The Poyais Scheme

The case

The settlers who stepped off the Kennersley Castle at the mouth of the Black River in March 1823 had come looking for St Joseph, a capital of paved boulevards, a theatre, an opera house and a domed cathedral. They had read about it in a 355-page guidebook. Some of the emigrants had traded their own coin for notes of the Bank of Poyais before sailing. On the shore of what is now Honduras they found a camp of earlier arrivals still waiting for officials who never came, the rubble of an abandoned eighteenth-century settlement, and jungle.

The man behind Poyais was Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish soldier who had fought in the Peninsular War and then for the independence movements in Venezuela and New Granada. Some of his South American campaigns had been genuinely brave. Others, at Porto Bello and Rio de la Hacha in 1819, ended with MacGregor sailing away and leaving his British volunteers to be killed or captured. In April 1820, at Cape Gracias a Dios, the Miskito king George Frederic Augustus signed over to him a large tract of coastal land in exchange for rum and jewellery. The ground was poor and nearly empty. MacGregor named it Poyais after a local people and returned to London in 1821 calling himself its Cazique, or prince.

London was ready for him. After Waterloo, government bonds paid little, and investors were pouring money into the loans of the new Latin American republics. MacGregor gave Poyais everything a credible state needed: a constitution, an army with its own uniforms, honours, a London legation on Dowgate Hill, land offices in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the guidebook, published in 1822 under the name of a "Captain Thomas Strangeways". It promised a healthy climate, three maize harvests a year, friendly natives and rivers with gold in them. Land certificates sold briskly, and in October 1822 a reputable London bank underwrote a £200,000 Poyais government loan.

To make the country seem real, MacGregor sent people. He recruited mainly among Scots, appealing to national pride and to memories of the failed Darien colony of the 1690s, and he offered skilled tradesmen free passage and government posts. The Honduras Packet left London in September 1822 with about seventy emigrants; the Kennersley Castle sailed from Leith in January 1823 with nearly two hundred more. Among them were a banker appointed to run the Bank of Poyais, young men who had bought army commissions, and an Edinburgh shoemaker who had accepted the post of official shoemaker to the Princess of Poyais.

At the Black River there was no government to meet them. The ship that brought the first party sailed off, and the settlers were left with the stores they had brought and no one in charge but Hector Hall, a former army officer whom MacGregor had made a colonel and a baron. When the rains came, malaria and yellow fever spread through the camp. In May 1823 a schooner from British Honduras arrived with the chief magistrate of Belize, who told them Poyais did not exist. The Miskito king then revoked the grant altogether. Most survivors were carried to Belize, where many more died. Of about 250 people who had sailed on the first two ships, at least 180 perished, and fewer than 50 ever saw Britain again. Warnings from Belize led the Royal Navy to intercept other emigrant ships already at sea.

When the first survivors reached London in October 1823 and the press called Poyais a fraud, MacGregor was already in Paris, where he found new partners in a trading company, the Compagnie de la Nouvelle Neustrie, and began selling Poyais land to French investors. Officials grew suspicious when dozens of people applied for passports to a country they had never heard of, and in 1825 the company's ship was held at Le Havre. MacGregor was arrested in December. At trial in 1826 the case against him fell apart, and the company's director, Lehuby, was the only defendant convicted. MacGregor walked free, returned to Britain and kept selling smaller Poyais schemes until 1837.