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Description

With thanks to Alagremm for spurring me into the idea.

---

So confident was the entirety of Britain in the venture of Gregor MacGregor that many still refused to believe that he had actively defrauded the country to the tune of billions of dollars in modern currency. Even his victims lept to his defense, claiming that MacGregor had himself been deceived by his subordinates in the scheme. In one of the most brazen confidence tricks of the 19th Century, MacGregor was acquitted. Privately though, he had gained the ire of three governments. The United Kingdom, the United States, and Honduras itself. All three of them were already wrapped up with an extant trouble of the United Kingdom attempting to negotiate its power and influence in the newly-independent states of Central America, in particular with regard to three territories: Belize, the Honduras Bay Islands, and the Miskito Kingdom. It was all already an issue for the three governments, and MacGregor's venture, failed though it was, could have presented a deeply unwanted intrusion of an outlier force that would have upset the entire situation. Publicly MacGregor was cleared of charges. Privately, three national governments were breathing down his neck. Rather than arrange some kind of accident, a new idea was presented to serve as a "compromise".

With the outwards appearance of his own volition, MacGregor negotiated with the government of Honduras over a land acquisition in the east. The Miskito Coast, though claimed by the Honduran government and disputed with Nicaragua and the Miskito people themselves, was a largely inhospitable wilderness that offered nothing much but national pride to whoever held it. With the US and UK governments seemingly giving their consent to the matter, the purchase was carried out with the hopes of helping to settle land claims between Honduras and Nicaragua. Using almost all the money he'd raised in his scheme, he purchased a triangle of land bounded by the Patuca River on the north and the Wangki River on the south, Poyais was indeed made a reality as MacGregor found himself exiled to his new country, the proud owner of a massive triangle of thick jungle and land which even by 1825 hadn't been thoroughly explored after 300 years of European exploration. The United States and United Kingdom were even kind enough to "provide" a group of settlers, largely consisting of the indigent and unwanted cast-offs of their society. Debtors, drunkards, the impoverished and unhoused, all of whom had so conveniently volunteered to help MacGregor build Poyais into reality.

If it feels the lead has been buried a bit, the New Poyais Scheme was effectively a means for the US and UK to dump their "unwanted" peoples into somewhere out of sight and out of mind, with MacGregor punished to lead them. It was almost intended to fail, but MacGregor had a unique combination of skills: charisma, audacity, and madness. A prisoner in his own country, he began to model himself in the style of Napoleon on Elba and declared that he would indeed make Poyais a reality. He was able to spin the situation he'd been saddled with, offering Poyais as an immigration destination with almost no restrictions on entry. Where the United States would pick and choose who it wanted, Poyais would take them all, and a wave of immigrants began to travel. Many died of malaria, many died of hunger, many died of violence as they struggled with each other and with the native Poyaisans themselves. But through sheer will, MacGregor persisted. The city of Saint Joseph, a ramshackle collection of tents and shacks on the swampy banks of the Kruka River, steadily began to take shape as a city in its own right. Although the United States and United Kingdom were happy to have somewhere to "encourage" their indolent to leave to, Honduras and Nicaragua began to increasingly find this nation of criminals and castoffs run by a conman to be an increasingly worrisome entity that they'd have to share space with.

The Poyais "Experiment" was a bizarre form of order emerging from chaos, a direct challenge to the entropic view of nations as the country slowly found itself. In its own way MacGregor's original claims of democratic government in Poyais was made true as MacGregor built a new constitution in the model of the British government, but which was even more radical in offering suffrage to all adult men, a radical proposal of the age. MacGregor, once a civilized man presented as the model of British order-bringing, began to lean increasingly into the freedom that his imprisonment gave him. It drew ire from even those supposed democratic bastions of democracy in Washington and London, who saw his country as a dangerous experiment in "excessive freedom". Even then, he was hardly an ultra-progressive man, particularly for his allowance of slavery. First Saint Joseph developed, then steadily more and more settlements grew. At the same time, the politics of the Miskito Kingdom began to overlap as the Miskito struggled to assert themselves against Nicaragua but now Poyais as well, especially as some Miskito began to leave the Kingdom for the Caziquate on the grounds of its formal recognition by major powers offering more stability even if they were often subject to the same kind of colonial discrimination as elsewhere.

MacGregor styled himself as "Cazique", a prince in a continent dominated by republics. And yet, MacGregor had no children when he died in 1847, leaving the question open as to how the government would proceed. However, Prime Minister Gabriel Wallace simply announced a Regency and carried on with business as usual. Though a regency, no effort was made to locate an heir to the position, and although formally a monarchy the government carried on as what amounted to a parliamentary republic, with the status of the Empty Throne carrying on as an informal state of affairs and the Prime Minister acting as "Prime Minister and Regent", creating a model similar to that of the Third French Republic. Indeed, some even went so far as to speculate that the architects of the Third Republic had even taken inspiration from Poyais, though most of these suggestions are unsubstantiated. Whatever the case, Poyais continued to draw immigrants from the Old World, creating a bizarre community that in many ways resembled the immigration-driven societies of the United States, Canada, and Brazil, though far lesser than either of them. All the same, the country's population continued to grow and develop over the years, a major milestone of which was abolishing slavery in 1849.

The state that emerged in the later 19th and early 20th Centuries was a product of this unorthodox beginning and bizarre society which had emerged out of the outcasts. Although crime was initially sky-high, it slowly receded as order emerged from the chaos and Poyais found its footing with exporting fruits and providing a number of "financial services" which many later described as an early example of what would be described as a "tax haven". The country found a number of ways to survive on the world stage, even in an environment when Nicaragua was almost overthrown by a would-be American despot and Honduras was converted into the archetypal banana republic. Part of this stemmed from the nature of Poyais, as while the nations of Central and South America were excluded from the definition of "white" Poyais was somewhat hazily included by virtue of most of its settlers coming from the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Germany, and partially from the United States. In other words, white. All the same, no one really wanted to call Poiyais part of the "Anglosphere" proper if not for the fact that the country spoke English as its main language of government, commerce, and vernacular, though Spanish was also quite common in many of the cities through migrant workers from surrounding nations, and in an odd twist Scots Gaelic through the influence of its "Founding Scoundrel".

Poyais would increasingly become emblematic of these odd attitudes. Although MacGregor had been somewhat liberal if rather comfortable with the established British attitudes, it was after his death when the country began to increasingly embrace its bizarre nature. Among various things, Poyais developed a very early reputation as a haven for "Theban practices", a bizarre colloquialism referring to its legalization of homosexuality in 1861. At the same time, both before, during, and after the American Civil War thousands of former slaves left the United States for Poyais, a move welcomed by the United States if it meant fewer black people to deal with. Although not necessarily embraced in Poyais, they found it a lot easier to settle themselves in Poyais and quickly began to emerge into their own. It didn't immediately plunge into becoming a nation of bohemian ideals and countercultural attitudes, but they certainly found it easier to persist in a country whose entire reputation was built upon the idea of welcoming the unwelcomed. It was a useful kind of niche to occupy, because it meant that there was an endless supply of people to migrate to the country, more manpower to work for the economy, more hands to move the wheels of commerce. Perhaps it was this kind of thing that led it to becoming the first nation in the world to grant women suffrage in 1889.

By 1900, Poyais was a nation everyone hated but felt was necessary to have for the sake of isolating the unwelcome sectors of society. And yet, this proved short-sighted. Poyais was a place where intellectuals and thinkers of all stripes could rub shoulders, counting among their number socialists and anarchists and advocates of free-love and proponents of racial integration, and on and on it went. Poyais was perhaps one of the most hated countries in the world, yet it avoided the coups and military interventions that the United States was all too happy to visit upon other Central American states. Perhaps it was seen as inconsequential, or perhaps it was simply the fact that the domestically-organized Vesuvius Fruit Company had managed to resist the influences and advances of the US-based United Fruit Co.Whatever the case, Poyais emerged as a country that was just as much a chaotic counterculture as it was an organized and functional republic. Regular elections, iron-clad freedoms of speech and organization, and one of the strongest set of civil rights laws in Central America. The "scare stories" served almost an opposite of their intended purpose, setting in place an excellent opportunity for the country's tourism industry to explode into being in the aftermath of World War II.

The government of Poyais has certainly been one of the most progressive countries in the modern age, being one of the first Latin American nations to legalize same-sex marriage and which is characterized by a generally progressive and tolerant attitude towards most things, which isn't to say that it's completely perfect and without flaw. Even to this day, economic inequality is sharply characterized by racial lines. To this day most Native Poyaisans remain economically disenfranchised, much the same for most Afro-Poyaisans, and both political power and wealth remains collected in the hands of the "Sacred Thirty", a loose collection of quasi-familial clans that grew out of the early settler groups of Poyais. This division is balanced by the steadily eroding power of the Poyaisan establishment, perhaps exemplified by the country maintaining the Empty Throne even to this day. Poyais maintains the trappings of a hereditary and aristocratic monarchy with none of the true institutions, and although Poyais at times tries to try and keep itself as such people increasingly find new ways to erode the power of the established powers. At the same time the country still ends up embracing a number of countercultural movements such as being one of the only Caribbean nations to legalize marijuana in all forms, and at the same time decriminalizing coca usage (though not cocaine).

It's an odd thing, a country that's at once trying to be a nation with a (nominal) monarchy with lords and ladies and a (nominal) aristocracy, and a nation that actively and avidly embraces the spirit of the modern age with its push towards social and community reforms that have emade Poyais one of the most aggressively progressive nations in the world. The Empty Throne has become as much a foundational part of the country's view of itself as the British Monarchy is for Britain, though without any actual monarchy the Poyaisan "Monarchy" is ironically in a more stable position than the House of Windsor. After all, an empty throne is hardly able to cause scandal. It's also a useful metaphor for everything that Poyais sees itself as. No one man sits above all others, which is a sentiment that sits at the very core of democracy's egalitarian principles. How strongly Poyais adheres to those is still something of a matter of debate, as even bereft a crowned head Poyais still inherits many of the same institutional flaws which come to a country like the United Kingdom or Spain or Japan, whether or not that government's monarchy holds any true power. A lot of this wonkiness is ultimately traceable to the country's very origins, which permanently set in place a national spirit of unorthodoxy and a bizarre mix of egalitarian ideals that still shape the country and its place in the world.

People come to Poyais almost to experience what a country generally isn't. Laissez-faire and yet with strong social programs, a monarchy without a monarch, and in general a country that feels almost like it shouldn't exist largely because it really shouldn't. Then again, that could be said of pretty much every nation in North America, as Poyais shares the same colonial settler legacy of every other nation in the Western Hemisphere even if not by the same mechanisms. Poyais shouldn't be real, it was a country that existed as a legal fiction to scam men and women out of their money before the scammer was sentenced to carrying out his promises. But what else is a nation if not a shared story, and Poyais' story is just as exciting as any other if not moreso at times. And perhaps it's this idea that leads Poyais into what it is now, much as the United States or United Kingdom shape the nations that have emerged from them. In theory, at least. In practice those nations can be and are as chaotic and messy as Poyais is often thought to be. Poyais is simply more honest in its embrace of its own chaotic story, warts and all, and when the nation refers to its founder as the "Founding Scoundrel" that tells you just about everything about how Poyais views itself, its history, and what it means to be Poyais.

Description

With thanks to Alagremm for spurring me into the idea.

---

So confident was the entirety of Britain in the venture of Gregor MacGregor that many still refused to believe that he had actively defrauded the country to the tune of billions of dollars in modern currency. Even his victims lept to his defense, claiming that MacGregor had himself been deceived by his subordinates in the scheme. In one of the most brazen confidence tricks of the 19th Century, MacGregor was acquitted. Privately though, he had gained the ire of three governments. The United Kingdom, the United States, and Honduras itself. All three of them were already wrapped up with an extant trouble of the United Kingdom attempting to negotiate its power and influence in the newly-independent states of Central America, in particular with regard to three territories: Belize, the Honduras Bay Islands, and the Miskito Kingdom. It was all already an issue for the three governments, and MacGregor's venture, failed though it was, could have presented a deeply unwanted intrusion of an outlier force that would have upset the entire situation. Publicly MacGregor was cleared of charges. Privately, three national governments were breathing down his neck. Rather than arrange some kind of accident, a new idea was presented to serve as a "compromise".

With the outwards appearance of his own volition, MacGregor negotiated with the government of Honduras over a land acquisition in the east. The Miskito Coast, though claimed by the Honduran government and disputed with Nicaragua and the Miskito people themselves, was a largely inhospitable wilderness that offered nothing much but national pride to whoever held it. With the US and UK governments seemingly giving their consent to the matter, the purchase was carried out with the hopes of helping to settle land claims between Honduras and Nicaragua. Using almost all the money he'd raised in his scheme, he purchased a triangle of land bounded by the Patuca River on the north and the Wangki River on the south, Poyais was indeed made a reality as MacGregor found himself exiled to his new country, the proud owner of a massive triangle of thick jungle and land which even by 1825 hadn't been thoroughly explored after 300 years of European exploration. The United States and United Kingdom were even kind enough to "provide" a group of settlers, largely consisting of the indigent and unwanted cast-offs of their society. Debtors, drunkards, the impoverished and unhoused, all of whom had so conveniently volunteered to help MacGregor build Poyais into reality.

If it feels the lead has been buried a bit, the New Poyais Scheme was effectively a means for the US and UK to dump their "unwanted" peoples into somewhere out of sight and out of mind, with MacGregor punished to lead them. It was almost intended to fail, but MacGregor had a unique combination of skills: charisma, audacity, and madness. A prisoner in his own country, he began to model himself in the style of Napoleon on Elba and declared that he would indeed make Poyais a reality. He was able to spin the situation he'd been saddled with, offering Poyais as an immigration destination with almost no restrictions on entry. Where the United States would pick and choose who it wanted, Poyais would take them all, and a wave of immigrants began to travel. Many died of malaria, many died of hunger, many died of violence as they struggled with each other and with the native Poyaisans themselves. But through sheer will, MacGregor persisted. The city of Saint Joseph, a ramshackle collection of tents and shacks on the swampy banks of the Kruka River, steadily began to take shape as a city in its own right. Although the United States and United Kingdom were happy to have somewhere to "encourage" their indolent to leave to, Honduras and Nicaragua began to increasingly find this nation of criminals and castoffs run by a conman to be an increasingly worrisome entity that they'd have to share space with.

The Poyais "Experiment" was a bizarre form of order emerging from chaos, a direct challenge to the entropic view of nations as the country slowly found itself. In its own way MacGregor's original claims of democratic government in Poyais was made true as MacGregor built a new constitution in the model of the British government, but which was even more radical in offering suffrage to all adult men, a radical proposal of the age. MacGregor, once a civilized man presented as the model of British order-bringing, began to lean increasingly into the freedom that his imprisonment gave him. It drew ire from even those supposed democratic bastions of democracy in Washington and London, who saw his country as a dangerous experiment in "excessive freedom". Even then, he was hardly an ultra-progressive man, particularly for his allowance of slavery. First Saint Joseph developed, then steadily more and more settlements grew. At the same time, the politics of the Miskito Kingdom began to overlap as the Miskito struggled to assert themselves against Nicaragua but now Poyais as well, especially as some Miskito began to leave the Kingdom for the Caziquate on the grounds of its formal recognition by major powers offering more stability even if they were often subject to the same kind of colonial discrimination as elsewhere.

MacGregor styled himself as "Cazique", a prince in a continent dominated by republics. And yet, MacGregor had no children when he died in 1847, leaving the question open as to how the government would proceed. However, Prime Minister Gabriel Wallace simply announced a Regency and carried on with business as usual. Though a regency, no effort was made to locate an heir to the position, and although formally a monarchy the government carried on as what amounted to a parliamentary republic, with the status of the Empty Throne carrying on as an informal state of affairs and the Prime Minister acting as "Prime Minister and Regent", creating a model similar to that of the Third French Republic. Indeed, some even went so far as to speculate that the architects of the Third Republic had even taken inspiration from Poyais, though most of these suggestions are unsubstantiated. Whatever the case, Poyais continued to draw immigrants from the Old World, creating a bizarre community that in many ways resembled the immigration-driven societies of the United States, Canada, and Brazil, though far lesser than either of them. All the same, the country's population continued to grow and develop over the years, a major milestone of which was abolishing slavery in 1849.

The state that emerged in the later 19th and early 20th Centuries was a product of this unorthodox beginning and bizarre society which had emerged out of the outcasts. Although crime was initially sky-high, it slowly receded as order emerged from the chaos and Poyais found its footing with exporting fruits and providing a number of "financial services" which many later described as an early example of what would be described as a "tax haven". The country found a number of ways to survive on the world stage, even in an environment when Nicaragua was almost overthrown by a would-be American despot and Honduras was converted into the archetypal banana republic. Part of this stemmed from the nature of Poyais, as while the nations of Central and South America were excluded from the definition of "white" Poyais was somewhat hazily included by virtue of most of its settlers coming from the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Germany, and partially from the United States. In other words, white. All the same, no one really wanted to call Poiyais part of the "Anglosphere" proper if not for the fact that the country spoke English as its main language of government, commerce, and vernacular, though Spanish was also quite common in many of the cities through migrant workers from surrounding nations, and in an odd twist Scots Gaelic through the influence of its "Founding Scoundrel".

Poyais would increasingly become emblematic of these odd attitudes. Although MacGregor had been somewhat liberal if rather comfortable with the established British attitudes, it was after his death when the country began to increasingly embrace its bizarre nature. Among various things, Poyais developed a very early reputation as a haven for "Theban practices", a bizarre colloquialism referring to its legalization of homosexuality in 1861. At the same time, both before, during, and after the American Civil War thousands of former slaves left the United States for Poyais, a move welcomed by the United States if it meant fewer black people to deal with. Although not necessarily embraced in Poyais, they found it a lot easier to settle themselves in Poyais and quickly began to emerge into their own. It didn't immediately plunge into becoming a nation of bohemian ideals and countercultural attitudes, but they certainly found it easier to persist in a country whose entire reputation was built upon the idea of welcoming the unwelcomed. It was a useful kind of niche to occupy, because it meant that there was an endless supply of people to migrate to the country, more manpower to work for the economy, more hands to move the wheels of commerce. Perhaps it was this kind of thing that led it to becoming the first nation in the world to grant women suffrage in 1889.

By 1900, Poyais was a nation everyone hated but felt was necessary to have for the sake of isolating the unwelcome sectors of society. And yet, this proved short-sighted. Poyais was a place where intellectuals and thinkers of all stripes could rub shoulders, counting among their number socialists and anarchists and advocates of free-love and proponents of racial integration, and on and on it went. Poyais was perhaps one of the most hated countries in the world, yet it avoided the coups and military interventions that the United States was all too happy to visit upon other Central American states. Perhaps it was seen as inconsequential, or perhaps it was simply the fact that the domestically-organized Vesuvius Fruit Company had managed to resist the influences and advances of the US-based United Fruit Co.Whatever the case, Poyais emerged as a country that was just as much a chaotic counterculture as it was an organized and functional republic. Regular elections, iron-clad freedoms of speech and organization, and one of the strongest set of civil rights laws in Central America. The "scare stories" served almost an opposite of their intended purpose, setting in place an excellent opportunity for the country's tourism industry to explode into being in the aftermath of World War II.

The government of Poyais has certainly been one of the most progressive countries in the modern age, being one of the first Latin American nations to legalize same-sex marriage and which is characterized by a generally progressive and tolerant attitude towards most things, which isn't to say that it's completely perfect and without flaw. Even to this day, economic inequality is sharply characterized by racial lines. To this day most Native Poyaisans remain economically disenfranchised, much the same for most Afro-Poyaisans, and both political power and wealth remains collected in the hands of the "Sacred Thirty", a loose collection of quasi-familial clans that grew out of the early settler groups of Poyais. This division is balanced by the steadily eroding power of the Poyaisan establishment, perhaps exemplified by the country maintaining the Empty Throne even to this day. Poyais maintains the trappings of a hereditary and aristocratic monarchy with none of the true institutions, and although Poyais at times tries to try and keep itself as such people increasingly find new ways to erode the power of the established powers. At the same time the country still ends up embracing a number of countercultural movements such as being one of the only Caribbean nations to legalize marijuana in all forms, and at the same time decriminalizing coca usage (though not cocaine).

It's an odd thing, a country that's at once trying to be a nation with a (nominal) monarchy with lords and ladies and a (nominal) aristocracy, and a nation that actively and avidly embraces the spirit of the modern age with its push towards social and community reforms that have emade Poyais one of the most aggressively progressive nations in the world. The Empty Throne has become as much a foundational part of the country's view of itself as the British Monarchy is for Britain, though without any actual monarchy the Poyaisan "Monarchy" is ironically in a more stable position than the House of Windsor. After all, an empty throne is hardly able to cause scandal. It's also a useful metaphor for everything that Poyais sees itself as. No one man sits above all others, which is a sentiment that sits at the very core of democracy's egalitarian principles. How strongly Poyais adheres to those is still something of a matter of debate, as even bereft a crowned head Poyais still inherits many of the same institutional flaws which come to a country like the United Kingdom or Spain or Japan, whether or not that government's monarchy holds any true power. A lot of this wonkiness is ultimately traceable to the country's very origins, which permanently set in place a national spirit of unorthodoxy and a bizarre mix of egalitarian ideals that still shape the country and its place in the world.

People come to Poyais almost to experience what a country generally isn't. Laissez-faire and yet with strong social programs, a monarchy without a monarch, and in general a country that feels almost like it shouldn't exist largely because it really shouldn't. Then again, that could be said of pretty much every nation in North America, as Poyais shares the same colonial settler legacy of every other nation in the Western Hemisphere even if not by the same mechanisms. Poyais shouldn't be real, it was a country that existed as a legal fiction to scam men and women out of their money before the scammer was sentenced to carrying out his promises. But what else is a nation if not a shared story, and Poyais' story is just as exciting as any other if not moreso at times. And perhaps it's this idea that leads Poyais into what it is now, much as the United States or United Kingdom shape the nations that have emerged from them. In theory, at least. In practice those nations can be and are as chaotic and messy as Poyais is often thought to be. Poyais is simply more honest in its embrace of its own chaotic story, warts and all, and when the nation refers to its founder as the "Founding Scoundrel" that tells you just about everything about how Poyais views itself, its history, and what it means to be Poyais.