The Greatest Conman Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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MICHAEL PARK: Hello, it’s Michael. It probably goes without saying that we work really hard to bring you episodes of Scotland as regularly as we can, but it comes at a cost in terms of money and time. So we’re sorry to be these people but we’ve set up a Patreon for anyone who fancies helping out to throw us a few quid every month. It’ll help with hosting costs and keeping us in the lavish lifestyle of yachts and champagne that we’re accustomed to.
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 17 - The Greatest Conman
MICHAEL PARK: They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger - and that’s not true. What doesn’t kill you can destroy you. What doesn’t kill you can weaken you until you beg for the sweet release of death.
That was often true for those who sailed from British ports bound for tropical climes in the New World. Those who made it there - there were rarely that many - would find their new homes infested with things that were either evolved to kill pink, soft, fleshy idiots from the land of pink, soft, fleshy idiots who thought they had a god-given right to overrun the entire world, or they would find their new homes full of things that were evolved to do irreparable damage to pink, soft, fleshy idiots.
What doesn’t kill you will probably try again. If it doesn’t kill you, it’ll kill everyone else. If only there was some way to live in a tropical idyl without having to worry about disease or the pesky locals.
It is 1812 and as Brigadier General Gregor MacGregor - you didn’t mishear that - looked out over his bedraggled troops he probably wasn’t thinking too much about hopeful British colonists. After all, he’s a long way from Edinburgh where he was brought up. The battlefields of Venezuela seem pretty far away from trading bits and pieces in some coastal backwater. He wears a full dress uniform which stands out like a sore thumb against the soldiers of his unit of Francisco de Miranda’s republican army.
The Spanish were intent on destroying the uprising but Miranda had been the toast of society on a recent visit to London - it had given the flamboyant former British Army Captain who had taken to calling himself Colonel around Edinburgh an idea. If he took what he knew he could make a name for himself fighting in Venezuela and come home to great renown.
Gregor MacGregor wants to be famous - he wants to be the toast of the town. Even back in Edinburgh he rolled around in a lavish carriage wearing dress uniform and the insignia of a Portuguese knight - an order descended from the Knights Templar. He was tempted to stay in Kingston, Jamaica, where many Scotland stories seem to begin or end, but no-one would have him: nobody knew his name.
It is 1812 and I’m telling you that Gregor MacGregor who was a Captain in the British Army before he pretended to be a Colonel and then was made an actual General because he made a flamboyant plea to a desperate revolutionary leader in South America was obsessed with his own image because what doesn’t kill you sometimes does make you stronger.
The revolutionary government in Venezuela is about to collapse and Gregor MacGregor will make a break for the Dutch island of Curaçao.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland, a podcast about history and the places we made it. I’m Michael Park.
People liked Gregor MacGregor, a man whose name is so satisfying to say it’s almost impossible not to give him his full name every time.
He was a professional soldier and, for the time, was the very definition of flash and pizzazz. He got bored easily and living quietly in Curaçao was the very definition of boring. For the next eight years Gregor MacGregor bounced around the Americas, offering his services to anyone who was trying to give Spain a bloody nose. If you had a Republican uprising you were trying to get off the ground then it was only a matter of time until a Scotsman turned up in full dress uniform claiming to be a Portuguese knight and a direct descendent of a Darién Scheme survivor and offered to help you out.
He fought in New Granada and was part of the defence of Cartageña, he went back to Venezuela and led a retreat of hundreds of men over hundreds of miles. He managed to rout the Spanish army by using a marsh as a trap. He deployed archers on the other side and watched as the charging Spanish cavalry collapsed into the bog and caught arrow after arrow for hours until Gregor MacGregor’s men charged and sent the army which had followed them for weeks packing.
That was where Gregor MacGregor gained notoriety - he had finally proved his worth as a military commander and the chattering classes in Kingston, Jamaica were suddenly quite willing to throw open their dining rooms for this exotic hero to regale them with tales of his staggering military prowess.
They called him the Hannibal of Modern Carthage because of his single-handed defence of Cartageña. They toasted him and they drank to his many military successes. There hadn’t been that many, but Gregor MacGregor had realised something. Now that the posh parlours of Kingston, Jamaica believed one story, they’d believe them all. Gregor MacGregor was learning - the best lies contain a kernel of truth.
A couple of years later, 1820, and MacGregor surfaces in the court of King George Frederic Augustus of the Mosquito people. The Mosquito were descended from indigenous people who had families with shipwrecked African slaves. Gregor MacGregor was popular with the Mosquito since they didn’t have a lot of time for the Spanish and he was renowned for shooting them at every chance he got - even if he wasn’t always any good at it.
It didn’t hurt Gregor MacGregor that the King of the Mosquito wasn’t really a king at all. The British had claimed the land decades ago and had elevated the Mosquito tribal leaders to be kings so that the lands couldn’t then be claimed by Spain. Sneaky sneaky.
The king liked Gregor MacGregor. Everyone liked Gregor MacGregor, whether they thought he was a military mastermind or a blithering idiot - everybody liked him.
In late April of 1820 the king signed over a portion of the Mosquito coast to the Scots colonel with the flamboyant fashion sense and questionable military record. The area was about the size of Wales and was - for lack of a better term - kinda rubbish. It would look nice in an oil painting but the ground was swampy, the jungle dense, the fauna aggressive, and the diseases tropical.
But it was Gregor MacGregor’s. All of it.
It is 1822 and you are hushed into silence by your host as you coiff the last swig of wine from your glass at one of London’s most fashionable tables. The guest of honour is reintroduced and you sit up and take notice as the man in full military regalia has the help pass out massive books to everyone. You’d expected dessert. Maybe a nice queen cake - they baked them in the shape of hearts. They were quite something.
Instead here you were with a 300-page book in front of you and a man beginning to effervesce with stories of his wild military exploits. You’re not that impressed. You’re one of the only people at the table who read Mr Rafter’s biography of the man and knew what a pompous incompetent he was. As you look round the table it’s clear that everyone else is very impressed indeed.
The man, this Gregor MacGregor, is wrapping everyone around his little finger and he’s not even at the good part yet. He’s not even reached the kicker. The stories of his military genius are exaggerated beyond belief but a little bit of parlour trickery never hurt anyone. People always embellish their achievements a bit at parties.
You didn’t think you’d heard your host right when they introduced him. Something about being a Cassock of Poison?
Cazique of Poyais. He says as if he’d been reading your mind the whole time. He spins some yarn about the famous and noble kings of the Mosquito coast before he begins to tell you about the incredible - simply incredible - opportunities available to colonists in this land of Poyais which he was lucky enough to be leader of.
You began to see yourself living in land he described. It was like a warm, tropical version of Britain. The locals were friendly, the harvests bountiful, the rivers ran with water so clear you could see the hunks of gold which rumbled around on their bed. The people of the Caribbean used Poyais as a health spa, such was its agreeable climate and natural beauty.
The Cazique of Poyais described the thriving capital: St Joseph, which was all sprawling boulevards and well-appointed mansions. He tells you that the settlement is criminally overlooked by most people in Europe - a real land of opportunity.
He references the Darien Scheme, the cautionary tale of Central American expansion and explained to his enraptured audience that Poyais was different - Poyais was special. There weren’t even any tropical diseases in Poyais - there were no mosquitoes either.
All MacGregor needed to turn Poyais into a thriving port of the fledgling empire was a bit of financial support from clever investors like the ones sitting around the table. He told them that they didn’t have to decide there and then, your host had already invested, but merely take the beautifully illustrated guide book away and give it some thought.
It was like a timeshare presentation - no obligation to buy, only an obligation to give it some thought.
If only you had any idea what a timeshare presentation was in 1822.
You take yourself home and forget about the dashing white colonel for the night but when you come down to breakfast the next day, there it is, that guide book written by one Captain Thomas Strangeways. You pick up the morning paper and there is a piece written about this incredible land of Poyais and the opportunity for glory and wealth that it offers its investors and colonists.
Everywhere you go that day there is someone talking about Poyais and - occasionally - the Cazique. You return to your home and you devour this leather-bound guide book. You have to understand what’s happening. Maybe Gregor MacGregor’s actually come good. It certainly seems like it.
You close the book by candlelight and resolve that a little investment couldn’t hurt.
For his part Gregor MacGregor is delighted with this attention and is well on his way to raising £200,000 to take Poyais from idyllic backwater to powerhouse of the British empire. There’s just one problem.
Poyais doesn’t exist.
Yes, MacGregor does own a huge area of land on the Mosquito coast but everything else, right down to the name and his own title are all made up. Those news reports in the paper? Fake. The paintings and etchings of a bustling port with stunning palms and friendly settlers? Forgeries. The guide book by Thomas Strangeways? A work of fiction written under a pseudonym… by Gregor MacGregor.
Your money is going into a black hole of debauchery and lies. Over the course of his life the land certificates which MacGregor issued as proof of investment were worth as much as £3 billion total in today’s money. The certificates, initially handwritten and later printed, for huge swathes of a prosperous nation that didn’t exist were quite literally not worth the paper they were printed on.
He dispatched a fleet of settlement ships to the port of Poyais. Gregor MacGregor, the Cazique of Poyais, sent seven ships of settlers excited for a better life, to a dead spot in the middle of a swampy, disease-ridden jungle, their pockets full of Poyais Dollars, a paper currency which MacGregor had himself printed. The settlers handed over all of their British money for worthless sheets of paper. It didn’t take them long to realise that they’d been duped.
There was no economy in Poyais. There was nothing to buy, and there was nobody to buy that nothing from.
The settlers immediately began to contract disease and had to be rescued. By the time they returned home, many unable to believe that they had been the victims of a lie and blaming the leaders of the expedition, the Cazique of Poyais had disappeared.
He was in France, but he wasn’t in hiding. He was raking in another small fortune convincing the elites of Paris that the mystical land of Poyais was the pinnacle of French sophistication.
Settlers began to make applications for passports to travel to Poyais in their droves. But something didn’t sit right with the authorities in France. Why were so many people looking for permission to go to a country which, as far as they could tell, didn’t exist.
It led them to the door of Gregor MacGregor, the Crown Prince of Lies, the progenitor of securities fraud, the greatest conman the world has ever seen.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland. It was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
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