The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
The Books
Ramusio Map (1534). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library
Gregor MacGregor (1786 - 1845)
By Jack Mindich
Perhaps no historical figure from the age of sail more clearly accentuates the era’s tension between deep global connectivity and the tenuous authenticity of the information that flowed across the oceans as Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor. MacGregor’s peripatetic life and numerous Atlantic crossings, to borrow Epeli Hau’ofa’s framework, imbue the oceans with a terrestrial relevance that forces us to interpret them as the connecting tissue of the early modern world.[1] But, while his exploits can seem to tie the globe together, MacGregor’s mastery of manipulating the great voids of uncertainty that oceanic travel produced also shows how frail the threads connecting global societies could be. Nothing in MacGregor’s life was set in stone—not his story, not his finances, not even his name written alternatively as McGregor or M’Gregor—and, as many of those he defrauded came to realize, nothing he said should have been trusted.
MacGregor's peripatetic life began when he was sixteen years old and enlisted in the British army. Once set in motion, he never stopped.
Gregor MacGregor was born in Scotland on December 24, 1786. His father, a captain in the British East India Company, was likely often absent, a harbinger for MacGregor as he joined the British army at the earliest possible age (sixteen) in 1803 and never truly settled down again. MacGregor’s travels were an odyssey. He first served in Iberia (first Gibraltar, later Portugal) during the Peninsular War, with a brief return to Britain in 1805 for his wedding. About five years later, in 1809 or 1810, a dispute with a senior officer ended MacGregor’s tenure in the British ranks, leading to his departure from the Iberian Peninsula and the military. MacGregor then began his great Atlantic odyssey, joining Simón Bolivar’s Republican Army in Venezuela where he initially served as a colonel under Francisco de Miranda. After Miranda’s arrest, MacGregor remained in New Grenada and began criss-crossing the Caribbean on a series of journeys that brought him to a number of islands including Jamaica, Haiti, and Curaçao as part of the Republican efforts. The “zenith” of MacGregor’s Venezuelan career came in July 1816 when he executed a controlled retreat from Spanish forces near Caracas and successfully maneuvered the battle to a marsh where he defeated a superior enemy army and then marched on to take the city of Barcelona (Venezuela). MacGregor’s career as a commander continued but, again following a dispute with a superior, he left Venezuela even after Bolivar himself pleaded for him to remain. MacGregor then traveled to the United States in 1817 and raised an army, ostensibly to liberate Florida from Spanish rule. Between 1817 and 1819, often using Haiti as launching base, MacGregor led expeditions to Amelia Island off the Florida coast, Panama, and Rio de la Hacha in Colombia. While success evaded him, he always managed to survive to devise another scheme. [2]
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In 1820, George Frederick, whom the British recognized as sovereign of the Mosquito Coast (in modern day Nicaragua and Honduras) granted MacGregor title to a piece of land in Nicaragua, initiating the episode of MacGregor’s career that would define his legacy in Britain. MacGregor would dub the region “Poyais” and himself its “Cazique,” or prince. Despite being nearly uninhabited
A painting of Gregor MacGregor by George Watson. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
and completely inhospitable for western colonists, MacGregor, after returning to Europe, created an elaborate scheme to sell potential British migrants on the possibility of buying land and relocating to an idyllic American country that MacGregor claimed already had a functioning government and strong relationships with the indigenous people of the area. MacGregor’s ploy convinced hundreds of Britons to move to Poyais. However, when the first ship arrived in 1823, instead of a bustling metropolis, the immigrants found a barren jungle. MacGregor’s problems did not end there. The King of the Mosquito Coast revoked his charter and repossessed the land setting off a series of legal disputes as MacGregor attempted to “[fight] against the inevitable.” [3] MacGregor was arrested in 1825, but amazingly acquitted in 1826. He served a grand total of eight months in prison.[4] Even more astonishingly, he continued to solicit new loans and sent more migrants to the Americas even after his trial. However, after years of attempting to find a new sponsor for his colony, MacGregor gave up and sought refuge in Venezuela, where he settled in 1839 and stayed until his death in 1845.[5]
An engraving from MacGregor’s promotional materials illustrating MacGregor’s false depiction of Poyais. Image from Sinclair, The Land That Never Was, location 1794.
Though scholars, as Mathew Brown notes, have viewed MacGregor “as little more than a diverting footnote” in the story of his time, his life trajectory reveals much more about the risks and opportunities of the world he inhabited. On one hand, MacGregor’s path demonstrates the extent to which the Atlantic functioned as a singular geographic unit. MacGregor’s voyages were certainly extensive and his service in the Bolivarian army is proof that he truly lived a life on both sides of the Atlantic. But, beyond his physical travels, MacGregor was effective at bringing together coalitions of soldiers. Whatever else he might have been, MacGregor was an effective salesman. MacGregor’s armies were borne not from conscription, but from choice and it was only by appealing to prospective soldiers that he could fill his ranks, a task in which he found great success. Moreover, MacGregor’s forces were relatively diverse, including large numbers of native soldiers as a commander in Venezuela, further pointing to his ability to tie together the Atlantic world. Further complicating matters is the fact that MacGregor was opposed to slavery, a stance that drew the ire of British slave owners. In these ways, MacGregor could present himself as something of a universalist, swashbuckling hero. The Poyais constitution rested on republican, Bolivarian values and, in it, MacGregor declared that Poyais: “shall henceforth be called Indialand; and further, embracing all men as brothers, of whatever clime, of whatever complexion, of whatever religious opinions they may be.” In his invented republic, he added, “All forms of slavery shall be abolished.” His ideological stances, alongside his military exploits, reveal MacGregor’s complexity. He was perceived, and is remembered, as a different person in different countries. In Scotland, he is, as Brown relates, an embarrassment; in England, a joke. In Venezuela, by contrast, he was a war hero. While the Atlantic was an interconnected space, information about individuals and their plans and, consequentially, perceptions about those individuals did not spread evenly. In a unified Atlantic, there was room for dissent and an ample spectrum of interpretations.[6]
However, on the other hand, MacGregor is also a reminder of the extreme distance and uncertainty of his era. MacGregor recognized and capitalized on Europeans’ eagerness to invest in and take part in Atlantic travel without gaining a full appreciation for the actual on the ground realities of the Caribbean. In an age where it was practically impossible to audit MacGregor’s claims from across the ocean, MacGregor’s word was extremely powerful and the evidence he marshalled was effective at cementing a false narrative. Such was the nature of the time. As the scope of the world expanded, documents were more important than they had ever been, as a way to deliver information back to Europe. The veracity of the information they carried, however, was always suspect. Investments could be more lucrative but were also far riskier than ever before. MacGregor, with his charisma, was able to create the perception of substance where there was none and raise a kingdom out of a jungle in the minds of hundreds of British emigrants. Fraud obviously did not die with the steam engine, but never again would such global excitement for the possibilities of far off lands be coupled with such deep ignorance about those territories. The end of the age of sail was the end of an era of discovery, and MacGregor was one of the last members of a group of adventurers that successfully manipulated people’s fascination with the unknown by making them believe in a Neverland that was, in reality, more “Isle of Despair”.
[1] Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 152-53.
[2] Sinclair, The Land That Never Was, loc. 1054, 1071, 1108, 1149-59,1250, 1374, 1876.
[3] Hasbrouck, “Gregor McGregor and the Colonization of Poyais,” 446, 449, 457.
[4] Sinclair, The Land That Never Was, loc. 2587.
[5] Hasbrouck, “Gregor McGregor and the Colonization of Poyais,” 458–59.
[6] Brown, “Inca, Sailor, Soldier, King,” 45-46, 53, 56, 62-64
References
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Brown, Matthew. “Inca, Sailor, Soldier, King: Gregor MacGregor and the Early Nineteenth-Century Caribbean.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 24, no. 1 (2005): 44–70.
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Hasbrouck, Alfred. “Gregor McGregor and the Colonization of Poyais, between 1820 and 1824.” Hispanic American Historical Review 7, no. 4 (1927): 438–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/2505996.
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Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 147–61.
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Pérez Morales, Edgardo. No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018.
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Sinclair, David. The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History. 1st Da Capo Press ed. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004.