careers.
[00:14:30] And they went all in. Many of them sold their homes and their furniture to pay for their piece of Poyais. They packed up their tools, said goodbye to friends and family, and sailed off into the sunset.
[00:14:46] MacGregor gave the more ambitious ones titles and government posts in the new land. A shoemaker from Edinburgh proudly accepted the position of Official Shoemaker to the Princess of Poyais.
[00:15:01] In September 1822, the first ship sailed from London with about seventy settlers aboard.
[00:15:09] In January the following year, a second ship left from just outside Edinburgh, with around two hundred more, and MacGregor proudly announced that women and children would travel free. The ship left harbour with a six-gun salute, the Poyaisian flag flying from the mast.
[00:15:29] All in all, around 250 people sailed for Poyais.
[00:15:34] The crossing took around two months, and you can imagine the mood on board.
[00:15:40] The settlers read and re-read their copies of the guidebook. They discussed which plots of land they would farm, and which trades would be most in demand in the capital. The Official Shoemaker checked over his tools.
[00:15:55] Somewhere below deck sat their furniture, their savings converted into Poyaisian dollars, and everything they would need for the new life waiting for them on the other side of the ocean.
[00:16:07] The first group reached the Mosquito Coast in November 1822, and found the mouth of the Black River, exactly where the maps said St Joseph should be.
[00:16:18] But... there was nothing there.
[00:16:22] No harbour, no city, no bank, no opera house. Just beach, swamp and jungle, and the crumbling remains of a few huts left by an earlier failed settlement.
[00:16:35] However, strangely enough, their first thought doesn't seem to have been, "oh no, we've been tricked".
[00:16:42] Perhaps that thought was too big to let in.
[00:16:46] They decided that St Joseph must be further inland, or that the government of Poyais would shortly send officials to receive them. They unloaded their supplies, set up camp on the beach, and waited for someone to come.
[00:17:00] The man MacGregor had put in charge of the expedition, an ex-army officer named Hector Hall, grandly titled Baron Tinto, kept sailing along the coast, supposedly to find help or to consult the Mosquito king. Of course, he never found him.
[00:17:19] The second ship arrived in March, and two hundred more people walked into the same trap. Fresh faces came ashore asking for directions to St Joseph, and the first group had to tell them there were no directions to give.
[00:17:35] Then the rainy season came.
[00:17:38] The camp flooded. Malaria and yellow fever swept through the settlers, and they, remember, had been promised a climate remarkably healthy for Europeans. With no proper medicine, people started to drop like flies.
[00:17:57] The man who had been appointed Official Shoemaker to the non-existent Princess of Poyais took a pistol and shot himself.
[00:18:06] Rescue, when it finally came, was almost accidental. A small ship was passing by the coast and saw this bunch of ragged Europeans. They took the survivors to British Honduras [which is now called Belize], and it was there that they learned the truth: there was no Poyais, there never had been, and nobody in this part of the world had ever heard of their Cazique.
[00:18:34] Word got back to the king who had granted MacGregor the land, and when he learned what the Scotsman had done, he publicly cancelled the grant.
[00:18:45] Of the roughly 250 settlers who sailed, at least 180 died. Fewer than fifty ever made it back to Britain.
[00:18:56] When the survivors' accounts reached the London newspapers in late 1823, there was an enormous scandal. But MacGregor had already slipped across the Channel to Paris.
[00:19:10] Strangely enough, though, some of the survivors of Poyais, some of the people who had been duped by MacGregor, publicly defended him.
[00:19:20] Six of them signed a public statement insisting that their Cazique was blameless, and that the disaster was the fault of the expedition's leaders on the ground.
[00:19:32] Perhaps this sounds impossible, but, just like with the victims of Victor Lustig, for some people it must have been too painful to admit that they had been tricked; it was easier to point to something else, to blame someone else.
[00:19:49] Now, if you've been having strange flashbacks, thinking "I'm sure I've heard a story of Scottish people trying to set up a colony in Central America before", you're right. A century and a quarter earlier, Scotland had tried to build its own colony in Central America, at Darién, in modern-day Panama.
[00:20:09] That too ended in disaster, and you can hear about that in episode 564. That, though, wasn't a con. A terrible idea, yes, but not one man's trick.
[00:20:23] Poyais was the invention of Gregor MacGregor.
[00:20:28] And even after being found out, the con continued.
[00:20:33] In Paris, MacGregor ran the same scheme again.
[00:20:38] He linked up with a French trading company, produced a new constitution for Poyais, and began recruiting French emigrants. This time, however, the authorities noticed. Officials became suspicious when a group of citizens applied for passports to travel to a country that didn't exist on any official map, and the whole network was arrested.
[00:21:03] In 1826, a French court tried MacGregor for fraud.
[00:21:08] But he had a plan. He hired excellent lawyers, presented himself as an honest soldier betrayed by dishonest associates, and was acquitted, found not guilty. One of his associates went to prison, but the mastermind of the operation walked free.
[00:21:28] He returned to London, and, incredibly, kept going. For almost a decade he continued to issue Poyaisian bonds and land certificates, in smaller and smaller schemes, to anyone who would still buy them.
[00:21:44] By 1838, his second wife had died, the money had dried up, and London had finally stopped listening. So the old soldier made his last move.
[00:21:57] He sailed to Venezuela, presented himself to the government as a hero of the war of independence, and asked for his old rank back, along with a general's pension. The Venezuelans said yes.
[00:22:11] Gregor MacGregor spent his final years in Caracas as a respected veteran, and when he died in 1845, he was buried with full military honours in Caracas Cathedral.
[00:22:25] He, of the three protagonists in this mini-series, is the only one to have truly "got away with it".
[00:22:32] And given the scale of the con, it is quite something.
[00:22:36] An entirely new country, invented. Guidebooks. Currency. Even persuading London banks to issue debt for it.
[00:22:45] On the list of the most ambitious con artists of all time, it's hard to find a more worthy number one than Gregor MacGregor, the Cazique of Poyais.
[00:22:56] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Gregor MacGregor, the man who invented a country.
[00:23:02] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:06] Next up, in the final part of this mini-series, we'll be off to Boston in the summer of 1920, where an Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi discovered a magical way to double people's money, and got immortalised in the dictionary in the process.
[00:23:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
