#taveller

December 3rd 1845 saw the death in Venezuela of Gregor MacGregor, Prince of Poyais.

Poyais. I hear you say? Never heard of it? Well that’s because it doesn’t exist now, in fact it never existed back then either, oor Gregor was a conman he invented it and persuaded many British and, later, French to invest in, and in many case emigrate to the non-existent colony he said was on the Bay of Honduras in central America.

Gregor McGregor had joined the Royal Navy in 1803 and was a Colonel in the Venezuelan War of Independence, fighting under Simon Bolivar who had fought in Florida in 1817.

In 1820, he returned to London and announced that had been named the Cacique (Prince) of the Principality of Poyais. The country was located on the Bay of Honduras and the land had been bestowed upon him by native chief King Frederic Augustus I of the Mosquito Shore and Nation. The country included over 12,500 square miles of untapped, rich lands which only lacked settlers to develop.

To help promote his cause, he published a book, Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, including the Territory of Poyais, supposedly written by Captain Thomas Strangeways. The book said English settlers had founded the capital of St. Joseph in the 1730s, had untapped gold and silver mines, fertile soil, and other ample resources which settlers could profit from. The country had a civil service, a bank, an army, a democratic government, and natives eager to work for their British masters. The book can be downloaded for free from Google Books and you can read for yourself the wonders of this non-existent country. Unfortunately, the most fertile thing about Poyais was Gregor McGregor’s imagination.

In reality, King Frederic Augustus had signed the document granting the land to Gregor McGregor in April 1820 after being plied with whisky and rum. The land only had four run-down buildings in it, and was surrounded by uninhabitable jungle with no fertile lands, gold or silver mines and the other assets describe by McGregor in his book. But to a fraudster, facts are irrelevant. It was his fiction that fed his cause.

MacGregor began selling shares in his new country, and in October 1822 raised a loan of £200,000, he even opened offices in London as well as Glasgow, Stirling and Edinburgh to sell land to his fellow Scots, and printed Poyais dollars. This was no small scale fraud, shares for the company were even sold on The London Stock exchange!

By January 1823, two ships carrying around 240 passengers had arrived in Poyais to find not a thriving town as promised, but untamed jungle. Disease and malnutrition soon set in and about 180 of them died; some even after the settlers were rescued by a passing ship in May 1823. Word of MacGregor’s fraud quickly reached England. He escaped to France, where he was imprisoned but ultimately acquitted. In its October 25, 1823 story about the scheme, The Guardian called MacGregor, “a person of whom we do not choose to say all that we think.” However many of the “settlers” defended MacGregor, blaming other advisors for the failure of the enterprise.

MacGregor returned to London in 1826 and went on to try to raise an £800,000 loan for Poyais. But by now potential investors were wary and, besides, other conmen had moved in on his non-existent country: MacGregor found himself in competition with others trying to sell Poyais by the acre.

He was still trying to sell Poyais land certificates in Edinburgh as late as 1837 and apparently gave up not long afterwards, returning to Venezuela in 1839. Here he was awarded the pension of an army general for his service during the war for independence. He died there on this day in December 1845.

The truth is, I didn’t write it, not by myself at any rate.  The essential plot of the novel is such a jumbled mess because the story is lifted directly from a game of Traveller, an RPG from Game Designer’s Workshop.  The basic characters in the novel were all player characters.  Their design and personalities are created by adolescent boys in the 80’s and the paths they chose in the story strongly reflect the chaos of youth.

The Aero Brothers, Ged and Ham were both created by one of my favorite students of all time.  I will refer to him here as Armando Carrizales, though that was not his real name.  I am trying to explain the novel here, not mortify an adult former student living somewhere in Texas, or even elsewhere.  Armando’s idea was to use Star Wars characters.  Hamfast Aero was actually Han Solo in the game.  And when Armando wanted to create an all-powerful psionic character, he created brother Ged Solo, using the first name of Larry Winslow’s character Ged Stryker (And Larry did not know how to spell “Jed”).  Because I really liked Armando, and he was bright, creative, and a good problem solver, I eventually chose his characters as the main characters of the novel.  He was good at organizing expeditions, collecting gear and matching it to the purpose in the adventure before him.  But you do need more than heroes for an adventure game, or for a novel.

Emilio Jalapeno was a very different kind of kid, but also Armando’s real-life best friend.  He was a skinny kid with a goofy grin, and was always ready with a joke or prank that would either make you laugh, or make you palm your forehead and consider murder.  His first Traveller character lasted all of fifteen minutes because he decided he wanted to take his shiny new pistol and kill everyone on the entire planet they were on.  That character, whose name I have forgotten, was actually gunned down by his own adventuring party.  So Emilio had to start again.

He created the character Trav Dalgoda.  He got the name from the first syllable of the Traveller game and a name he spotted on the cover of a magazine laying on the table.  Trav was simply Emilio in an RPG form.  He wanted to have an eye patch like a pirate, but he wanted to have two eyes.  He wanted to wear wide ties with messages on them, like a cartoon screw next to a baseball.  And he dearly loved to blow things up.  A time would come in the adventure where he had access to really big weapons, and we had to let him experiment with killing everybody on an entire planet.  This, then, was the needed comedy relief that kept us laughing through shared adventures.  And Trav’s ability to get into really big trouble would eventually drive the plot forward.

Sinbadh the Lupin, a dog-headed humanoid alien, was also Emilio’s character.  The fact that he based his entire character on talking like a pirate from Treasure Island was a source of endless hilarity.

Tron Blastarr, the scar-faced villain, was created by Armando again.  There was a time when Larry Winslow wanted to create a villain character in the most desperate way possible.  But the evil villain Mantis, who was really just a living head on a robotic body, and the enigmatic psionic Xavier Trkiashav never really got their chance to be truly villainous.  One became a laughable boob while the other became a hero and the leader of the Psionics Institute.  Tron, however, was a perfect pirate.  He led the band of adventurers on merry chase after looping, curling space chase, eventually becoming the first player character to get married and have children.  He retired as a villain with a fleet of stolen space ships, and a planet (the airless world Outpost1) as his pirate treasure.

So, to claim I wrote the novel Aeroquest on my own is to completely overlook my collaborators.  It is a mess of a comedy sci-fi novel that I am still trying to iron out and rewrite, but it is also a story I shared with some who were very near to my writer’s heart.