RECAST - Saturnalia, Gregor MacGregor's Poyais Scheme

We're taking xmas off! We hope that you're having a wonderful holiday and that we can help you distract yourself from your families with the re-cast of one of our favorite episodes. We'll be back with new stuff in 2020, see you then!

This episode features guest host David Fouhy subbing in for Noel. We dive into Saturnalia: a Roman festival of rebirth that if you squint at it looks an awful lot like xmas, if xmas was way cooler and involved making servants into princes for a week. There were gifts of wax, feasting, dancing and the softest of meats. We even talk about it’s place in Roman politics and it’s roots in some small amount of human sacrifice (probably).

Then Fouhy tells us all about Gregor MacGregor and the Poyais Scheme. Gregor, an ex-soldier who married into the nobility, managed to put together what some are calling, “the biggest dick move in history.” Gregor, after a short and unlustrous career in the military, made up an entire country in the ass end of nowhere and sold British people land there. When those people tried to sail and settle in this place that DID NOT EXIST, hundreds of them died. But the survivors still believed in him! And he fled to France to do it again, before returning to England to do it again. He got away with this scheme over and over, and eventually set himself up as a knight in Caracas with the money he made off this scam. Just the fucking worst. Oh, he also tried to free Florida from the Spanish and had a 200-mile battle march or whatever, but really, we hate this dude.

Talking points include: over 30 mentions of soft meats! ironic punishments, the finest in wax fruits and heads, and more.