『18 - Gregor MacGregor. (part 5).』のカバーアート

18 - Gregor MacGregor. (part 5).

18 - Gregor MacGregor. (part 5).

無料で聴く

ポッドキャストの詳細を見る
Gregor MacGregor. (part 5). Land of opportunity. The consensus among MacGregor's biographers is that Britain in the early 1820s could hardly have suited him and his Poyais scheme better. Amid a general growth in the British economy following the Battle of Waterloo and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, interest rates were dropping and the British government bond, the "consol", offered rates of only 3% per annum on the London Stock Exchange. Those wanting a higher return invested in more risky foreign debt. After continental European bonds were popular in the immediate post-Waterloo years, the Latin American revolutions brought a raft of new alternatives to the London market, starting with the £2 million loan issued for Gran Colombia (incorporating both New Granada and Venezuela) in March 1822. Bonds from Colombia, Peru, Chile and others, offering interest rates as high as 6% per annum, made Latin American securities extremely popular on the London market—a trend on which a nation like the Poyais described by MacGregor would be ideally positioned to capitalise. MacGregor mounted an aggressive sales campaign. He gave interviews in the national newspapers, engaged publicists to write advertisements and leaflets, and had Poyais-related ballads composed and sung on the streets of London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. His proclamation to the Poyers was distributed in handbill form. In mid-1822, there appeared in Edinburgh and London a 355-page guidebook "chiefly intended for the use of settlers", Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, Including the Territory of Poyais—ostensibly the work of a "Captain Thomas Strangeways", aide-de-camp to the Cazique, but actually written either by MacGregor himself or by accomplices. The Sketch mostly comprised long, reprinted tracts from older works on the Mosquito Coast and other parts of the region. The original material ranged from misleading to outright made up. MacGregor's publicists described the Poyaisian climate as "remarkably healthy ... agree[ing] admirably with the constitution of Europeans"—it was supposedly a spa destination for sick colonists from the Caribbean. The soil was so fertile that a farmer could have three maize harvests a year, or grow cash crops such as sugar or tobacco without hardship; detailed projections at the Sketch's end forecast profits of millions of dollars. Fish and game were so plentiful that a man could hunt or fish for a single day and bring back enough to feed his family for a week. The natives were not just co-operative but intensely pro-British. The capital was St Joseph, a flourishing seaside town of wide paved boulevards, colonnaded buildings and mansions, inhabited by as many as 20,000. St Joseph had a theatre, an opera house and a domed cathedral; there was also the Bank of Poyais, the Poyaisian houses of parliament and a royal palace. Reference was made to a "projected Hebrew colony". The Sketch went so far as to claim the rivers of Poyais contained "globules of pure gold". This was almost all fiction, but MacGregor's calculation that official-looking documents and the printed word would convince many people proved correct. The meticulous detail in the leather-bound Sketch, and the cost of having it printed, did much to dispel lingering doubts. Poyaisian land certificates at two shillings and threepence per acre, roughly equivalent to a working man's daily wage at the time, were perceived by many as an attractive investment opportunity. There was enough demand for the certificates that MacGregor was able to raise the price to two shillings and sixpence per acre in July 1822, then gradually to four shillings per acre, without diminishing sales; according to MacGregor, about 500 had bought Poyaisian land by early 1823. The buyers included many who invested their life savings. MacGregor became, to quote one 21st-century financial analyst, the "founding father of securities fraud". Alongside the land certificate sales, MacGregor spent several months organising the issue of a Poyaisian government loan on the London Stock Exchange. As a precursor to this he registered his 1820 land grant at the Court of Chancery on 14 October 1822. Sir John Perring, Shaw, Barber & Co., a London bank with a fine reputation, underwrote a £200,000 loan—secured on "all the revenues of the Government of Poyais" including the sale of land—and offered provisional certificates or "scrip" for the Poyaisian bonds on 23 October. The bonds were in denominations of £100, £200 and £500, and offered at a marked-down purchase price of 80%. The certificate could be acquired for 15%, with the rest due over two installments on 17 January and 14 February 1823. The interest rate was 6% per annum. If the Poyaisian issue successfully emulated its Colombian, Peruvian and Chilean counterparts, MacGregor stood to amass a fortune. Eager settlers. For settlers, MacGregor deliberately targeted his fellow Scots, assuming that they would be more likely to ...
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません