Gregor McGregor, a Scottish con artist, fabricated the nation of Poyai in 1821 by selling worthless land plots for £200,000 to desperate British investors exploiting post-Napoleonic financial panic. He utilized a fake propagandist, Thomas Strangeways, and non-existent currency to lure settlers who arrived in 1823 only to find a hostile wilderness instead of a utopia. The resulting colony collapsed as colonists turned on each other, causing over two-thirds to die within months while McGregor fled to France and eventually died penniless in Caracas in 1845, exposing the hollow social structures of the British Empire. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Money Control with Tiffany00:02:38
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Yeah.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
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Just a little bit bigger hips.
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And it's another episode of a podcast that I do.
I have forgotten which one.
Sophie, what is my job?
Uh, you do, you are a professional podcaster.
You hosted seven.
Wanda Sykes and Clarissa Shields00:16:04
That does not sound right.
I know.
Even when I said it, I was like, Yeah.
You're Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, a show about the War 3 history.
And today.
Oh, I forgot it because of the head injuries.
Well, then I guess I should read this script that someone has handed me.
And the script says that my guest today is Lacey Mosley.
Bam Right.
The script is right.
Oh, I love a manufactured Jamaican air horn.
It's my favorite.
Yeah.
No, there's no air horn like the one you pretend to make with your mouth.
It's for that.
So, Lacey, how's it going?
Good.
The same, I assume.
Because it's minutes after we've recorded the first episode.
It's going good.
It's nice to talk to people.
Like, on days where I have lots of podcasts, I'm like, oh, this is going to be a long day.
But then I'm like, oh, it's just talking to people I like.
So then it's great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I don't have many social outlets these days because of the plague and being an introvert.
So yes, I too.
I too get all of my social life by talking about conmen with my friends over the internet.
So thank you for being my con man friend.
Yes, I love this.
Wait, were you doing lots of socializing before COVID?
Like you, no, no, no, no.
I was mostly hiding in a fortified compound.
Anyway, so when Gregor McGregor traveled back to London in 1821, he brought back with him his wife and a scheme that was on the surface very silly.
The land that he'd been given was beautiful, but again, worthless from a financial perspective.
It was a bad place to grow.
It was completely uncultivated.
So discovering like whatever resources might be there would take lifetimes worth of work.
You'd have to cut through miles of jungle to even do anything.
There were natives there, but none of the kind of cultivated infrastructure that Europeans looked for in colonial prospects.
Remember, the most successful colonies that Europeans took were in places where like locals had been doing shit for a while.
Right.
Like food was growing.
Like shit was they kind of had to just move in.
And this is not that.
This is like, this is actual uncultivated country.
None of this mattered to Gregor, obviously, because he had no plan doing anything in Poyer.
His plan was to lie and pretend it was an actual independent nation filled with riches and fertile land and friendly natives, eager to learn from British civilization.
Friendly natives.
You know, natives, we love when the Brits come and take all our shit and give us disease.
All the natives love us.
They love it.
Oh, that doesn't sound like the British name more than 40 times they did that, Lacey.
Smallpox?
Come over here.
We love to see it.
So, yeah, his plan was to drum up a media frenzy around his new country in Great Britain and sell plots of land back to gullible rubes.
And then it wasn't really clear what he planned to do after that.
But it was like, if you've seen the monorail episode of The Simpsons, that's kind of what he was going for, it seems like.
So as it happened, Gregor landed in London during the best possible time to sell a fake Latin American nation to idiots.
And I'm going to explain how this scheme got off the ground.
But first, I'm going to have to walk you through how stock trading worked in the 1820s.
And this is a funner story than you might expect.
So the idea of trading stocks is still pretty new in the 1820s.
People have not been doing it in like a kind of recognizable modern way for a long time.
The whole concept had arisen in London during the time of Queen Elizabeth I out of what was called merchant banking, the selling and trading of various commodities.
Now, this took off in the aisles because the continent of Europe spent basically the 1700s and 1800s fighting a bunch of horribly bloody wars.
And the men who profited from those wars did all of their financial gambling in London because London was safe, right?
People aren't getting over to England and doing their fighting.
So it's a pretty good place to do your trading.
So it was an English bank that managed the $15 million loan that let the U.S. buy Louisiana.
And it was Rothschild's Bank that loaned Britain and her allies more than 100 million pounds during the Napoleonic Wars.
Now, when those wars ended, the situation is kind of like it was for the U.S. in World War II, where everyone else is devastated and the British are doing all right.
And they kind of like wind up holding everybody's money at the end of that war.
And so with the fighting over, you had all these rich guys who had more money than ever, and they wanted to make even more money with that because that's the only thing rich guys do with huge piles of money.
They're hoarders.
So they want to do, yeah, they're hoarders and they want to like make more money.
And they so they want to like gamble on something.
And the Royal Exchange had for decades kind of handled that gambling.
But by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there's way too much money for this tiny little exchange to handle.
And there was no like real regulation.
And this had started to become a problem.
There were all these frauds and conmen.
And yeah, people were worried that the entire economy was going to collapse under like a whole bunch of giant grifts.
And this had happened before.
It had kind of happened repeatedly as soon as people started trading stocks.
In 1720, there was something called the South Sea bubble.
This started when the South Sea Company bribed the British government with millions of dollars in exchange for a monopoly on South American trade.
The government needed that money for a different war with France, so they passed a bill to make this legal.
And suddenly all like the South Sea Company stock rises to 10 times its value.
And all these Englishmen see like, it's like with Bitcoin.
Suddenly like, oh my God, that got worth so much more overnight.
Something else has got to be like that.
What if I invest in something else and then I can get rich too?
And so there's like, anyway, speculation starts running wild and people start investing in some really stupid shit.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in historic UK here.
Speculation ran wild and all sorts of companies, some lunatics, some fraudulent or just optimistic, were launched.
For example, one company floated was to buy the Irish bogs.
Another was to manufacture a gun to fire square cannonballs.
And most ludicrous at all, quote, this was an investment at the time for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but no one to know what it is.
Yes, that's not how to scam silicon banks.
They're like, if we tell you, then somebody's going to steal it.
But just give us money for the thing that we'll make it.
Yeah.
And of course, the bubble burst and the entire economy collapsed and the government had to resign.
So like that had happened about a century before, and people saw the same stuff starting to happen again and they got like really worried.
So the more level-headed citizens in England decided to make a system of rules and regulations to govern the selling of stocks so the country wouldn't be destroyed completely by reckless greed.
And this is kind of how the London Stock Exchange came about.
And like there's a lot more to the history than that, but that's more or less the...
Anyway, so you get this stock exchange by the 1800s and it regulates trading and only approved entities could list commodities for sale or sell commercial stock.
So fraud was kept to a minimum, which was good for the economy, but bad for people who want to get rich quick.
Right.
Bad for fraud.
So the London Stock Exchange worked for a while to keep fraud in check, but then Napoleon loses his war and the British wind up with all of the money in the world.
And that kind of makes people reckless.
So they start looking for schemes that they can't find on the London Stock Exchange because it's vaguely legitimate.
And I'm going to quote from The Economist here to explain what happened next.
The economy was expanding steadily, driven on by manufacturing.
The cost of living was falling, with industrial workers' wages rising.
Interest rates drifted down with the government borrowing more and more cheaply.
The country was in an upbeat mood.
The downside to all this was that investing in government debt, a staple place to park spare funds, had become boring.
The market rate on the most popular British government bond fell steadily between 1800 and 1825.
The government made the most of this, swapping its existing debt for new bonds that paid rates as low as 3%.
All this gave British investors the incentive and the confidence to look for more exciting opportunities.
One option was to lend money to governments that paid higher interest rates.
Russia, Prussia, and Denmark all had good credit records, but offered a 5% return.
So this is how it happens at first, is they start investing in foreign companies that offer more of a return than the government.
And foreign bonds weren't traded in the stock exchange.
So there's no regulation.
Now, this is okay when you're investing in like Denmark, because Denmark is a real country.
And you know that your investment's not going to just fly away, right?
Prussia's not going to default on all of its debt.
But right at this time, like this, it's kind of an open place where a scammer could establish themselves.
And it's scam is maybe the wrong way to put it.
But less safe bets start being possible.
Yeah.
So all of these South American colonies that we've been talking about had been in the process of fighting wars against their colonial oppressors and winning them.
And you start having independent South American states at this point.
And these are very new countries.
And they just finished fighting these horrible wars.
So they had a need for a bunch of cash.
And all of these people in Great Britain are both obsessed with South America and they have too much money.
So you get this kind of like perfect storm.
And it starts with Columbia, which is the first new nation that comes to the people of Great Britain asking for a loan.
They wanted 2 million pounds.
And this is uh, they offer, and like they're willing to offer a 6% return rate, which was actually illegal in Britain at the time.
Why?
Because it's too high, because it's too high.
And the government's like, any, any, anything with a return that high has to be somehow, what, sketchy?
Right.
Um, but people fall for this, and they like, they love it.
They invest a shitload of money in Colombia.
And the way that Colombia has to like, the first country to do this is Colombia.
So they, they kind of go to an effort to convince people that they're legitimate, that like they'll be able to pay this back.
So they print up all these brochures with lists of like the revenues they expect to make and how good their tobacco market's going to be and how much gold and silver they're going to be mining as soon as the economy gets off the ground.
So it seems like a stable investment.
People go fucking wild for Colombian bonds and the bonds run out almost immediately.
And so people start like, yeah, people are very hungry for another opportunity like that.
And so Chile comes up and Chile's like, well, we'd like a loan too.
And then Peru comes up next.
And by the time Peru starts offering investments, they're not even telling people what natural resources they have to guarantee their.
They're just being like, hey, we're fucking Peru.
You guys want some of this shit?
And they guessed correctly that like London wasn't, no one was going to factor it.
They're like, we just like Colombia.
We just like, no, everything they said, that's what we're doing too in Peru.
Just give us the money.
Yeah, of course we probably have gold.
Probably.
You don't know.
Fuck it.
The soil very rich.
I saw.
Great soil.
Yeah.
I saw a plant the other day.
Anyway, give us the money.
Now, these were not necessary.
These were not all great investments.
Obviously, all these countries do have natural resources, but Latin America was still fighting a whole bunch of civil wars.
All of these countries were still fighting.
Like none of their governments were actually really all that settled at this point.
They had no credit history, and nothing was known about the resources of these places or when they would start being the kind of seeing the kind of profits that all these British people were going to expect.
And it wasn't even possible to truly vet that all the men claiming to represent these governments were who they said they were.
Because it's a time of war.
So it's like, who anybody?
None of these nations are even recognized by the British government.
Now, I don't think that's the only path to being legitimate is being recognized by colonizers.
However, I do think it's fun that it's like, we don't know who's going to be in charge tomorrow.
We are definitely still at war.
Yeah.
And if you are a British investor and your country doesn't recognize this as a country, that might be a sign that like, okay, this maybe I should be a little bit more, I don't know.
Yeah.
They invested a bunch of money in these places.
And this is the London that Gregor McGregor, the prince of Poyer, walks into in 1822.
And the only disadvantage he had when he was trying, because he wants to do the same thing with Poyer.
He wants to put it up for a bond issue and like get a bunch of money from people who are expecting it to be paid back.
And the only disadvantage he has in doing this is that Spain had never owned his country.
So one reason British folks were willing to invest in like Colombia or Peru is that the Spanish had fought like hell to hold on to these places.
So even though they didn't know exactly what resources these countries had, they figured if the Spanish are willing to fight hard for them, there's got to be.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, so Poyer didn't have that, but it had an advantage that none of the Latin American countries issuing bonds in Great Britain had, which is that its head of state was in London.
And its head of state is, of course, Gregor McGregor.
Yeah.
So he immediately goes to the press.
Like, that's his first thing.
And he starts talking about how, like, basically talking at Poyer is this like utopia with undiscovered riches and stuff.
And he hires a bunch of assistants to write newspaper ads and leaflets and ballads to be broadcast by like street singers in London and Edinburgh and Glasgow to try to convince them.
So he hired Drake to sing about Poyer.
He was like, we popped in bottles.
Every day that rhymes.
We bopping bottles in Poyer every day.
Yeah.
That would make me go.
It is.
Shit.
Yeah.
Yeah, fuck, that's good.
How would go?
So, we have some examples of some of the ads that he hired.
This one was published in the Glasgow Sentinel, and I'm going to read it now.
The climate is remarkably healthy and agrees admirably ably with the constitution of Europeans, many of whom, having become much debilitated by a long residence in the West Indies, have been completely restored to health by a removal for a short period to the Bay of Honduras.
The soil is extremely rich and fertile, bearing three crops of Indian corn in a year and produces not only all the necessities of life in profusion, but is well adapted for the cultivation of all those valuable commodities which have rendered the West Indies so important, especially coffee, sugar, cotton, tobacco, cocoa, etc.
So, everything valuable grows here, and the climate makes you healthier if you're European.
Right, and everyone's coming here to the island here.
The land heals the sick, basically, is what he said.
Beautiful snake oil sales, heals sick white people.
Only white people, don't worry, we'll only heal sick white people.
Well, you know, it's kind of a thing at this period.
All the places where Europeans are making all of their money by selling and mining commodities kill Europeans in huge quantities because you know they're giving smallpox to the natives, but like they don't have immunity to like all any of the local diseases either.
So, uh, yeah, there's a lot of reasonable questions that responsible men asked about this investment scheme.
Uh, for example, Gregor, how do you plan to repay this loan?
And Gregor answered that Poyer had a lot of gold and it had all sorts of animals that could be hunted and it had great soil and soon there'd be a bunch of stuff for sale.
And so, when he said this, people were like, Hey, Gregor, if Poyer has all this shit, why has no one ever traded with it before?
And Gregor's like, Well, the locals were too scared of getting the Spanish attention, and then Spain would colonize them.
And like, they didn't want that.
And so, then they were like, Well, why didn't Spain conquer Poya?
Like, they were right there.
And he was like, Well, there's mountains too.
There's all these big mountains, huge, biggest mountains you've ever seen.
No one could get into it.
And a really deep lake, like the deepest lake, and honest, lots of lake currents, sharks, lake sharks, tons of sharks, sky sharks, too.
Nobody could get it.
So, these again are all pretty transparent lies, but nobody was checking him out because people just have money to burn and they want to get in on South America.
So, the loan that Gregor wound up seeking on behalf of Poyer was 200,000 pounds, just a fraction of what larger nations had asked for, but enough to make him very rich.
It's the equivalent of about like 11 million dollars or 11 million pounds, I guess, today.
Yeah, it's a lot of money.
So, if Gregor had been an ordinary con man, he would have focused on just this grift.
But by 1822, Gregor had gotten good at being a con man, and the loan was just his side grift.
His real plan was to convince hundreds and hundreds and eventually thousands of English and Scotsmen to sell their property, buy land from him, and immigrate to Poyer to help civilize it.
Transparent Lies About South America00:02:44
Now, I should note here that there's some debate about whether or not he actually intended to try to settle and govern a new nation.
There's some evidence that, like he did on Amelia Island, he wanted to move all these people out there so they could form the core of a private country.
But he never actually tried to do this.
And whether or not he intended to try and start a settlement, the plan was a con from the beginning.
And evidence of this comes from the propaganda booklet he wrote to entice colonists to immigrate.
It was titled Poyer: Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, including the territory of Poyer, descriptive of the country, with some information as to its productions.
Now, he credited the writing of the book to Thomas Strangeways, a man who did not exist but was supposedly a captain in the Poyan military, which also did not exist.
That was his fake friend's name.
What a name.
Yeah.
Johnny Fake Name, my good friend.
Jesus.
Timothy Lech.
The booklet was a pretty good piece of con art.
It opened with an apology that the contents were very dry and serious and wouldn't be entertaining to ordinary readers because he knew that the intelligent and like serious men who would agree to invest in Poyer wanted only the best information.
They didn't want it to be flowery and interesting.
They wanted serious facts.
And that's all he was going to give you.
So first off, he's being like, oh, if you're not really, if you're expecting a lurid read, this is for serious people.
So clearly, if you're into this, you're a serious person.
Apologies.
This book is not for the poor.
Yeah, not for poor and dumb people.
Just the very smart.
Yeah.
So the book was a bunch of, included a bunch of like plagiarized descriptions of different plants and like lies about the growing season and also these very elaborate calculations for how much farms of different sizes and plantations of different sizes could expect to earn.
And all of this was lies, but he did all like all of the math was laid out in a way that like, oh, wow, this has to be legitimate.
He did a bunch of math.
There are numbers in this leaflet.
Yeah.
And these calculations went next to like things that were a lot less reasonable, like claiming that like it had more fresh water than anywhere else and all of the freshwater rivers were also just filled with hunks of gold that you could pick up.
And like, it's this mix of like, yeah, it's very fun, very fun.
So wait, one question.
This Poyer, because he did inherit land that wasn't.
Yeah, there's real land.
But is that that Poyer is the location of the land that he inherited?
Yes.
Okay, got it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what isn't fake land kind of grifted from where are you on here, buddy?
Math Meets Golden Rivers00:03:28
I don't know.
Sophie, I don't know anymore.
Let's just roll the ads.
Don't be sad, Robert.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
The Cost of Colonizing00:16:26
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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So, we're back.
Oh, I missed the ads already.
But we get to talk more about Gregor McGregor.
So, Thomas's guidebook included lengthy descriptions of the local natives, the local Polleyans, or the Polleyans, Poiesians, I think.
I like Polleansians.
Yeah, Poiesians, I think, is the correct way.
In his description, the Poiesians basically had no real culture of their own.
Their culture was that they loved the British.
Yo, he really sold them the white man's stream.
Yeah, he knew how to sell this shit.
Like, he's not dumb.
He knows his people.
They're cool.
He wrote you.
Yeah.
That's why I tell them.
They love you.
Yeah.
He wrote, a tradition has long prevailed among them that the gray-eyed people, meaning the English, have been particularly appointed to protect them from oppression and bondage.
He was like, oh, that's his good grift.
Yeah.
All of the women are young and their breasts are right underneath their chin and all they want to do is marry an old, decrepit British man.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
The women won't marry young men.
They won't fuck anyone under 70.
So yeah, he tells them that like these people are probably descendants of the Aztecs.
So they're formerly civilized people who needed English help to rescue them from barbarism.
Oh God.
He was like, look, they were colonized once and they loved it.
They were like colonization, just kiss.
And they really wanted you guys to come back.
Yeah.
So, yeah, he wrote, quote, they have repeatedly shown an anxious desire to acquire the arts of Europe, as is manifest by their repeated invitations to the English to form settlements among them, as well as by their former offers to cede a part of their country to Great Britain, thereby showing that their aversion to Spain does not extend to all other nations of Europe.
Yeah.
Can't wait for you white people to get here.
You know, they need you.
They don't know how to have a country without you.
Said every indigenous population.
Where are the white people?
What are they getting?
All we've got is this unspoiled country and like a culture not based on constant toil and like, ah, you know what we really need is some incredibly filthy cities choking to death on coal dust.
God, if only we had coal dust.
Tell Turlington to pull up.
We're ready.
So, yeah, he also goes into length in this book about like how happy the natives are to be hired for basically nothing and how like, oh, you just give them ammunition and they'll hunt all the food that you need.
They love doing it.
And also, you know, if you hire them and pay them, they never want raises.
Like, they're happy getting paid the same amount forever.
They also want to be treated as second-class citizens.
Oh, they love it.
Can't get enough of being second-class citizens.
You know what they said to me the other day?
They were like, what if we had a system of segregation here?
Wouldn't that be grand?
They said to me, me, McGregor, they said, we are tired of opportunity.
We are set of it.
So he also lied about the present extent of European civilization in Poier, claiming that a forgotten load of British settlers had already set up like a nice, orderly European city in the country that was its capital.
Like, there's already a white people city waiting for you.
All you got to do is land there.
You'll have workers.
You'll have a nice city with a bunch of comforts.
Like, it'll be fine.
All you got to do is set up your farms.
They're ready to just be planted.
And you can just start making money right now.
By the way, McGregor, you said the city, you said the city is called White People City.
Yeah, Whitetopia.
It's full of nice white people things.
It's got, I don't know, John Mayer is always there.
He never leaves.
White conda forever.
Selling white conda.
Oh, I love it.
Yeah, condos as far as the eye can see.
Burritos with no spices at all.
It's amazing.
I love that you thought that.
Do you think I said condo?
Oh, I mean, yeah.
Like Wakanda forever.
White condo.
Oh, oh.
Oh, that's better.
I thought you were making a comment about white people's famous love of condos.
Shaking her head.
Robert.
So hundreds and hundreds of people sign up, and they all start paying him a ton of money for acreage.
He's making money hand over fist for this land that these people had never seen.
And the bulk of his volunteers were Scotsmen because Gregor finally figures out how to con his own people.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
Starts at home.
It starts at home.
Yeah.
The historians have spent a decent amount of time trying to tease out why Scottish people were particularly vulnerable to this scheme.
And there's an interesting paragraph in the BBC on it.
Quote, according to Columbia University psychologist Tori Higgins, people are usually more likely to be swayed by one or other of the two motivational lines.
Some people are promotion-focused.
They think of possible positive gains, and some prevention-focused.
They focused on losses and avoiding mistakes.
An approach that unites the alpha with the omega appeals to both mindsets, however, giving it universal appeal.
And it's easy to see how McGregor's proposition offered this potent combination.
He published interviews in national papers, for instance, touting the perks that would come from investing or settling in Poyer.
He highlighted the bravery and fortitude that such a gesture would demonstrate.
You wouldn't just be smart, you would be a real man.
The Scottish Highlanders were known for their hardiness and adventurous spirit, he wrote.
Poier would be the ultimate testing ground, a challenge and a gift, all in one.
Gotta love toxic masculinity.
It's like, are you gonna move to Poyer or is your dick small?
And yeah, I'm working on using that griff.
Like, are you too much of a coward to get into a gunfight with the FDA SWAT team?
Like, oh, I mean, if you don't want to get into a gunfight with the FDA, then don't move to my compound and die for it.
Yeah, what's wrong with you?
I mean, that's a problem.
What's wrong with you?
Oh, you're a coward.
No, that's fine.
It's cool to be a coward.
That's cool.
Yeah.
Like, you don't have, like, the cool people are going to go die fighting the FDA.
You don't have to.
Because you're not cool.
Yeah, you can live the rest of your life knowing that you're a layman.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Knowing that you suck.
So it is also speculated that one reason the Scots were particularly interested in this is that they were jealous of the English and all of their fancy colonies.
And there was also a manner of honor at stake here.
In the late 1600s, the hundreds, the Scots had tried to start a colony on the Gulf of Darien near Panama.
And it was a poorly led shit show, and basically everyone either died or were conquered by Spain.
And Scotland invested fully 20% of all of its money in the scheme, which kind of destroyed the entire country for years.
They were bad at colonizing.
I kind of like that for them.
Yeah, it is nice about them.
I mean, they're good at being the soldiers of colonial oppressors because that's how the British did a lot of work.
Oh, yeah, yikes.
Before they had African soldiers to fight for them, they had Scots to conquer the chunks of Africa and then hired African soldiers to fight under Scottish officers.
It's this whole thing, it's the whole thing.
Yeah.
They're not dumb.
So, yeah, you would think that having been a part of this giant scheme that had crashed the entire economy and cost a bunch of people their lives would have actually built like a cultural immunity to schemes in Scotland, but it just made them feel like they had a shame to wipe out, and McGregor took advantage of that.
He pointed out that colonizing Poyer would like, this will wipe out the shame of Darien.
Like, nobody's going to be talking about Darien because you're going to have Poyer.
People are going to be like, oh, those Scots, they're so good at colonizing.
So, Gregor was flooded with applicants, and he happily set to work hiring and refitting a small fleet of boats for the journey.
The first one set sail in September with 70 immigrants aboard.
These were to be the vanguard.
They were there to prepare the way for everybody else.
Now, Gregor, of course, stayed behind to prepare the next wave of ships, and in his stead, he promoted the most gullible of the settlers, commissioning a former British Army officer named Hector Hall as lieutenant colonel of the fictional 2nd Native Regiment of Foot.
Beautiful.
Gregor even generously made him the lieutenant governor too and granted him a 12,800-acre estate that, again, absolutely did not exist.
He said, You're king of everything.
Now get to work.
Now do all the stuff for me.
So the second wave of colonists would depart in November after their ship was refit to carry 250 people.
And while Gregor waited, he designed and printed his own Poiesian currency and started handing it out to colonists in exchange for their gold.
From the land that never was, quote, the new world of their dreams suddenly became a very real world as the men accepted the Kazik's dollar notes with the coat of arms, the crest of the Bank of Poyer, and the promise that, on demand or three months after sight and the option of the government of Poyer, one hard dollar will be paid to the bearer at the bank office in St. Joseph.
The people who had bought land and who had planned to take their savings with them in coin were also delighted to exchange their gold for the legal currency of Poyer.
Yeah.
He loved to print a money.
Oh, yeah.
He loved to print money, but Gregor did.
He said, y'all, just take, give me your real money.
I'm going to get it.
And it's a good scheme.
It's like, oh, you got to get on a boat.
All that gold's heavy.
You know, it's not heavy.
These totally real dollars.
These Poyer books.
Oh, yeah.
Real as hell they are.
So just as the refitting neared completion, disaster struck.
See, the financial market that had gotten so bullish in investing in all these South American bonds started to get a little bit like antsy because the Colombian government basically the Colombian government wrote a letter or something to England being like, hey, you know the guy who's been saying he's our representative?
Like, he didn't actually have the right to ask for a loan.
Yeah, we don't know who we're not really sure what's going on here.
So this worries the people who had invested shitloads of money in Colombia.
And like a panic takes a hold of the market.
And this spreads to the holders of Chilean and Peruvian bonds.
And there start to be like warnings in the press that people might like, yeah, people might have, might be about to lose all of their money.
So the bubble bursts and people stop buying Gregor's bonds, which he had not sold all of the bonds he was trying to issue.
So he's in a cash crunch.
Now, this didn't halt colonization because he had a bunch of money that he'd gotten from these people who were buying fake land from him.
But so he had to like rush along and send, you know, hundreds of people off on these two boats and then travel back to London to find a way to grift more money.
And it's funny the way he does this.
He meets this like British army officer who's like a very rich and famous man in London and offers him a place to stay.
And Gregor becomes good friends with him and he's like, hey, I'll make you the ambassador to Poyer if you like help me get some bank loans and shit.
You can be the other king.
We have two kings.
So while he's doing this, the first shipload of colonists land at Poyer in early 1823.
And they were immediately surprised by a couple of things.
For one thing, there was no European-style capital right at the edge of the harbor.
Like the drawings that Gregor had showed them had depicted.
In fact, there were no signs.
Yeah, yeah.
No roads, no buildings, no signs of what they called civilization at all.
And there's also no signs of the friendly natives that they'd been promised were eagerly awaiting them.
There's no people that they see at first.
The first wave of guys splash ashore and they're just kind of baffled.
The land's beautiful, but it's completely undeveloped.
And there's no way to like, there's no clear way to make farms there.
You'd have to chop down hundreds of trees and like put in soil and everything.
Like, so, yeah, this would not have been an impossible task.
Like, obviously, you could have turned this land into land that had farms and shit on it.
If the expedition there had been filled with people who were like ready to do that, like a bunch of experienced woodsmen and young farmers who like were used to hard work and expecting it.
But the party that Gregor had sent to be the first people in the Poyer consisted of only a couple of veteran soldiers and younger farmers with any sort of experience with hard work.
The rest of the party was a mix of lawyers, artisans, a banker, and one young man who Gregor had promised would be the first theater director on the island of Poye.
This is a Jarul.
This is the first fire farmer.
Yeah, there's a Jarul.
Yeah.
And there were some other farmers, but most of them were old men who like had hoped that they'd get to retire in a place that Gregor had promised.
Gregor had told them that the climate in Poyer extends the lives of English people.
And then there were clerks who were supposed to staff the empty government offices in a capital that did not exist.
So this was not the crew of people you would pick to build civilization from the ground up using nothing but hand tools, right?
Like, these aren't the folks who are going to clear-cut forests and start farms from nothing.
Oh, my gosh.
These are the influencer girls.
Yeah, these are a lot of influencers, right?
Like, there's a lot of people who basically thought, like, basically, a lot of people who are like middle class and upper middle class and who were told, like, you want to be aristocrats?
You move here.
You can be like the new aristocracy of this new country.
And then, like, ah, there's no country.
Sorry.
But you are still an aristocracy.
Look, you, you can rule that tree.
Yeah.
You can rule those leads.
You're the richest guy in the woods, according to the fake dollars I gave you that you can use nowhere, because there's no one here you cannot use.
So there were people, there were natives, and some of the natives were friendly but others weren't and, like none of them had any desire to work for white people, like because they were doing their own thing.
They're like well, like we're fine, like we already have lives, like what do you?
You guys are all dying.
Like we don't.
We don't want to.
Like nobody wants to take advice from you.
It should not be that easy for white people to think that people want to work for them like, of course, they want to work for us.
For nothing, they want to be exploited.
Well, this is where we get to the thing about this.
That is this a beautiful piece of historic irony, because all of the white men here they weren't particularly bad within sort of the context of their cultures, but they all had the same thing that basically all white Europeans had, which is this belief that, like they inherently knew how to be civilized in a way that other peoples of the world didn't, and like that's why they should take all this land from these people is they knew how to civilize it.
And so finally, a group of these people who believed that they were, who believed that they were going to help a bunch of poor, non-white people learn how to be civilized, this group of people finds themselves in a land that's actually truly wild and undeveloped, and so that it was like, okay, guys like you're here, are you gonna make a civilization now?
Can you do it?
And of course not.
They all completely fucking collapsed because there was nothing for them to just take over and steal.
They actually would have had to build civilization from the ground up, and none of them were ready to do that.
Right, they're like, look, we did that once and then we stole everything from everybody else.
Yeah, and we didn't like people like a thousand years ago did that once and we've just been kind of coasting like i'm gonna be honest yeah, we reached out, we stole guns from China, and it's been easy.
So some of this was the fault of the lieutenant governor, who refused to lead his party to higher ground and build permanent structures.
See, midway through the unloading of the equipment they brought, a storm had hit the coast and the captain of the boat that dropped them there used this as an excuse to abandon them and sell the rest of their stuff.
Failed Civilizations in the New World00:04:15
And the governor yeah, the governor couldn't believe he'd been abandoned and he wanted everyone to stay close to shore because he thought a boat was coming back to rescue them, that there had been some mistake.
And he's.
There is one.
There is like there is like an actual town, that's like a several days journey away.
That's where like, the actual king of the mosquito coast is based out of, and like there's some civilization, you know by the European terms there, but it's not very big.
They don't have any interest in taking these people's money and they certainly like, when they they they talk to this guy who's supposedly This king, who supposedly made Gregor prince.
And he's like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Like, I gave that dude some land, but like, I was not like, nobody, nobody wants you all to civilize us.
Like, what are you, what's, what, what's going on here?
Yeah.
So they're kind of fucked.
Yeah.
You know, who isn't kind of fucked, though?
Who?
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Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
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I said, oh, hell no.
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My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
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I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
Financial Legacy for Your Family00:09:35
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
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Oh, we're back.
So these people have just realized that they've been grifted and that there's no country for them and that they're alone in the wilderness with dwindling supplies.
And so for months, they did very little.
They were just kind of waiting for the second colony ship and a chance to escape.
Some of them hunted for meat.
Others dug holes in the sand to collect semi-drinkable water.
They didn't have any rum, which was used to clean water back then.
So everybody starts getting sick.
And eventually the second boat does arrive along with 250 new colonists.
And, you know, they realize that something's gone wrong, but the boat that took them wasn't hired to take them back and they didn't have any money because their only money is fake.
So they're all stuck too.
So I feel like I had to try to finesse on that boat.
I've been like, y'all, pull out or whatever you're supposed to call.
It's great.
Y'all just go head up that way.
Okay.
I'm going to go to the boat.
So they're a little fucked.
With all the new blood that's just come in, they briefly try to build permanent structures.
They try to chop down pine trees and float them on the river down to their camp, which is a thing that people do.
That's how you get big trees.
That's how you moved them in this period.
And that would have been a good idea if they'd known what they were doing.
But you have to drain the pine resin out of a tree like that before you can float it, because otherwise it won't float.
All their logs sink.
So they realize their mistake and they start tapping the resin out of pine trees, which takes a long time and doesn't isn't done before the rainy season.
And because they're dumb, they throw all the resin away rather than using it to seal the roofs of the huts that they built.
Because again, they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
So the rainy season comes and they all get soaked and they all get sick and all their kids start to die.
And then the old people start to die.
The guy who got like one of the real tragedies is that there was a guy who Gregor conned into buying his way on who was a shoemaker and was promised he was going to be the first shoemaker in all of Poye.
They get to establish.
Yeah, which he was.
And he shot himself to death when he realized he'd been grifted.
Blew his brains out with a musket.
Yeah, very sad.
So all of the people who were supposed to be in charge of this endeavor, all of the professionals, the former military officers, the civil servants, the kind of people who were planning to be the aristocracy of this new society, completely failed to take a hand in building an actual survivable settlement.
Instead, they vested all of their hopes in the lieutenant governor, who made regular trips to the only settlement in Poye to try to find some ship to take them home.
They just had no interest in actually attempting to make the best of their circumstances because they didn't know how to bring civilization to a place.
They just knew how to exploit people when there was already civilization.
David Sinclair writes, quote, they had been led to believe that they would find homes in or near a great city that was essentially European in style and peopled by men and women like themselves, including English and Americans.
In the event, the only people they found living in Poyer, aside from the natives, were two eccentric Americans named Murray and Windship, who had built themselves a farm in the hills behind the Black Lagoon a couple of years earlier.
I kind of think those guys might have been gay and just like escaping a world.
I love it.
Well, this is just the like, we're gay.
The world's terrible.
Let's go live alone in the middle of nowhere on a farm.
I love it.
Seems like it.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good, good.
I hope things worked out for them.
I don't know anything else about them.
So it was hardly surprising then when the likes of Colonel Hall, the civil servants, the officer class, and the manager of the National Bank of Poir realized that they had been comprehensively duped.
Their first thought should have been to escape from the inhospitable wilderness in which McGregor's deception had deposited them.
On the other hand, there can be no doubt that part of the tragedy of Poyer was the failure of the men who, through their societal position alone, would have been regarded as the national leaders of the group to adjust to the uncomfortable and dangerous circumstance created by McGregor's lies and to show some of the capacity for leadership that might have been expected of them.
Instead, when the conditions they found on their arrival did not correspond in any way to those promised, they took the view that because the authority conferred upon them by McGregor was obviously as bogus as the country he described, it was no business of theirs to try to compensate for his betrayal.
Basically, they totally dropped all responsibility.
When they thought they were going to be in charge of a country that was already ready-built, they were ready to be responsible.
When they realized they were in a dangerous situation, none of them were willing to do anything.
They took all their badges off, threw the jacket down.
No, no, I'm not in charge of shit.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
And there's a part of this story that kind of reveals how fundamentally hollow the social structure of the British Empire really was.
These colonists had been left in a bad position, but not an unsurvivable one.
They had a year's worth of food rations.
They had two doctors, medical supplies, tools, and guns.
They could have built a survivable community.
But they weren't a community.
They had no desire to be one.
They were a bunch of people who wanted to get rich quick and make non-white natives do all of the hard work.
As one survivor of the expedition, James Hastie, later noted, I do not wish to say anything rashly, but instead of attending to make us comfortable, it seemed as if everyone was for his own hand, was in it for himself.
Even the boards and timber used for fitting up our berths in the ship were mostly sold or delivered.
Basically, like they had this wood that was used to build berths in the ship that they took out of the boat when they landed to build homes with.
But instead of building homes, the people in charge sold it so that they could buy some manner of luxuries from the local.
Like, nobody took care of each other.
It was just like this complete, it was every man for himself.
Now, a couple of the braver souls left to make a 500-mile journey to a British colony in Honduras to try to get help.
And this was noble for them, but it meant that like the most decent and competent men in the whole expedition weren't there anymore.
So by the end of April, as James wrote, quote, sickness and despondency was so general that few were able or willing to make any exertion.
And I am sorry to have to add that many of those who were still well plundered instead of assisted their sick brethren, and likewise plundered the public stores of anything they could conveniently lay their hands upon.
So they robbed them.
Wow.
They were planning to rob other people.
They wound up robbing themselves, and in the end, more than two-thirds of them died.
Wow.
Just a couple of months.
Yeah.
The traumatized survivors were eventually rescued by a passing ship, which was fortunate because as they were rescued, Gregor had dispatched five more ships filled with like a thousand other people-men, women, and children-to a colony that had become a graveyard.
The British Navy was thankfully able to recall these boats before anyone else died.
He was still sending people over there.
Of course, he was.
He's a grifter.
He ain't done grifting.
Maybe he thought the first people would actually just buck up and start building something so that by the time the other people got there, they saw something was in progress.
That did not happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If I keep sending people over, eventually it will be true that there's a settlement there.
He's not wrong.
Yeah, because they'll die otherwise.
Yeah.
So by autumn of 1823, the story of what had really happened at Poiri had hit London, and McGregor's response was to do what McGregor did: retreat.
Yeah, he fled to France, where he tried to do the same trick again, and tried to get more colonists to go to Poiri.
He got about 60 people to sign up and pay him.
But eventually, thankfully, like Paris isn't that far from London.
The authorities there figured out what was happening.
And they got wind of what was going on, really, when French settlers started applying for passports to a country that wasn't real.
So there's an investigation.
He gets imprisoned, but being McGregor, he's able to kind of get himself out of incarceration.
But that was his last trick.
He was left in financial debt to his investors, and his repeated attempts to find more buyers for his fake Poiesian bond failed to sell for some inexplicable reason.
He tried to go back home to Edinburgh, but he was caught by some of the people he'd conned and he was forced to flee Scotland for the only place that would accept him, Caracas, where he was still a war hero.
And his status is that guaranteed him kind of a place to live, basically, but not much more.
He died penniless in December of 1845.
Wow.
Yeah.
He had come up so much.
If he hadn't just gone to that last, I'm going to sell y'all a freak country.
He could have just lived his life out rich.
Yeah.
$2,000 or pounds.
Like, wow.
Yep.
Can't stop, won't stop.
That's the scammer thing, right?
That's how they all get caught.
Cause like you have to be able to walk away.
It's like gambling.
You have to know when you're up.
You just got to wait until you win and gambling.
There's no other way to win at gambling, but leaving.
Yep.
Lacey, do you want to plug your pluggables speaking of scams?
Yes, we like robbery.
Knowing When to Walk Away00:03:03
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