Up for auction a VERY RARE! "Confidence Trickster" Gregor MacGregor Clipped Signature. This item is authenticated By Todd
Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity.
ES-7554E
General Gregor MacGregor (24 December 1786 –
4 December 1845) was a Scottish soldier, adventurer, and confidence trickster who attempted from 1821 to 1837 to
draw British and French investors and settlers to "Poyais", a
fictional Central American territory that he claimed to rule as "Cazique". Hundreds invested their savings in supposed
Poyaisian government bonds and
land certificates, while about 250 emigrated to MacGregor's invented country in
1822–23 to find only an untouched jungle; more than half of them died. Seen as
a contributory factor to the "Panic of 1825", MacGregor's Poyais scheme has been called
one of the most brazen confidence tricks in history. From the Clan Gregor, MacGregor was an officer in the British Army from 1803 to 1810; he served in the Peninsular War. He joined the republican side in the Venezuelan War of Independence in
1812, quickly became a general and, over the next four years, operated against
the Spanish on behalf of both Venezuela and its neighbour New Granada. His
successes included a difficult month-long fighting retreat through northern
Venezuela in 1816. He captured Amelia Island in
1817 under a mandate from revolutionary agents to conquer Florida from the Spanish, and there proclaimed a
short-lived "Republic of the Floridas".
He then oversaw two calamitous operations in New Granada during 1819 that each
ended with his abandoning British volunteer troops under his command. On his return
to Britain in 1821, MacGregor claimed that King George Frederic Augustus of the Mosquito Coast in the Gulf of Honduras had created him Cazique of Poyais, which
he described as a developed colony with a community of British settlers. When
the British press reported on MacGregor's deception following the return of
fewer than 50 survivors in late 1823, some of his victims leaped to his
defence, insisting that the general had been let down by those whom he had put
in charge of the emigration party. A French court tried MacGregor and three
others for fraud in 1826 after he attempted a variation on the scheme there,
but convicted only one of his associates. Acquitted, MacGregor attempted lesser
Poyais schemes in London over the next decade. In 1838, he moved to Venezuela,
where he was welcomed back as a hero. He died in Caracas in 1845, aged 58, and was buried with full
military honours in Caracas Cathedral. Gregor MacGregor was born on Christmas Eve
1786 at his family's ancestral home of Glengyle, on the north shore of Loch Katrine in Stirlingshire, Scotland, the son of Daniel MacGregor, an East India Company sea
captain, and his wife Ann (née Austin). The family was Roman
Catholic and part of the Clan Gregor, whose proscription by King James VI and I in 1604 had been repealed only in
1774. During the proscription the MacGregors had been
legally ostracised to the extent that they were forbidden to use their own
surname—many of them, including Gregor's celebrated great-great-uncle Rob Roy, had participated in the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745. MacGregor would
assert in adulthood that a direct ancestor of his had survived the Darien scheme of 1698, the ill-fated Scottish attempt to
colonise the Isthmus of Panama. Gregor's
grandfather, also called Gregor and nicknamed "the Beautiful", served
with distinction in the British Army under the surname Drummond, and subsequently
played an important role in the clan's restoration and rehabilitation into
society.
Little is recorded of MacGregor's childhood. After his father's death in
1794, he and his two sisters were raised primarily by his mother with the help
of various relatives. MacGregor's biographer David Sinclair speculates that he
would probably have spoken mainly Gaelic during his early childhood, and learned English
only after starting school around the age of five-and-a-half. MacGregor
would claim in later life to have studied at the University of Edinburgh between
1802 and 1803; records of this do not survive as he did not take a degree, but
Sinclair considers it plausible, citing MacGregor's apparent sophistication and
his mother's connections in Edinburgh.