How a con man pulled the evilest agriculture fraud in history
One agriculture fraud to rule them all. In an eight-million-acre hoodwink, Gregor MacGregor stole the life savings of hundreds of farmers and sent scores to their deaths.
The agriculture record is replete with monumental con men.
Tino De Angelis stole several hundred million dollars in soybean oil in the mid-1950s, Billie Sol Estes raked in tens of millions via imaginary ammonia tanks during the late 1950s, Fred Hendrickson pocketed $25 million as a Jerusalem artichoke Ponzi prophet in the 1980s and Robert Carl Stokes’ reign as a crop insurance huckster generated at least $100 million in the early 2000s.
They are rank amateurs beside MacGregor and his billion-dollar heist.
Equal parts swindler and sociopath, MacGregor promised farmers an agricultural paradise where three corn crops could be grown in a single year. It was a lie and part of the most chilling and deadly farm-related fraud in history.
Fly in the ointment
Under a presumably starless sky, MacGregor was born in Stirlingshire, Scotland in 1786, foreshadowing P.T. Barnum’s birth 24 years later.
At 16 years young, he fought for Great Britain in the Napoleonic wars, moved up the ranks and gained a deserved reputation as a fearless soldier. Following his British military career, MacGregor stayed in the saddle as a mercenary in multiple wars of liberation in South America.
A Jekyll-and-Hyde split personality, MacGregor returned to Great Britain in 1821 with grandiose claims of fortune, preaching a gospel of green, gold and acres galore.
Opportunity, he barked, waited just across the seas in the hidden country of Poyais, tucked between impassable mountains along the Mosquito Coast overlapping Nicaragua and Honduras. Poyais, he described, was a nation unafflicted by tropical disease and bathed in perpetual 80-degree temps.
Burgeoning with a beautiful port at the mouth of the Black River, Poyais boasted fledgling industry, opportunity and a capital city of St. Joseph, featuring mansions, wide boulevards and an opera house – a wonderland.
Backing his bona fides, MacGregor unfurled a charter purportedly signed by the native chieftain of the greater region, George Frederic Augustus I, bestowing the title of cazique – big dawg or prince – on MacGregor and dropping eight million acres of dominion into the Scotsman’s lap.
There was a stubborn fly in the ointment – the nation of Poyais didn’t exist. No matter. All MacGregor needed to turn Poyais’ fiction into a golden goose reality were farmers and investors. The rest were mere details.
Crying and dying
Peacocking around London, a city emerging as the planet’s financial hub, MacGregor was wined and dined at banquets by businessmen, government secretaries, high-ranking military officers and ambassadors – all wanting a piece of the Poyais pie.
To build the illusion, he published “Sketch Of The Mosquito Shore, Including The Territory Of Poyais,” a 355-page guidebook “chiefly intended for the use of settlers.”
Written by Thomas Strangeways, aid-de-camp to his Highness Gregor, cazique of Poyais, the tome was the key that picked the scheme’s lock.
Strangeways, like Poyais, didn’t exist. “Sketch Of The Mosquito Shore” was authored by MacGregor, or rather, plagiarized. He stole entire sections from other books on the Americas and compiled the material into a believable summary of Poyais, filled with exhaustive detail – hundreds of packed pages on climate, topography, flora, fauna, wild game, rivers, lakes, water depths, mountains, minerals, untapped gold mines and Indians, natives known as Poyers of course, who worked for trade items instead of coin.
The book also dove deep into agriculture, providing a profitability breakdown on crop after crop – corn, cotton, rice and more, including acreage, yield potential, production facilities and management.
“The soil is everywhere fertile in a very uncommon degree and capable of producing in the utmost perfection, whatever is produced between the tropics. Few countries, perhaps ever, possessed higher advantages in an agricultural point of view,” MacGregor wrote.
The farming bottom line, according to MacGregor – plant seed and reap a bin buster.
“In the territory of Poyais, there are three crops of Indian corn in the year, and the produce will generally exceed 100 bushels an acre,” he claimed.
Even decades later, from 1866-99, U.S. corn growers only averaged 26 bushels per acre.
And how much did Poyais’ magical acreage cost? MacGregor charged three to four shillings per acre, a bargain price considering an average worker’s weekly wage was roughly 20 shillings per pound.
MacGregor piously offered land ownership of his eight million acres to all, as long as the buyers were “industrious and honest, none others shall be admitted amongst us.”
Gaining steam, MacGregor opened a Poyaisian governmental office in London and penned a constitution for his fake country. He showed plenty of leg to the newspapers, passed out reams of advertising handbills and distributed stacks of promotional flyers.
Bees to honey, farmers sold their land or dumped their leases and signed on for Poyaisian acreage and a one-way voyage to the promised land.
Insult to injury, MacGregor printed stacks of official Poyaisian currency, encouraging farmers to exchange hard savings and British pounds for worthless Poyaisian bills.
And following the farmers? Next in line were bankers and deep-pocket investors, pouring cash into the money pit.
The trap was sprung. It was time for crying – and dying.
Trip to nowhere
The first half of the 19th century is saturated in agriculture-related invention.
In 1794, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, in 1822 Jeremiah Bailey invented a horse-drawn hay-cutting machine, in 1827 Hiram and John Pitts made their mark with an endless-apron threshing machine, in 1835 Solomon Merrick patented the wrench, in 1837 John Deere crafted the self-scouring steel plow and in 1839 Charles Goodyear concocted vulcanized rubber.
And bobbing in the cauldron of innovation alongside Whitney and Deere? The grand Poyais venture on virgin soil where corn and cotton purportedly would explode into yield monsters, courtesy of MacGregor.
In September 1822, lured by saccharine promises, 70 of MacGregor’s first farmer-settlers sailed out of London on the Honduras Packet, bound for the blessed port of Poyais where the Black River spilled into the Caribbean Sea.
Roughly four months later, on Jan. 22, 1823, MacGregor’s second wave departed out of Leith, Scotland on the Kennersley Castle – 180 settlers packed and stacked into a 100-by-30 foot ship – the hold jammed with tons of agriculture equipment and seed.
Fitting the occasion’s pomp, the Kennersley Castle flew the national flag of Poyais, a white background splashed with a green cross of St. George.
Two months of trans-Atlantic travel later, the Kennersley Castle arrived at the shores of Poyais, its crammed but delighted passengers craning for a look at the bustling Black River port. Instead, they saw wilderness. Silence.
No people. No ships. No docks. No roads. No civilization. And farmland? Only wretched wilderness.
James Hastie, one of the forlorn, would later provide court testimony regarding Poyais’ farming potential, saying, “It is such a soil if he were to put a turtle’s egg into the sand, in 10 minutes it would be as well boiled as if it had been put into a kettle.”
Almost 4,500 nautical miles from home, Hastie and 180 trusting hopefuls stumbled into MacGregor’s demented version of Gilligan’s Island. Most would pay with their lives, dead within months.
Meanwhile, back in Great Britain, the faithful were loading six more ships for the trip to nowhere.
Cazique goes AWOL
Exploring on foot around Black River, the bewildered passengers of the Kennersley Castle were greeted by a ragtag band of English-speaking castaways – the original 70 from the Honduras Packet – living in tents and huts. It was a sobering reunion and confirmation of MacGregor’s epic con job.
When rumors filtered along the Mosquito Coast 250 Europeans were camped out and claiming deeded ownership of a massive chunk of land, the titular king of the region, George Frederick Augustus I – the same ruler MacGregor claimed had gifted him eight million acres – made a surprise appearance at Black River.
Enraged, George Frederick called BS on the entire affair and threatened to kill every castaway, unless, of course, they pledged undying loyalty to him.
As word of the plight leaked up the coast, ships were dispatched from the British colony of Belize and survivors transported to relative safety. However, hardship and disease – malaria and yellow fever – killed 180 of the 250, who either died in Poyais or later of illness in Belize.
When news of the debacle reached London, MacGregor’s other Poyais-bound ships were halted. The Royal Navy managed to turn back five outgoing ships, missing only a single vessel which managed to cross the Atlantic, but wisely dropped its settlers in Belize, forgoing the deathtrap of Poyais.
Of the original 250 farmer-settlers dumped in Poyais, only 50 made it back to Great Britain.
And where was MacGregor? Running like a blind man from a burning barn. Poyais’ grand cazique was AWOL.
Teflon Don
Déjà vu all over again. Skipping across the English Channel to France, MacGregor struck up the Poyais band once more, issuing new promises to French farmers, selling more nonexistent acres and preparing a ship for trans-Atlantic transport.
This time, investigators caught wind of the stench and jailed MacGregor. He was tried and acquitted in 1826, truly a Teflon Don.
Bouncing back to Great Britain, MacGregor unsuccessfully tried to crank up interest in the Poyais scam, at least into the mid-1830s. In 1839, he stopped preaching on the Poyais Eden and moved to Venezuela, dying in 1845 at age 58.
Beyond the death of 180 farmer-settlers, MacGregor’s charade cost multi-billions of dollars in modern currency, by some estimates.
According to Almost History, MacGregor’s frauds “would run to £1.3 million. As a share of Britain’s economy, this is equivalent to around £3.6 billion today.”
If accurate, the £3.6 billion translates to over $4.7 billion at current rates.
Again, one agriculture fraud to rule them all.
Writing from the level land of the Delta just outside of Clarksdale, Miss., Chris Bennett has blogged for several years on agriculture, surrounded by cotton and plenty of cottonmouths. He can be reached at cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106. This article was originally published by AgWeb on Jan. 21.
