Gregor MacGregor

Gregor MacGregor (24 December 1786 – 4 December 1845) was a Scottish soldier, adventurer and con man who attempted from 1821 to 1837 to draw British and French investors and settlers to "Poyais", a fictional Central American territory that he claimed to rule as "Cazique". Hundreds invested their savings in supposed Poyaisian government bonds and land certificates. About 250 emigrated to MacGregor's invented country in 1822–1823 to find only an untouched jungle in Honduras; more than half of them died. MacGregor's Poyais scheme has been called one of the most brazen confidence tricks in history. From the Clan Gregor, MacGregor was commissioned into the British Army in 1803 and participated in the Peninsular War before being discharged in 1810. He joined the republican side in the Venezuelan War of Independence in 1812, quickly became a general and, over the next four years, operated against the Spanish on behalf of both Venezuela and its neighbour New Granada. His successes included a difficult month-long fighting retreat through northern Venezuela in 1816. He captured Amelia Island in 1817 under a mandate from revolutionary agents to conquer Spanish Florida, and there proclaimed a short-lived "Republic of the Floridas". He then oversaw two calamitous operations in New Granada during 1819 that each ended with him abandoning the British volunteer troops under his command. On his return to Britain in 1821, MacGregor claimed that King George Frederic Augustus of the Mosquito Coast in the Gulf of Honduras had appointed him Cazique of Poyais, which he described as a developed colony with a community of British settlers. When the British press reported on MacGregor's deception following the return of fewer than 50 survivors in late 1823, some of his victims leaped to his defence, insisting that the general had been let down by those whom he had...