Sir Gregor Macgregor and the Land That Never Was: The Extraordinary Story of the Most Audacious Fraud in History [Hardcover]

Around one-tenth of the British population chose to emigrate during the 19th century, many of them lured by stories of untold riches in the new world. David Sinclair's Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Land that Never Was tells the tale of one of the more improbable and outrageous of such episodes, whereby a swashbuckling charmer of dubious descent conned a group of Scottish emigrants into voyaging to the Mosquito Coast of central America in 1823. They were told that the nation of Poyais awaited them, but instead found an uninhabitable swamp. Sinclair hasn't discovered this colourful story anew--MacGregor's exploits were sufficiently well-known to merit an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography--but he embellishes it with pace and colour. The middle section of the book recounts MacGregor's involvement with the wars of independence in Spanish America, where he honed his skills as a confidence trickster, and winds up with an account of the drawn-out legal case that followed the "colonisation" of Poyais. At times Sinclair is over-reliant on the rival versions of the story supplied by MacGregor and his detractors, and perhaps a little more detective work would have unravelled a better explanation of why so many were duped for so long by this Scotsman on the make. But it is a fascinating story, and a timely reminder, in our modern era of time-shares and cheap holidays in the sun, that you should never believe what the travel brochure tells you. --Miles Taylor

On a cold January morning in 1823, a group of Scottish immigrants set sail from the port of Leith. They were headed for the nation of Poyais in Central America where, they were told, they would find rich and fertile soils, a balmy climate and beautiful, civilized cities. A month later they landed on the swamp-infested Mosquito Coast and were forced to realize that they had been the victims of one of the most elaborate hoaxes in history. The land they had been sold was non-existent; the banknotes and guidebooks they carried with them were forgeries; their documents were worthless. Poyais was a fiction. The man responsible was General Sir Gregor MacGregor, "the Prince of Poyais", a flamboyant and charismatic character who had fought as a mercenary in Simon Bolivar's army. On his return to Britain he reinvented himself and was welcomed into society. But who was this man who had succeeded in making himself a fortune and luring so many people away from their families to face a dangerous and uncertain future?

David Sinclair is a respected journalist and a former editor of the Sunday Times Review. His previous book The Pound: A Biography was a bestseller in hardback and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2000.