Document of the Month January 2005
This month's Document of the Month features the image of
a bogus government bond from the imaginary state of Poyais
in Central America. The bond, signed by a man claiming to
be the country's President, General MacGregor, would invest
the speculative capital of the purchaser in this new
country and its capital city, St Joseph. According to
President MacGregor, Poyais had risen, like so many other
Central and South American countries, from the declining
Spanish Main.
In 1823 General Sir Gregor MacGregor, self-proclaimed
Cazique of Poyais, visited Britain to encourage Scottish
emigration to what he described as a thriving population
who had found their fortune on the streets of St Joseph and
in the gold mines of the balmy country that surrounded it.
One Scot swapped his sterling for Poyaisian dollars, bought
some bonds in the country (like the one shown here) and
boarded ship in Leith with a promise that he was to become
the director of the St Joseph Opera House.
However, when the emigrants arrived they found that
there was no St Joseph at all; no opera house, no gold
mines, no thriving population (apart from some deeply
suspicious Miskito Indians - after whom, rather than the
insects, the Mosquito Coast is named) and no habitable
European settlement. They had in fact invested their
savings in tracts of jungle impossibly far from the nearest
source of provisions and impregnated with the tropical
diseases so fatal to European constitutions.
Gregor MacGregor (he was not a general in any recognised
army, nor had he been knighted in Britain) sold similar
stock certificates and other Poyaisian material in both
Britain and France during the 1820s and 1830s. Despite the
clearly fraudulent nature of his promises, Mac Gregor was
never convicted of any crime - although he served a short
jail term in France awaiting a trial that never came about
- and eventually retired to Venezuela where he wrote his
autobiography (handwritten notes for which are also in the
National Archives of Scotland, reference
GD50/112).
Transcription
POYAISIAN NEW THREE PR. CENT Consolidated Stock
CERTIFICATE
Know all Men by these Presents, That
We, GREGOR MAC GREGOR, President of the
POYAISIAN REPUBLIC, do hereby CERTIFY AND DECLARE, that the
Bearer hereof is entitled to have this Stock Certificate
exchanged for a SPECIAL BOND of
One Hundred Pounds, of a new Stock, to be
called "THE POYAISIAN THREE PER CENT. REDUCED STOCK", and
which said Stock is to be redeemable at par, at a certain
date, to be therein named, and to bear Interest from the
first day of May, one thousand eight hundred and
thirty-two, at the rate of Three Pounds per Centum per
Annum.
And furthermore, We hereby promise and engage
to deliver or cause to be delivered to the Bearer hereof,
in Exchange for this Stock Certificate, a SPECIAL BOND of
One Hundred Pounds, of the Poyaisian Three
per Cent. Reduced Stock as aforesaid, so soon as the same
shall be prepared and ready for delivery.
Witness my Hand at London, this tenth Day
of September 1831
[signed] Gregor MacGregor
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