General Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish soldier, adventurer, and confidence trickster. He attempted from 1821 to 1837 to draw British and French investors and settlers to a fictional Central American territory that he claimed to rule. He was an officer in the British Army from 1803 to 1810; he served in the Peninsular War. 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.
About Gregor MacGregor in brief
General Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish soldier, adventurer, and confidence trickster. He attempted from 1821 to 1837 to draw British and French investors and settlers to 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 Mac Gregor’s invented country in 1822–23 to find only an untouched jungle; more than half of them died. MacGregors had been legally ostracised to the extent that they were forbidden to use their own surname during the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745. He was an officer in the British Army from 1803 to 1810; he served in the Peninsular War. 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 the Caracas Cathedral. His family was Roman Catholic and part of the Clan Gregor, whose proscription by King James VI and I in 1604 had been repealed only in 1774. Gregor 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. He 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. He joined the British army at the age of 16, the youngest it was possible for him to do so, and his family purchased him as an ensign in the 57th Regiment of Foot, probably for around £450.
Later that year he was promoted to lieutenant—an advancement that took up to three years to purchase. In February 1804, he was at Ashford, Kent, as a lieutenant in the Ashford Foot, and later that year, he took up the post of captain in the Kent Regiment of the Royal Regiment of Fusilier and C Hussars. His grandfather, also called Gregor and nicknamed \”the Beautiful\”, served with distinction in the UK Army under the surname Drummond, and subsequently played an important role in the clan’s restoration and rehabilitation into society. He is buried in Ashford’s Ashford Cemetery, near Kent, with his father and two sisters. His father died in 1794, and he and his two sisters were raised primarily by his mother with the help of various relatives. His mother died in 1803, and after his father’s death in 1804 he was raised by his wife Ann in Glengyle, on the north shore of Loch Katrine in Stirlingshire, Scotland. He later became a general in the Venezuelan War of Independence in 1812. 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”
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