David Sinclair: The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor And The Most Audacious Fraud In History

The specifics change, but the essentials of popular manias remain, depressingly, the same. As the past decade's dot-com madness and corporate bookkeeping scandals illustrate, one of the most predictable aspects of wild speculation is that it proves a breeding ground for pecuniary chicanery of all kinds. A similar mania concerning the limitless possibilities of Central and South America swept Europe during the early 19th century, leading to one of the largest cases of fraud and con artistry in recorded history. The perpetrator of that fraud, a Scottish soldier of fortune and self-proclaimed hero of South American liberation, Gregor MacGregor invented not just a fraudulent business or bank, but an entire country named Poyais, whose ostensibly hard-working, industrious, Anglophilic indigenous people were eager for the Queen's enlightened subjects to emigrate to their island paradise and teach them the civilizing ways of the West while concomitantly pocketing huge fortunes from the fertile, teeming land. MacGregor's colonialist-friendly scenario seemed too good to be true, and for good reason: An inveterate liar and con man, he fabricated just about every detail about the land he claimed to rule as the benevolent, all-powerful Cazique (a title that, like most that ever adorned his name, he had created himself). Author David Sinclair devotes a good third of The Land That Never Was to documenting MacGregor's pre-Poyais military misadventures, and while the relatively dry procession of seemingly interchangeable skirmishes, battles, and inglorious retreats doesn't make for riveting reading, Sinclair makes a compelling case that military service was where MacGregor learned the supreme importance of image and spin. A self-promotion genius whose obsession with keeping up appearances would serve him well throughout his life and crimes, MacGregor was keenly aware that the right spin could transform a cowardly fiasco into a triumph, and his con-artistry reached its pinnacle when he transformed an inhospitable land mass into a European colonialist's geographic wet dream. The invention of Poyais represented the high-water mark in MacGregor's con-man career, but he built up to it with a thousand smaller fabrications and half-truths. As is perhaps inevitable with a chronicle of a long-ago scam involving a pathological liar, the portrait of MacGregor that emerges in The Land That Never Was is a bit fuzzy, but it still stands as an enduring testament to the wisdom of the phrase "caveat emptor."