The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History

Natural History, Feb, 2004 by Laurence A. Marschall

by David Sinclair Da Capo Press, 2004; $23.00

Before there was a bridge for sale in Brooklyn, there was land for the gullible in Poyais. Poyais? Ah ... yes, that new republic on the Caribbean coast of Central America, the talk of the town. The year was 1822, a bull market was raging in London and Edinburgh, and the banking houses were abuzz with the news that Sir Gregor MacGregor was offering acreage in the New World at bargain prices.

If either Poyais or Sir Gregor's impressive credentials were unfamiliar, the potential settlers might have picked up Thomas Strangeways's Sketch of the Mosquito Shore (a reference, according to accounts of the day, to a cluster of small nearshore islands and rock formations--not to bugs), published that same year. The aptly named, but otherwise unknown, author described Poyais as a veritable Garden of Eden, with plenty of rich soil for growing idle money. Sugar, cocoa, and coffee were readily cultivated, and cotton grew wild. Saint Joseph, the capital city, was a model of European efficiency, its government and financial institutions ready and waiting for the inevitable flood of developers. Investors were impressed not only by the promise of easy wealth but by the romance of a tropical paradise where they could plant the flag of Anglo-Saxon culture in the heart of Spanish territory.

Two boatloads of settlers left the British Isles for Poyais in 1822 and 1823. It was only after the sea-weary travelers from the two voyages had been summarily dumped on the beach, and the chartered ships had disappeared over the horizon, that the luckless immigrants turned around and saw what they had bought.

Poyais was pure fiction. There were the rotting remains of an abandoned stockade, but no cities, no plantations, no mines or quarries, no docks or warehouses or public buildings. There was, undoubtedly, plenty of tangled forest, plenty of swamp-land, and more than enough mosquito-borne malaria and yellow fever to go around. Confusion turned to chagrin, then to anger, as most of the colonists beat a hasty retreat to the nearby British enclave of Belize. But before they could find passage out of the region, some 180 of the original 250 or so settlers died of tropical diseases. The survivors who straggled back to England found themselves without the resources to seek equitable restitution.

The bond issues, land sales, and trumped-up currency of the imaginary Territory of Poyais were all part of an old-fashioned scam. The monumental fraud had enlisted the credulity not only of starry-eyed adventurers but also of earnest bankers, profit-hungry land agents, and an old-boy network of tin-medal aristocrats. So convincing was Sir Gregor that he had duped them all.

Journalist David Sinclair has drawn on a wealth of contemporary sources to create a deliciously detailed account of the great deception, as fantastic as a novel of magic realism by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. According to Sinclair, everything that MacGregor claimed turned out to be a lie, or at best a shading of the truth. Humbug to the end, MacGregor parlayed his dubious record as a compadre of Bolivar into a pension from the Venezuelan government, and even managed to have the last laugh: he was interred in the cathedral in Caracas, with full military honors, in 1845.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.