Greetings From Poyais, 19th Century Con Man Bilks Investors In Made-up Central American Paradise

SFGate ^ | Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 18, 2004 | Reviewed by Peter Lewis

[Son House]

Never heard of Poyais? That's because you weren't living in Great Britain in the early 1820s, when newspaper advertisements, promotional brochures and the ubiquitous street singers broadcast the country's limitless opportunities to potential investors. There was a snake in the garden, though, writes David Sinclair in "The Land That Never Was," a striking and colorful history of Poyais. The glitch: Poyais was a fiction, the brainchild-turned-hell-spawn of Gregor MacGregor -- fantasist, confidence trickster, dandy and bon vivant with a taste for titles and palms itching for lucre.

Mostly, MacGregor sat on his hands. When roused, he made tactical and logistical blunders. As a soldier of fortune, he was unlucky in the fortune department; his greatest feats were retreats, yet they did win him a measure of celebrity. His boldest move might well have been a nifty piece of land fraud perpetrated in Florida. It was the drift of things to come. So to Poyais.

"Fashion has always been an important factor in financial markets," Sinclair writes, "and no company likes to see competitors taking too much of a lead in the next boom." A ripe situation for MacGregor. The charade could only last so long. What the settlers found, of course, was nothing: no town, no bustling economy, no Poyais. Hundreds would die of disease; the rest would disperse with only the clothes on their backs. MacGregor served a mere eight months in jail, since "the deception could not be proved conclusively." Sinclair invests the story with considerable insight and pizzazz. If the language is not always economical, the strength of the telling is in the structure and the fertile ironies. It is a tale as pungent as the spices of Poyais, if only there was a Poyais.

[Son House]

My how I am reminded of a Liberal(Democrat) Utopia...

[HereInTheHeartland]

Poyais; old Indian word for ObamaCare.

[Son House]

And the extended(Read more ›) version of an Amazon book review;

The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History
http://www.amazon.com/The-Land-That-Never-Was/dp/0306814110

When we rejoin the settlers, or at least the ones who managed to make it home with their lives, what I found the most amazing portion of the book begins. Apparently MacGregor’s personal charisma was so persuasive that he managed to persuade many of his followers, and others as well, that he was not the perpetrator but the victim in this scheme. He had simply placed his trust in the wrong subordinates, and given the opportunity, everything could be straightened out.

MacGregor always seemed to stay one step ahead of the truth, and the law, until the latter caught up with him at his next stop, Paris, where he tried to stir fresh interest in Poyais. He was imprisoned and brought to trial, but leading the charmed life that he was, he was soon back in London, still working to entice people to put money into the land that didn’t exist.

[GeronL]

Yep.

[left that other site]

There are more people signed up for a one way trip to mars than have signed up for Obamacare.

Poyais couldn’t have been nearly as bad as either.

[Son House]

Easily predictable, the ones signing up are the ones who get the free Medicare benefits.

[left that other site]

yes. The medicaid Signups far outnumber the alleged signups for the “exchanges”.

[Tupelo]

A little reminiscent of James Addison Reavis the Baron of Arizona.