Gregor MacGregor

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Gregor MacGregor (about 1820)
MacGregor (around 1804)

Gregor MacGregor (born December 24, 1786 in Edinburgh , † December 3, 1845 in Caracas ) was a military leader in the South American Wars of Liberation . Later, he was a fraud and impostor known who fictitious as the "Prince of Poyais" a South American country and marketed.

Life

Gregor MacGregor was about 1.75 m tall and stocky. Since he was a “connoisseur” and liked to eat, drink and smoke, he became more and more obese with age. Little is known of MacGregor's youth. He described himself as the son of an old Scottish family of officers who had provided officers for the "Black Watch" regiment for generations. His father Daniel MacGregor, a former captain in the service of the East India Company , died as early as 1794. Gregor and his two sisters were placed under guardianship and raised by their mother Ann, née Austin, with the help of relatives.

At 16, the earliest possible age, MacGregor joined the British Army . From March 1803 he served at the “57. ( Middlesex ) Regiment on Foot ”and was promoted to lieutenant in February 1804 . By marrying Maria Bowater, the daughter of a British admiral (who had died at that time) , in June 1805 he became wealthy and quickly made a career. In August 1805 he was appointed captain and company commander. 1808/09 he studied chemistry and natural sciences temporarily at the University of Edinburgh . In 1810 he had to say goodbye as a result of a dispute with superiors and then stepped briefly as a major under Marshal William Carr Beresford in Portuguese services, which he also had to leave involuntarily after a short time. Then he lived with an alleged Portuguese nobility title as "Colonel a. D. ”in his hometown of Edinburgh. His wife died surprisingly in 1811, causing MacGregor to lose social and financial support from her family.

Simón Bolívar
General Miranda.jpg

The freedom fighter

“Amalia Island Medal” (1817)
Banknote Amelia Island 1817

At the beginning of the 19th century, all of Europe followed the liberation struggle of South America against the Spanish colonial masters. When the Venezuelan revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar came to London in 1811 to recruit officers for his army, MacGregor also entered his service. According to another account, MacGregor met General Francisco de Miranda , living in exile in London , who had already fought in the American War of Independence .

MacGregor traveled to South America in late 1811. In Caracas he was placed under General Miranda, who was pursuing the dream of a new Inca empire , perhaps the first root of MacGregor's later state-founding dreams . Despite the changeable fortunes of war, MacGregor stayed with the revolutionaries and was appointed general because of his strategic talent. In 1812 he married Bolívar's niece Josefa Antonia Lovera for the second time.

With certain victory in mind, the South American revolutionaries began to part with their mercenaries. MacGregor said goodbye, went to the USA and in June 1817 ran a filibuster company for the conquest of Spanish Florida , which was financed by American business people. On June 29, 1817, he and his 55 men succeeded in conquering Amelia Island , which he declared independent under the flag of the Green Cross of Florida . When there was no further support from his donors, MacGregor left the island in September 1817. Amelia Island was then occupied by the Mexican rebel Louis Michel Aury , who declared the island an "annex" to the Mexican Republic , but in the same year by troops of the United States States was expelled.

MacGregor returned to South America. Here the fortunes of war had turned again and MacGregor entered Bolívar's service again. After the victory of the revolutionary troops, MacGregor turned to Central America on his own. With a mercenary troop of 250 men, he attacked the Spanish Portobelo in the isthmus of Panama in 1820 . Due to the strong Spanish resistance, the company failed. But MacGregor did not give up and a few months later landed with the rest of his troops on the so-called Mosquito Coast in Nicaragua . Ownership of the coastal strip had changed between Great Britain and Spain several times between 1655 and 1786, but by the end of the 18th century most of the settlers had left the unhealthy and economically uninteresting area. MacGregor occupied virtually no man's land. He signed a concession agreement with the chief of the Poyais Indians living there and declared that he wanted to colonize the area.

The impostor

alleged representation of the country of Poyais
Coat of arms of Poyais (1831)
Settlers Manual 1822 (title)
Share by Poyais (1827) with original signature by MacGregor

In the same year, 1820, MacGregor appeared in London as the self-proclaimed “Prince of Poyais”. The freedom fighter had turned into a fraud.

He claimed that the country "Poyais", as he now called the Mosquito Coast, had developed into a flourishing state under his rule as "Gregory I", sovereign Prince of Poyais and " Kazike " of the Poyais people. It would have a large capital with a palace, parliament building, opera house, cathedral and modern port facilities. The country has rich gold deposits and fertile soil for new settlers. Amazingly, his claims have not been challenged. On the one hand, there was little knowledge of non-British possessions in the New World in Great Britain; on the other hand, the emerging British nation was looking for new markets and colonization areas. However, it is certain that MacGregor also paid some influential people bribes to secure his project in order to secure the necessary political support for his project. MacGregor's "Charge d'affaires" John Richardson, an old friend from the Wars of Liberation, was received by the British King George IV. MacGregor himself was raised to the nobility as "Sir Gregory" to promote relations between the two countries.

Meanwhile, MacGregor and his assistants began to monetize the state of “Poyais”: an engraving of the “capital of Poyais” was made, an extensive manual and numerous pamphlets were printed and meetings were held across the country. Immigration offices sold property in Poyais to potential emigrants for four shillings an acre, and "Gregory I" appointed wealthy Britons to his country's government officials. He had previously exchanged your British money for freshly printed Poya currency. From September 1822, the first ships with emigrants sailed to Central America. Finally, in October 1822, MacGregor, with the help of a prestigious London banking firm, issued a £ 200,000 loan to "Consolidate the State of Poyais", the shares of which were subscribed within a few weeks.

At the end of 1822 there was a disaster on the Mosquito Coast. The first two emigrant ships were stranded on the "Black River", on which the country's capital should lie. The port and capital of Poyais could not be found, the impoverished Indians could not take care of the newcomers. Many of the new settlers died, the survivors were evacuated in April 1823 by a rescue expedition that had been put together on the basis of rumors in the colony of British Honduras . The British Navy intercepted other emigrant ships. From the autumn of 1823 the first disappointed settlers returned to Great Britain. On July 8, 1824, the young Republic of Colombia ended the existence of the fantasy state by decree. But MacGregor's influence was still big enough to avoid a public scandal. On the contrary, further bonds were put out to tender in 1825 and 1826.

"Gregory I" left Great Britain to be on the safe side and moved to Paris, where he immediately founded several companies "to promote the development of Poyais". In the autumn of 1825, the first group of French emigrants from France set sail for Poyais. Too sure of his cause, MacGregor returned to London in 1827 and was immediately arrested. But through his connections he was able to prevent a trial, also in France, where he had also been briefly arrested and charged.

MacGregor retired to the French provinces and lived on his fortune for a few years. But poya bonds were still being offered - by him or his former employees. In 1834 he appeared in Scotland, where he tried again to sell land tenure deeds. In 1836 he published a “constitution for the inhabitants of the Indian coast in Central America, usually called the Mosquito Coast”, which was based heavily on the American Declaration of Independence, but remained without public response.

In 1839, when his fortune was exhausted, he applied for Venezuelan citizenship, reinstatement to his rank of general and immediate retirement. His applications were approved and he moved to Caracas. He died there in 1845 without ever having been punished for his fraudulent activities.

literature

  • Gregor MacGregor: Exposición documentada… al gobierno de Venezuela. Caracas: Imprenta A. Damirón 1839.
  • Tulio Arends: Sir Gregor Mac Gregor. Un escocés tras la Aventura de America. Monte Avila Editores, Caracas 1991, ISBN 980-010265-5 .
  • Matthew Brown: Inca, Sailor, Soldier, King: Gregor MacGregor and the Early Nineteenth-Century Caribbean. In: Bulletin of Latin American Research 24: 1 (2005), pp. 44-70.
  • Richard T. Gregg: Gregor MacGregor, Cazique of Poyais: 1786-1845 . International Bond & Share Society, London 1999, ISBN 0-9511250-2-8 .
  • Egon Larsen : Gregor MacGregor, Prince of Poyais . In: Ders .: impostor . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1984, pp. 88-102, ISBN 3-921909-42-2 .
  • M [ichael] Rafter: Memoirs of Gregor M'Gregor . JJ Stockdale, London 1820. (contemporary trend writing) ( PDF )
  • David Sinclair: The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History . Headline Review, London 2003, ISBN 0-7553-1079-9 .

Web links

Commons : Gregor MacGregor  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c M [ichael] Rafter: Memoirs of Gregor M'Gregor . 1820.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Egon Larsen: Gregor MacGregor, Prince of Poyais. In: Ders .: impostor. Hamburg 1984, pp. 88-102.
  3. ↑ a b c d Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford 2004, p. 432.
  4. ^ David Sinclair: The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History . London 2003.
  5. ↑ cf. Political journal, along with advertisements by scholars and other things, 1816 2/7 (July 1816), pp. 1085-1089.
  6. ^ Frank Lawrence Owsley, Gene A. Smith: Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800–1821. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997, pp. 118-140; s. a. Niles' Weekly Register XIII, Sept 1817 - March 1818 (1818), pp. 346-352.
  7. ^ Proclamation of the Liberating Army v. June 30, 1817, first printed in the New Hampshire Patriot v. July 29, 1817 (Text online ( Memento of the original from March 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.amelianow.com
  8. ^ Stanley Faye: Commodore Aury. In: Louisiana Historical Quarterly 24 (1941), pp. 611-697.
  9. ^ Josiah Conder: The Modern Traveler. VII, 2. Boston 1830, p. 182 f.
  10. ↑ [Verax]: A Letter to the Editor of the Quarterly Review, for February 1923, on a Review of Captain Strangeway's Sketch of the Mosquito Shore. London 1823 ( PDF ).
  11. ↑ a b Timi Ogunjobi: The Cazique of Payais. In: Ders .: Scams - and how to protect yourself from them. Morrisville NC (BoD) 2008, pp. 150-156.
  12. ↑ Thomas Strangeways: Sketch of the Mosquito Shore: Including the Territory of Poyais, Descriptive of the Country etc. London 1822 ( PDF ).
  13. ↑ a b Law Cases and Narratives: King's Bench, Guildhall - M'Gregor v. Twaites and another. In: The Annual Register or a View of the History, Politics and Literature, of the Year 1924. London 1825, pp. 17 * -23 *.
  14. ↑ Times v. October 28, 1822, p. 2.
  15. ^ Remarks on the late accounts received from the Poyais settlers. In: The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany XCII 2 (July – Dec. 1823), pp. 324–331; Sir Gregor M 'Gregor's Colonie. In New General Geographic and Statistical Ephemeris. XII, 1. Weimar 1823, p. 351 f.
  16. ^ Gustav Wilhelm Hugo: Yearbooks of the history of America (1492 to 1829). Karlsruhe 1829, p. 123.
  17. ↑ cf. Le Cacique Gregor Marc-Gregor. In: Annuaire anecdoctique ou souvenirs contemporains. Janvier. Paris 1826, p. 270; Paris. Cour royale. Procès du cacique Mac-Grégor. In: Annuaire historique universel pour 1826. Paris 1827, Appendice p. 221 f.
  18. ↑ Poyaisian Stock Certificate from 1831 (web link)
  19. ^ Gregor MacGregor: Plan of a Constitution for the Inhabitants of the Indian Coast, in Central America, Commonly called the Mosquito Shore. Edinburgh 1836.
personal data
SURNAME MacGregor, Gregor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish military leader in the South American Wars of Liberation
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1786
PLACE OF BIRTH Edinburgh
DATE OF DEATH December 3, 1845
Place of death Caracas