The Land that Never Was.

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 covers this long-forgotten scam, which claimed the lives of 180 of those 240 settlers, yet for which Macgregor only served a few months in jail, eventually dying in exile in Caracas in 1845, still a free man.

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, which is going far better than I expected given what little I’ve previously read of James’ work.

How We Decide, Lady Almina, and Bitters.

Time to catch up on a few recent non-fiction reads…

* Jonah Lehrer ended up back in the news recently, again for the wrong reasons, this time because a journalism foundation paid him their standard $20,000 honorarium to come speak at their conference about how he went from one of the brightest stars in science writing to fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan (and, it turns out, in many of his articles forWired) for his third book, Imagine, which was a great read but has been removed from publication. (I don’t understand why it couldn’t be fact-checked more thoroughly, rewritten, and re-released.) I still like the guy’s writing even if I have to read his work with a more skeptical eye, and I think How We Decide, his second book, was an even more valuable read than Imagine for its insight into how the two sides of our brain, the rational and the emotional, interact in our internal decision-making processes.

Lehrer’s premise here is that recent advances in neurology and related fields have allowed us to better understand what goes on inside our brains when we are forced to make different kinds of decisions, and whether those processes are ideal or counterproductive. He cites numerous psychological studies and, as in Imagine, makes heavy use of the results of fMRI scans of the brains of people as they’re confronted with choices or decisions to see what parts of the brain are activated by which stimuli or questions. He gives shocking examples like the pilot who saved a plane from a terrible crash by making a fast yet totally rational decision to try something that had never been tried before by a pilot and wasn’t even taught in flight school, or like John Wayne Gacy and other psychopaths whose emotional response systems are broken, usually due to childhood abuse or neglect. (Lest you think Lehrer shows sympathy for the devil in that section, his descriptions of broken brains, thoughout the book, are quite dispassionate.) Lehrer’s conceit is that between looking at people who can only use one of those two decision-making processes and looking at what kinds of images, numbers, or thoughts light up certain parts of our brains, we can better understand how we make decisions and thus better understand how to improve that decision-making – such as when it’s good to let your rational brain take over and when it’s better to let your emotional side help simplify things for you. It is a real shame that Lehrer’s name is mud right now among much of his potential audience, because his main gift as a writer was in making complicated matters of science, especially neurology, available and accessible to the lay reader. His crimes were serious, but I’d rather see him writing under much stricter controls than he had before than to have him out of the game entirely.

* My wife bought me Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey because we’re both fans of the British soap opera (although I thought season 3 was a big letdown from a writing standpoint), and I was pleasantly surprised by how well-written the book was and how much real-life drama the family that held the house, called Highclere Castle, during the time period of the show actually underwent. Written by the current Countess of Carnarvon (that is, the wife of the current Earl of Highclere, three generations removed from the Earl of the time of the show), the book focuses on Lady Almina, the illegitimate daughter of Alfred Rothschild, who grew up privileged because of her parentage and managed to land the young heir to the earldom of Highclere, after which she put her energy, force of personality, and organizing skills to work in rebuilding the family’s status and the Castle itself, eventually shifting her attention to wounded soldiers when she volunteered to turn the estate into one of the most luxurious wartime hospitals for wounded British soldiers during the Great War.

Almina’s efforts at a time when women’s rights were pretty limited led to her overshadowing her husband in the book, and, one presumes, for most of their marriage, but that table turned in 1922 when the Egyptian explorer Howard Carter, whose expeditions had long been financed by the Earl, discovered the intact tomb of King Tut, making Carter and Lord Carnarvon instant celebrities, touching off a media storm just as the Egyptian public was becoming restive under unwelcome British colonial rule. (You can see the earliest seeds of today’s political strife in the Maghreb and Middle East in the Countess’ brief descriptions of Egyptian protests.) The Countess manages to make this seem like an almost inevitable climax or conclusion to the family’s efforts and struggles during the war, in which many of the household staff gave their lives while their son served but survived. The lead-up to the war, the Castle’s conversion into a hospital, and the episode in Egypt moved a little slowly, since we’re largely getting background material, some of it feeling like the intro to a Regency romance, but once Almina gets cracking, she’s a fun and interesting character to follow, buoyed by the Countess’ clear, evocative prose.

* Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All isn’t a book to read so much as a book to own, one to keep with the cookbooks or in the liquor cabinet rather than in your library. The book contains about fifty pages of text describing the history of bitters, its definitions and types (the book focuses on the highly concentrated flavoring bitters, not potable bitters or digestifs like Campari or Fernet Branca), listing the major artisan bitters makers, most of which have begun production in the last ten years, and explaining how to make your own bitters, with numerous recipes. The back of the book lists recipes for common and obscure drinks that rely on various flavors of bitters as well as some recipes for dishes that use bitters as an ingredient. I particularly enjoyed the two-page essay on the 2010 Angostura bitters shortage, with the explanation of how it began and ended, but not before much hoarding had taken place, especially by better bartenders in New York City.