{"id":898,"date":"2016-02-23T12:55:53","date_gmt":"2016-02-23T17:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/?p=898"},"modified":"2016-06-24T17:59:31","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T21:59:31","slug":"eli5-gregor-macgregor-the-unsung-hero-of-con-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/uncategorized\/eli5-gregor-macgregor-the-unsung-hero-of-con-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Gregor MacGregor, the Unsung Hero of Con Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here today to tell you all the story of the life of one of the most original men with such an unoriginal name: Gregor MacGregor.<\/p>\n

\"Gregor
Gregor MacGregor surrounded by all of his friends.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gregor MacGregor was one of the greatest con men in history, amassing over \u00a31.3 million in bond-market frauds over his lifetime (1786-1845), which would be about \u00a33.6 billion today.<\/p>\n

What was MacGregor\u2019s trick to swindling so many people in the early nineteenth century? Upon returning to London in 1820 after an eight-year stint in the Americas, Gregor MacGregor invented a country.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But let\u2019s set the story up properly with some background on our hero. When he was 16, Gregor joined the British army and was seconded (lent) to the Portuguese army where he fought
\nagainst Spain before sailing across the Atlantic in 1812 in search of adventure. He landed in\u00a0Venezuela and joined with Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar\u2019s freedom fighters, later marrying Bol\u00edvar\u2019s cousin.\u00a0MacGregor worked his way up to the rank of brigadier general in the Venezuelan\u00a0republican army after he organized a mass escape through a Spanish siege thanks to a French\u00a0privateer while fighting for Colombian independence. MacGregor captured Amelia Island off the\u00a0coast of Spanish Florida with a small force funded by wealthy Americans. These Indiana Jones-esque adventures are all the things he didn\u2019t make up!<\/p>\n

Upon his return to London with his wife in 1820, MacGregor started a whole different\u00a0kind of adventure. He claimed that a Native American king had named him the \u201ccazique\u201d – or\u00a0Prince – of \u201cPoyais,\u201d a land located near the Black River in modern-day Honduras. MacGregor\u00a0claimed Poyais, an entirely fictional nation, covered eight million acres and was rich in natural\u00a0resources but in need of development. That would require both cash and manpower.\u00a0MacGregor persuaded people not only to invest their savings in the bonds of a non-existent\u00a0government, but also convinced 250 people to emigrate to Poyais.<\/p>\n

How did he accomplish this? Part of his success was due to his brilliant salesmanship.\u00a0MacGregor got his interviews in the national papers, he wrote and published a book under a\u00a0false name which confirmed MacGregor\u2019s promises of friendly natives and plenty of natural\u00a0resources. Another part of his success was due to the chaotic financial markets of the time,\u00a0where foreign government debt offered a higher rate of return which attracted greedy investors\u00a0who didn’t take the time to double-check MacGregor\u2019s claims.<\/p>\n

In late 1822 two ships carried around 250 settlers \u2013 including a banker, doctors, and\u00a0military commanders \u2013 across the Atlantic to Poyais. On arrival, they found no port, no town and\u00a0no roads. At first, they thought they must be in the wrong place. But the settlers stayed and\u00a0tried to make the best of it. This didn\u2019t work out. Six months later, a passing ship saw their camp\u00a0and rescued the remaining settlers. Two-thirds of the \u201cPoyers\u201d (as the settlers liked to be called)\u00a0had died. Word of all this reached London and the British Navy intercepted the five other boats\u00a0that had already set sail. By the time that authorities tried tracking down MacGregor, he had\u00a0already fled to France.<\/p>\n

Once MacGregor landed in France, he set about constructing the exacting same scheme,\u00a0raising money from rich creditors in exchange for Poyais government bonds, and convincing 60\u00a0French settlers to get on a boat to sail to the fictional country. However, the French government\u00a0grew suspicious when they received 60 passport filings for travel to a fictional country. The government stopped the ship in the harbor when it was already full of would-be settlers. Once\u00a0word got out that the Prince of Poyais was a fraud, MacGregor went into hiding but was caught\u00a0and imprisoned. He stood trial for fraud in a French court along with his financial partners from\u00a0the banks. What happened next? MacGregor was acquitted! He beat the charge!<\/p>\n

Sensing that he\u2019d better get the hell out of dodge, MacGregor sailed back over to\u00a0Scotland where a few years later he tried to sell even more people on the idea of Poyais! It\u00a0didn\u2019t work this time. So what did Gregor do? He sailed back to Venezuela where he was made a\u00a0citizen, reinstated as a general, received a military pension appropriate for an officer of his rank,\u00a0and died in relative comfort.<\/p>\n

After reading about MacGregor for a while, I actually started rooting for him. He\u2019s a\u00a0scoundrel, but he\u2019s my scoundrel … like Han Solo but with South American independence\u00a0movements instead of the Rebel Alliance. Why shouldn\u2019t he be allowed to swindle some stuffy\u00a0London aristocrats out of their money? Screw those imperialists!<\/p>\n

But then I remembered that he conned 250 people into sailing halfway across the\u00a0world on false promises and that all but 60 of the settlers died before rescue.<\/p>\n

Alas, history has all but forgotten Gregor MacGregor. He pulled what is possibly the greatest swindle of all time, multiple times, and his story has single-handedly made me believe that anyone can accomplish great things in life with just a little imagination and no regard for human life.<\/p>\n

SOURCES:
\nThe Land That Never Was by David Sinclair (Da Capo Press, 2004) – Available on Amazon<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.economist.com\/news\/christmas-specials\/21568583-biggest-fraud-history-warning-professional-and-amateur-investors<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.cracked.com\/article_15892_the-5-ballsiest-con-artists-all-time.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here today to tell you all the story of the life of one of the most original men with such an unoriginal name: Gregor MacGregor. Gregor MacGregor was one of the greatest con men in history, amassing over \u00a31.3 million in bond-market frauds over his lifetime (1786-1845), which would be … Continue reading Gregor MacGregor, the Unsung Hero of Con Men<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assignments-turned-in","category-uncategorized","tag-davidcarter"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1209"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1409,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions\/1409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/thea350-16s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}