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

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 TaylorRead More