Klawchat today at 1 pm EDT. I’ll have a Top Chef recap up late tonight or early Friday morning.
Poyais was a small, independent principality (later republic) on the Mosquito Coast of Central America, protected by mountains from invasion by neighboring Spanish territories, blessed with abundant natural resources, and, according to its Cazique Gregor Macgregor, desperate for English colonists to come populate it. Macgregor issued bonds on behalf of the Poyais government on London exchanges, and sold plots of land in Poyais to eager would-be settlers from all economic strata, desperate blue-collar workers to professional men promised positions of authority in the Poyais government. He eventually attracted 240 men, women, and children and loading them on two ships bound across the Atlantic, while he remained in England to float more debentures and recruit further colonists.
If you’ve never heard of Poyais – I hadn’t, in any context – that’s because it was Macgregor’s fabrication, all part of an elaborate fraud he used to pilfer money from investors and settlers alike. David Sinclair’s The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor And The Most Audacious Fraud In History
Sinclair’s retelling is fairly straightforward, taking readers back through Macgregor’s history as a soldier of fortune with ambitions beyond his abilities and a talent for lying through his teeth when it suited his purposes (such as taking credit for battles or adventures in which he hadn’t fought). He depicts Macgregor as a silver-tongued confidence man taking advantage of a time when Central and South America were all the rage among English investors and reporters, an environment that was ripe for a polished scam artist who had just enough legitimacy in his credentials to pull it off. The people Macgregor fooled weren’t all rubes or uneducated citizens – many were successful professional men who bought Macgregor’s promises of government appointments in European-style cities in Poyais that just needed experienced leaders to fill out its government.
Knowing nothing about the Poyais scheme beyond what I read in Sinclair’s book, I was more struck by another aspect of Macgregor’s temporary success: He told people what they wanted to hear. The fantasy he created put an apparent physical reality to the aspirations of the middle-class men he recruited to lead the colony, and to the desperate dreams of poorer workers in search of greater economic opportunity than they found in the heavily populated, stagnating England. A century after the disastrous Darien scheme, a failed attempt to establish a Scottish colony on the northeast coast of what is now Panama, nearly bankrupted the nation’s landowners and led to their 1707 union with England, the Scots fell for a fabrication that catered to their disillusion over their last failure but promised little risk because the colony had already been established. Macgregor wrote his pamphlets in a bombastic style, sometimes under assumed names, to improve their appeal, but the audience had to be willing to receive it. Whether he was just fortunate in his timing or truly understood that he was selling something his listeners or readers wanted to buy, it was a critical element in the success of the scam.
Macgregor was eventually found out, but paid very little penalty for it, so Sinclair’s story lacks the sort of natural climax and resolution you’d expect or want in a story of a terrible fraud that cost not just money but innocent lives, including those of children. The reactions of the survivors are shocking, far more interesting than the limited time we see of Macgregor facing legal charges in France, but robs Sinclair a little of the strength of a traditional narrative – not that there’s much he could have done to improve that. Instead, the book’s greatest strength comes in its midsection, where we follow Macgregor around as he sells his nonsense and then read about the plight of the colonists when they get to Poyais and find nothing there. That alone makes it well worth a read, even if its story arc isn’t what we typically expect (unfairly, perhaps) from narrative non-fiction.
Next up: I’m halfway through Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady