Revolutions - 5.17a- Supplemental Gregor MacGregor

Episode Date: October 24, 2016

Do not buy land in Poyais. 

And welcome to revolutions. Episode 5.17A. Supplemental Gregor McGregor. So today, we're going to veer off the main story to follow one of the many fascinating tangents that come from the wars of Spanish-American independence. And the man we're going to talk about today has actually been around for quite a while. Sometimes he's just been on the margins of things and occasionally right in the thick of it. He arrived right around episode 5.9 and did not depart the scene. for good until we got to the events of last week's episode, although by that point he was long gone

from the main story, and Belivar had long since sentenced him to instant death if he ever set foot in Venezuela again. So, let's talk about Gregor McGregor. Gregor McGregor was born in Glengal Scotland on Christmas Eve 1786. The McGregers were old-school Highlanders. They were Catholic Jacobites who had continued to support the line of Stuart pretenders to the throne after the glorious revolution. Gregor himself was allegedly the great-great-nephew of Rob Roy, but by the end of this episode, you'll fully appreciate why that sort of claim can be taken with a massive dose of salt. The McGregors had suffered for their religion, but strict anti-Catholicism was fading away by the end of the 18th century, and Gregor's father was a fairly prosperous ship captain working for

the East India Company. No doubt an adventurous spirit from the get-go, McGregor joined the British Army as soon as he could, the minimum age at that point being 16, which just so happened to be April of 1803, which, if you'll recall from various episodes, 3.53, 4.17, 5.5, was just a few weeks before the official end of the year of peace when the Treaty of Amiens broke down and the Napoleonic Wars truly began. But the teenage McGregor spent the next few years on relatively sleepy assignments. He joined the 57th foot regiment and was posted first to Kent and then the island of Guernsey to guard against an expected French invasion that never materialized. Along the way, though, he met, courted, and married a woman

named Maria Bowwater, which was an amazing catch for McGregor. His new father-in-law was an admiral in the British Navy. Various uncles and cousins of his new bride were high-ranking generals, and there was even an MP thrown in there. McGregor married way, way up, and Maria married way, way down, cannot imagine her family was thrilled by the match, which, if nothing else, proves that McGregor was a hell of a persuasive talker from the get-go. The couple married in 1805, and McGregor used funds from his wife's considerable dowry to purchase a captaincy. He was then posted in Gibraltar until 1809, which, after the British had won Trafalgar, was again a fairly sleepy assignment. The sitting around and doing nothing finally ended in the summer of 1809 when McGregor's regiment

was transferred to Portugal to reinforce Wellington. This was just about a year into the Peninsular War when Wellington was launching his second campaign to put the French out of Portugal, and we touched on this briefly in episode 5.7. But McGregor's time in the British Army proper came to a close just a few months later. In October 1809, he was transferred to the Portuguese Army and elevated to the rank of Major, and he served there until May 1810, at which point he abruptly resigned his commission and left the service. Various tales of personal clashes with other officers seeming to be the root cause of both his transfer to the Portuguese and his eventual retirement at the ripe old age of 23. Now before we move on, though, I specifically mentioned that he joined the 57th foot regiment, which is the kind of detail I'd usually skip over.

But at the Battle of Albuera, fought in May of 1811, the 57th foot made a courageous stand against the French, earning them some very positive press, and the regimental nickname, the diehards. And for the rest of his life, McGregor would talk big about how he had served with the diehards, never telling anybody that he had quit the regiment almost exactly a year before their heroic service made them famous. And this would be McGregor's M.O. from here on out, massively embellishing who he was and what he had done. He returned to Edinburgh after retirement and made a big deal about being now Sir Gregor McGregor, claiming an invented Portuguese knighthood. The following year he and Maria moved to London, where he further let it be known that he was actually the head of Clan McGregor, which was not true at all, but he was a smooth talker and was soon walking tall in London High Society. Now, there is unfortunately no firm report one way or the other, but it is not hard to imagine that during this period he met Francisco de Miranda, who, while not being quite as shameless as McGregor, did share the habit of not going out of his way to correct.

people's mistaken beliefs about his rank or exploits. And though there is no clear documentation, I do think it's probable that McGregor did meet Miranda during this period, given what happens next. What happens next is that Maria dies in December 1811, and McGregor finds his in-laws suddenly turning a very cold shoulder. Cut off from the riches and connections he had mostly been trading on, McGregor was faced with the dim prospect of returning home to the small estate in Scotland he had an inherited from his father and becoming an anonymous Scottish farmer. Gross. Instead of the horror

of boredom and anonymity, McGregor decided instead for a life of high adventure. He sold the estate and used the proceeds to fund his emigration to exotic Venezuela. The Venezuelans had declared independence just about six months earlier, and old Miranda himself had already gone home. McGregor quite rightly suspected that the new Venezuelan Republic would have use for a veteran colonel of both the British and Portuguese armies. McGregor arrived, though, at literally the most inauspicious moment possible, pulling up to Caracas with baggage in tow in April 1812, just two weeks after God's divine wrath had leveled the city. But though morale in the First Republic was low, McGregor was right that he would be a welcome addition to their small army. Miranda embraced

the dashing young Scotsman, still only 25 years old, and commissioned him a cavalry colonel. But this was not the time to be joining the Venezuelan army, and the walls were already closing in on the First Republic. But in between losing skirmishes, McGregor found time to court and marry Josefa Antonia Andrea Ariste Gietta, a daughter of the Caracas-Crio aristocracy and cousin to none other than Simone Bolivar, though at that point Bolivar was just a brash young radical who Miranda was trying to keep out of the way. At the end of June 1812, Miranda promoted McGregor to Brigadier General, but this was just a few weeks before his cousin-in-law Belivar lost Porta Gabaeo and the whole project collapsed, as we saw in Episode 5.9. In the chaotic aftermath of Miranda's

surrender, McGregor managed to secure passage for himself and Hosepha on the very British ship that Miranda himself was planning to board the night that he was arrested. While Miranda was tossed in prison by Belivar and the other disgruntled Venezuelans, McGregor sailed away, getting himself deposited shortly thereafter in Curacao, like so many of the other exiled Republicans. But Curacao offered few amusements and little chance for fame and glory, so McGregor moved on to New Granada. After landing in Cartagena, McGregor trekked up to Tunha and presented himself to President Camillo Torres. Now bearing the rank of Brigadier General, it was not hard to convince the Tunha government to give him a commission in their army, and he was given command of 1,200 men and

placed in the Sokoto district on the border with Venezuela. And that is where he would sit during the dramatic events that we discussed in episode 5.10, as Belivar, arriving in New Granada just a few months after McGregor, launched first the Magdalena campaign and then the admirable campaign. McGregor's job, though, was to guard the frontier with Venezuela, so he took part in neither of these campaigns and continued to sit in Socorro as Belivar established the Second Republic and then watched it get consumed by the legions of hell. But none of that was McGregor's particular concern. He had his own problems.

As we touched on in episode 5.12, during this same period, Antonio Norino's army was defeated by a royalist force and the union of New Granada was teetering on the brink of collapse. So McGregor prudently transferred himself down to Cartagena, the one city in New Granada that remained in firm Republican hands. This meant that McGregor was in Cardahena, when Belivar came back through at the end of 1814, and was still there when Belivar came back through again. This is still all in episode 5.12. This is when Cardahena turned against Belivar,

and he was forced to resign his commission and go into exile in Jamaica. McGregor was on the other side of that confrontation. But if you'll recall, Belivar's self-imposed exile came at just the right moment because in September 1815, General Pablo Morillo's Armada showed up and put Cardahena to siege. McGregor participated in the defense of the city, though when he got out, he was happy to let people think that he had heroically led the ultimately doomed resistance to the Spanish. But he did not. He was, however, among the officers who concluded at the beginning of December that further resistance was futile. Among those other officers was also Jose Antonio Sucre and Jose Francisco Bermudez. The few men strong enough to keep

fighting loaded themselves onto 12 gunboats on December 5, 1815, and successfully blasted their way through the Spanish blockade, getting clean away, as General Murillo focused not on the birds who had flown the coop, but on the entire city that was now his for the taking. So McGregor and the other refugees were able to reach Jamaica, where they quickly learned that Belivar and a few other revolutionary veterans were reconvening in Haiti. McGregor and the others joined the crew in Haiti, with McGregor being enrolled as a general in this colonel of a Republican army. He sailed with everyone else from Le Chai at the end of March 1816, and then waited along with everyone else as Belivar dropped anchor until he could reunite with Pepita Machado.

Once they all landed on Margarita Island, though, McGregor stayed with Belivar. He was not an eastern caudio. He had no local support or connections to speak of other than the fact that Belivar was his cousin-in-law. So when Belivar made his ultimately doomed play at Akumare in July 1816, We talked about that in episode 5.14. Gregor McGregor was given a key assignment. He was deposited with about 600 men 10 or 15 miles east of Akumare on the beaches of Choroni. When the disaster subsequently unfolded, McGregor and his men were lost in the shuffle and left defend for themselves, as Belivar sailed away. With no chance of escape by sea, the only shot they had was to make a 300-mile overland march right through the heart of Royalist-held territory.

And thus began McGregor's one true, non-invented, non-embellished, non-scandalously disastrous military exploit. After realizing that they had been abandoned, McGregor led his men on a sweeping march that ran them south around Caracas. But the enemy knew that there was this rebel unit on the move, and they sent two armies to trap and capture them. On July the 27th, one of these armies got out in front of McGregor, and with no other option, McGregor had to just plow right through the blockade line they had set up. With an intense charge that seems to have flustered the royalist, McGregor and his men successfully punched through the line and sent the enemy running back to a nearby town,

where it took them fully two days to regroup and restart the chase. McGregor stayed ahead of this pursuing army for about two weeks, waging constant rear-guard actions, but on August the 10th, the beleared Republicans were finally set upon, but again, McGregor managed to break the trap, this time setting up archers amidst heavy marshland that was able to cut down the royalist cavalry and infantry as they tried to slog through the muck. This finally broke the momentum of the royalist pursuers for good, and ten days of Fats marching later,

McGregor's army was back in Barcelona, a city now held by friendly forces. It had been a relentless 34-day march, but they did it, and McGregor's fame spread. After his return to rebel territory, McGregor briefly joined the army run by Manuel PR, but the two men clashed over both strategy and tactics. So by October 1816, McGregor had transferred himself back to Margarita Island, which at that point was under the command of Colonel Artes Mendi, the guy who last time joined together with Santiago Morino to overthrow Vice President Sea. Well, from his island base, Aris Mendi was looking out to the sea and thinking about how the Republicans might establish stable lines of supply and communication. And he got it into his head that the weekly garrisoned

backwater colony of East Florida might hold the key. He suggested that McGregor might perform a signal service to the cause if he could establish a permanent base somewhere in Florida to better link with supplies of the above board and below board variety. So McGregor sailed back up to Haiti with the hope of raising a force there, and when he arrived, he must have met and conferred with Belivar, who was sitting in his fourth and final exile, and with whom McGregor had not spoken to since being abandoned to his fate back in July. It would be the last time that they would see each other. Haiti turned out to be a dead-end recruitment-wise, so McGregor decided to try his luck in the United States, sailing for Philadelphia, where he ramped up his considerably persuasive charm to

raise men and money for his operation. All this had to be done with a nod and a wink, as the American government wanted its citizens to remain neutral, but willing adventurers and speculators could always be found in the taverns of the young America. Republican Republic, and as McGregor made his way south through South Carolina on his way ultimately to Georgia, he raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars cash and a couple of hundred men to fight for him. And it's on this trip that I have to believe he first got the idea for the infamous poixie scheme, because McGregor raised his money by doling out titles to land in Florida that neither he nor anyone else had ever seen or had any right to actually be doling out. But the

acreage number on the piece of paper was huge, and the purchase price very small, and so men took their chances on the dashing Scottish adventurer. But as it would turn out, it never, ever, ever paid to take a chance on Sir Gregor McGregor. McGregor's plan was to go and seize Amelia Island, which is just off the northeast coast of Florida, and which had become a thriving pirate enclave, running contraband between the United States and points in the Caribbean. Now, technically, it was still under the jurisdiction of a small Spanish garrison, but they were cooped up in their fort and provided little in the way of actual control. At the end of June, 1817, McGregor launched himself from the mainland with one ship and just 80 men and induced the Spanish garrison, who thought this was the beginning

of a full-blown American invasion, to surrender without firing a shot. McGregor then raised a flag of his own devising, a green cross on a white background, and started making all kinds of declarations about the momentous founding of the Republic of the Florida's. But there was no Republic of the Florida's, and McGregor ran into trouble immediately. Like the minute his men asked if they could please now get the wages, they had been promised now that the mission was complete. Unfortunately, McGregor had already blown most of the money that he had raised. He tried to tax the pirates who were coming in and out of the main harbor, but they just laughed

in his face. The other senior officers, he had recruited, then started pressing him to keep going and use the capture of Amelia Island to launch the promised liberation of all Florida to truly create the Republic of the Florida's. But McGregor said, yeah, we don't have enough money or supplies are meant to do that. So the whole thing just kind of stalled out, as McGregor didn't appear to have any plan at all for what to do next. And he really didn't. So Gregor McGregor did what he's going to do a lot of from here on out. He ran for it. In early September 1817, he made his way down to the harbor of Amelia Island and said, yeah, I'm going to leave now. I'm sure this is all going to work out for you guys. I'll be back.

And his men watched incredulously as he just got on a boat and sailed away. McGregor never did come back, stiffing all his creditors and leaving the men on the island to their fates. And just to wrap up with this, that fate was that some other American adventurers had sailed over with reinforcements and tried to hold the island. But in December 1817, the United States sent him the Marines, retaking the island and then hold it. holding it in trust for the Spanish as the American government negotiated the final purchase of Florida, which was completed finally in 1819. But by then, McGregor himself was long since departed for other schemes. His next scheme would be taking advantage of Belivar's call for British mercenaries to join the revolution in Venezuela, which we of course just talked about two episodes back in episode 5.15. After reuniting with Hosepha,

But McGregor had been living in Nassau for just about a year until he was tipped off that the new Republic of Columbia wanted British soldiers. With his experience and connections, McGregor would be the perfect recruiter. And so he sailed back across the Atlantic to start recruiting, putting in at Dublin in September 1818, and then moving his way over to London. And no one on earth painted fluffier clouds or happier trees than Sir Gregor McGregor. The fluffiest and happiest part being that each men who joined him would be paid 80 silver dollars upon arrival in the new world, and in no time he had a good 500 men and 50 officers signed up for his personal legion. McGregor himself led the first contingent of men who departed England in November,

and who arrived in Lechai, Haiti in February 1819. But literally nothing McGregor had promised turned out to be true. There were no silver dollars. I mean, hell, there was no pay of any kind, nor were there any supplies or guns. Facing an immediate mutiny and frequent desertions, McGregor somehow managed to talk some merchants in Lekai into floating him some loans and equipment, and in April 1819 he was able to announce to his men that they had a mission. They would not be heading down to Venezuela,

but instead sailing over to the isthmus of Panama to seize the city of Portobeo and use it as a base to march down into New Granada. And just to be clear here, we're talking about Portobeo, not Porto Cabo. On April 9, 1819, McGregor deposited 200 men on a beach outside of Portobeo and told them to surprise the city and capture it. The Spanish garrison inside was not expecting any kind of attack and was pretty easily driven out of the port. McGregor then strode boldly into town and raised his personal green cross flag, made all kinds of impressive proclamations, and then set down to work. But mostly that work was designing cool medals for his officers and grandly taking crows. for liberating, like, the whole world. He did nothing to secure the city at all, or prepare for

any further action. Mostly what they did is just kind of sit around and aimlessly drink, and that's when the Spanish launched the inevitable counterattack. Without putting out any patrols to keep watch, on April the 30th, the Spanish were able to walk up, let themselves in, and just opened fire. McGregor himself was asleep when the shooting began, and he jumped out the window and ran for the shore, literally pushing himself out to sea on some driftwood. He paddled across the harbor until he reached the safety of his ship. With the battle unfolding back in town, McGregor seems to have gotten a message to the men he had left behind,

imploring them to hold out that soon he would be covering them with fire from the ships. But the minute he sent out that message, he ordered the captain to weigh anchor and sail away. The 200 men left in Portobeo must have felt their hearts drop into their stomachs as they watched the ships not open fire on the enemy, but instead recede into the distance. They had no choice but to surrender. All of them were tossed in prison, those that weren't executed anyway. Obviously, well ahead of the real story.

McGregor returned to Haiti and was able to spin it in his favor, and he also found an additional 500 or so men that had arrived in the meantime. So McGregor went back to work on the Haitian merchants, trying to get money and supplies for further operations, but everyone was starting to get a little skeptical, as were the recruits who were now deserting in droves. His problems were exacerbated when 400 more men arrived in early August. This is just as Belivar is winning the Battle of Boyacob, by the way, for those of you keeping score at home. As McGregor scrambled with excuses, most of his men simply turned around and headed for home or departed for other opportunities in the Western Hemisphere. And by September 1819,

he was leading just 200 men, though he also now controlled three ships. In early October, he announced that they were going to go off and capture the city of Rio Hacha on the north coast of New Granada near the border to Venezuela. So they sailed out of Haiti in the first week of October, but this new operation was going to go no better than the old operation against Puerto Beaux. In fact, it played out like a verbatim repeat of Portobeo. McGregor landed a force outside the city and said, okay, you guys get ready and I'll be back to personally lead you in a couple of hours. But McGregor never came back.

And after dodging a Spanish force sent out to stop them, McGregor's men managed to break into Rio Hacha and seize the city. The men then raised a flag to signal that they had succeeded, but McGregor had so little faith in them that he could not believe it wasn't a trap. And he would not believe it until the commander of that advanced force personally rode out. to McGregor's ship and said, dude, what are you doing? We have taken the city. Let's go. So into town strides Gregor McGregor once again. And once again, he offered very little in the way of practical direction and his men fell into aimless drinking. Meanwhile, outside the city, the Spanish garrison was regrouping. The better officers under McGregor's command, men with actual military experience, could see that this whole operation was as embarrassing as it was

dangerous. And so they commandeered one of the three ships on October the 10th and fled. Realizing himself that this wasn't going to end well, McGregor gathered his men together and gave an impassioned and inspiring speech for them to stand fast and defend the city with their pride and their honor. After thoroughly arousing the men, McGregor himself said, ah, I have to escort a few of our women down to the shore. I'll be right back. And then he wrote out to a ship and told the captain to sail away. The Spanish Count's counter-attack just a few hours later, and so far as I can tell all the men that McGregor left behind were either killed in battle or executed.

So Gregor McGregor is kind of a piece of crap, right? And by now, everyone was coming round to the same conclusion. Word had gotten out about what had really happened everywhere, and by the time McGregor was sailing away from Rio Hacha, his name was infamous. He couldn't go back to Haiti because his stiff creditors wanted him dead. He couldn't go to the United States because his stiff creditors wanted him dead there too. He couldn't go to Jamaica because the British now wanted him for piracy. And then down in Venezuela, Belivar had been briefed about how McGregor had been using the cause of Venezuelan independence to enrich himself and lead good men to ruin.

So Belivar issued a decree that if McGregor ever set foot in the Republic of Columbia, that he was to be hanged on sight. Now here's the craziest part. everything that I have told you so far, all these things that have made Gregor McGregor's name infamous, none of it is why history remembers Gregor McGregor as such an infamous figure, none of it, seriously, because it all gets overshadowed by what he does next, which is engaged in one of the single, most audacious, big cons in history, a con so huge and legendary that it is still talked about by economic historians to this day. They call it the poitie scheme. After six months in hiding, McGregor resurfaced on the Mosquito Coast in April of 1820.

And the mosquito coast is basically an uninhabitable stretch of Honduras that was held in a weird kind of colonial limbo. Runaway slaves from New Spain had mixed with the native population over the centuries, and their descendants now populated the region. And the British had run into these people at one point and discovered that they were really super anti-Spanish. So the British went ahead and recognized their chief as a king and signed a treaty with him, mostly just to stake a claim to the region against Spanish encroachment. The land, however, could sustain neither crops nor livestock, and as the name suggests, it swarmed with deadly mosquitoes every rainy season.

But in the spring of 1820, McGregor appeared before the court of King George Frederick Augustus, and after a night of drinking, he got the king to sign a document granting him title to 8 million acres of land in the region where today the north coast of Honduras turned south and becomes the east coast of Nicaragua. This claim in hand, McGregor got to work concocting an elaborate fantasy that he planned to take back home and sell for a boatload of cash. In the early summer of 1821, McGregor, his wife Hosepha and their now three children sailed back to London. Upon arrival, McGregor began making the craziest claims of his life. He said that the Mesquite king had made him Cossack of Poyer, that he was now the prince of this country that nobody had ever really heard of.

He claimed further that he had come as a diplomatic agent of Poyer to attend the official coronation of King George IV, and more importantly, to promote Poyer to the people of Britain and invite them to take advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime and emigrate to paradise. The only problem was Poitie did not exist. But at that moment, the British public was ready to believe that it did. They followed the course of the revolutions in Spanish America in the press, but with everything splintering into new countries, it was actually pretty easy for McGregor to just slip a complete fabrication into the mix.

You know, there's Argentina and Colombia, Venezuela, Poet, whatever. Nobody knew the difference. And he was also able to take major advantage of a speculative bubble in Latin American insecurities that had been growing as the newly freed governments, like say the one Santander was running out of Bogota, tried to raise foreign capital. Getting in on the action, McGregor talked a uniformly great game. He worked himself back into high society with tales of the diehards and the Liberator Belivir and the paradise that he had discovered in Poit, a country of which he was now a prince. He even published an extensive guidebook written by Captain Thomas Strangeways. In reality,

a fictional account written by McGregor himself that described a country whose beauty was matched only by its bounty. McGregor had worked out an entire system of government, a description of the economy and the geography and its future prospects. He invented a capital called St. Joseph, which was supposedly as modern a city as any in the Americas and boasting a population of 20,000. None of this existed. Though the book still does, it's been digitized by Google, and I posted a link at Revolutions

Podcast.com if you want to go take a look at some pretty elaborate world building. McGregor started out targeting working class families by offering huge tracks of land in Poet for dirt cheap, totally affordable to like a wage laborer looking to make his life better. Targeting specifically his fellow Scots, he told them that this was their chance to make a Scottish dominated colony in the new world. And in September 1822, McGregor had hired a ship and the first 80 settlers, many of whom had handed him their life savings, boarded that ship, and sailed for Poillet, which, remember, does not exist. But the charade of sending off these settlers was probably designed to further McGregor's scheme in London by alleviating any doubts that a

reputable bank might have about his claims. And it appears to have worked, because in October 1822, just like a month later, McGregor talked a bank into underwriting a 200,000,000 pound issue bearing 6% interest and getting it posted on the London Stock Exchange. With eager speculators buying up notes on an installment plan, McGregor now had further cash to keep the scheme going. He opened Poitie Consulates in London and Glasgow and Edinburgh to keep building on the con. On paper, this was all a smashing success, and McGregor became the equivalent of a multimillionaire. Confidence breeding confidence, McGregor then dispatched a a second ship of 200 settlers in January 1823, but shortly thereafter, things began to go awry.

First of all, of course, the original settlers arrived on the mosquito coast in November 1822 and found nothing, nothing at all. Believing they had simply made a navigational error, they plopped down and sent out parties looking to make contact with Poet and find the best route to St. Joseph. The captain of the ship, though, started privately suspecting the truth, though he didn't want to let on. Instead, he told everyone to sit tight here on the coast while I sail off to find the king and get to the bottom of this. He had still not returned when the second ship bearing the new settlers arrived in March of 1823, eager to begin their lives in Poyet. But a few weeks later, the first captain came back and said, look, I found King George Frederick Augustus, and he doesn't

know anything about any of this, and probably we should give this up now. But the duped settlers refused to believe it, even as the rain started, the mosquitoes arrived, and the yellow fever and malaria set in. So the captain sailed away a second time ostensibly to search for supplies and ask around about where they were really supposed to be. Finally, about a month later, a magistrate from the British colony of Belize happened to be sailing by when he spotted this random camp on the mosquito coast. He came in and asked the people what they were doing there, And when they replied that they were colonists looking to settle in Poitieh, the magistrate was like, there is no such place as Poet, and you're all going to die if you stay here.

But they still didn't believe it. I mean, if you've dumped your life savings into a fraud, that can blind you to the obvious reality. And it wasn't until the first captain returned for the second time that they finally started cluing in to what was going on. Because this time, the captain had King George Frederick. Augustus in tow, and the king angrily said, you're all trespassing on my land. I do not know who this McGregor character is, but whoever he is, he's a liar, now I want you to get out of here. So the settlers reluctantly evacuated to British Honduras, except now the tropical diseases

were really taking their toll. By the summer of 1823, about two-thirds of them were dead. The only good news now was that the British magistrates had alerted the Royal Navy of the fraud, and the Navy managed to intercept five further boatloads of would-be settlers that McGregor had filled in the meantime, sparing all of those poor souls an even worse fate. By that point, though, the real juice was already running out of the scheme. The Latin American bubble appears to have burst over the winter of 1822, 1823, and many of the initial bondholders decided to cut their losses rather than make further installment payments to McGregor. By the fall of 1823, the notes were trading at just as far.

just 10% of face value. And it was right then, in October 1823, that 50 survivors of the Poitie scheme returned to London. Before their stories hit the street, McGregor said, ah, yeah, I'm really not feeling very good, and he let it be known that he was going to Italy to recuperate. But he wasn't going to Italy. Really, he bolted for Paris just ahead of the scandal hitting the British press, who had a field day with it. Oddly enough, though, the full breadth of McGregor's con was not grasp. It was so huge and audacious and unprecedented that many even of the swindled settlers believed that they had been screwed by the ship captain or that McGregor himself had been

duped by the wily king George Frederick Augustus. No one could quite believe that the whole thing really was just Gregor McGregor wandering around spinning bullshit. And though he had managed to get out of town, just ahead of a scandal breaking. McGregor himself does not appear to have learned any lesson from any of this, or demonstrate the least bit remorse that he had just swindled a bunch of people and sent hundreds off to die.

Because when he got to Paris, he started the scheme right back up again. He partnered with an investment company looking to grow their business in the emerging free nations of Spanish America, and McGregor sold the company 500,000 acres in Pouet, for them to then sell to would-be settlers. But this time there would be no death toll. When the French government started getting requests for passports to Poet, which no one in the government had ever heard of and did not seem to exist on any map, they were able to trace the claims back and crack down on the apparent fraud. A few of McGregor's accomplices were arrested in October 1825, and then McGregor himself was finally tracked down and busted in December.

But by a stroke of luck, their main point of contact at the investment house had escaped to the Netherlands, with all the incriminating documentation. So McGregor spent the next six months blaming it all on that guy and saying, I too am the unfortunate victim of this swindler. Even after the guy was successfully extradited from the Netherlands, McGregor managed to convince the French judge that he, too, was just an innocent victim.

McGregor was acquitted, and the other guy got 13 months in jail. Whatever else he was, Gregor McGregor was a hell of a talker. Since it had now been nearly, three years since the first Poitayé survivors had returned to London and the press had all died down, McGregor returned to England, and I kid you not, got right back to selling the same lie. This time he managed to get an 800,000-pound bond issue floated on behalf of Poet, but this time it went nowhere. Word had gone round in financial circles that the bond was junk.

But incredibly, it was not considered junk because Poet was invented, and the previous bond had literally gotten people killed. They all just looked at the old record books and said the return on the previous Poet-Bond had been horrible, and a part of a speculative bubble we all now regret. So McGregor was forced to sell the whole lot of the 800,000 for nothing, and nothing ever came of it. Gregor McGregor spent seriously the next 10 years wandering around floating various versions of his Poet scheme, either in Edinburgh or London, but was now running into the problem of other unsavory character starting to claim that they were the true representatives of Poitiers and selling competing bonds to McGregers, which just had to have been infuriating these liars trading on my lie.

In May of 1838, though, Hosepha, who had been with him this whole time, finally died, and McGregor could think of no further reason to stay in Europe. In October 1838, he returned to Caracas, for I believe the first time since the fall of the First Republic way back in 1812, and he presented himself to the government. of Venezuela. He claimed that he had been unjustly exiled by Belivar and requested to be reinstated to his old rank of general and be given 25 years back pay. Some of the old revolutionary crew was still kicking around, and a few of them had become enemies of Belivar by the end, and they vouched for McGregor's service. So the Venezuelan government reinstated his rank and granted him severance

at one-third pay. Gregor McGregor then lived on this income for the next seven years. dying of natural causes in December 1845 at the age of 58. Gregor McGregor never repented, nor faced any real punishment for his con artistry. He started out a fairly run-of-the-mill mercenary adventurer and did some good work on behalf of the Spanish-American Revolution, but then just gave himself over to lying and scheming and then running, which between Amelia Island, Portobeo, Rio Hacha, and the Poitie scheme, probably led to to something like 500 deaths, I mean directly attributable to his various actions and inactions. I'm not sure what exact criminal charge would be best to haul him into court for,

but some version of depraved indifference to human life would seem fitting. But he's dead now, and he can't hurt anyone else, but I got to tell you, if anyone comes around offering to sell you land in Poit, call the cops. So that concludes our little supplemental diversion. And as I said last time, we're now going to return to the main story again in two weeks as I turn my attention to other projects. But luckily, one of those projects will launch in one week and will take the place of our next full episode because the second Revolutions podcast fundraiser launches one week from today on October the 30th, 2016. We will have two new T-shirts available, three totally awesome screen printed posters, and five, count them five. new episodes of the history of Rome. So I will see you in seven days for the grand opening

of the second revolutions podcast fundraiser.