The Parable of Poyais, Part I
by Sam Hatt
October 2023
Long Read
Was the remarkable territory of Poyais—full of unbounded commercial and civic promise—all it was made up to be? Or was it simply too good to be true?
Part I: Poyais
The Colonists
In thunder, lightning and in rain, the year of 1823 began on the east coast of Scotland.
For a fortnight a North Sea tempest slammed into Edinburgh’s port of Leith. There, two hundred Scottish settlers-to-be sat ashore, impatient. Each was destined for a new colony in South America, awaiting to board the Kennersley Castle. This was not a flight of the dispossessed, but instead a conscious, carefully planned decision founded on enlightenment ambition to better themselves and improve their standard of living. They would be pioneers, advancing liberal values in a land that they had been assured would handsomely repay their courage and enterprising spirit.
Some were professionals: soldiers, educators, lawyers, doctors, even a banker. They were accompanied by farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and clerks, and even an aspiring theatre manager. Such a varied and well balanced cargo of colonists was due to the abundance of information disseminated about the country they were to adopt. They could hardly wait to see with their own eyes the scenes that had been painted for them in promotional leaflets, newspaper articles and advertisements, in a handsome 350-page guidebook, and by the representatives in Scotland of the government of a land which—according to a senior British naval officer who had spent many years in the region—“is excelled by no country under the influence in the British dominion.”
Other than the great commercial appeal of a land with such natural abundance, the risks of immigration were also negligible. Apart from the fact that the natives were Anglophiles, after more than a century of contact with the British, there was the reassurance of knowing that their new land was governed by one of their own: a distinguished Scotsman who had been given the responsibility by the King of the land. Some of them had even had the pleasure of meeting the man himself: General Sir Gregor MacGregor, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and a hero of South America's struggle to liberate itself from Spain, who had subsequently been honoured with the title of Cazique of this edenic land: the Territory of Poyais.
Poyais was described as “a free and independent state situated on the mountainous side of the Bay of Honduras; three or four days’ sail from Jamaica; thirty hours from the British settlement of Belize in the Yucatan; and about eight days from New Orleans, in the United States of America.” The Territory lay between the Spanish South American provinces of Honduras and Nicaragua, from which it was separated by a chain of almost inaccessible mountains. Its natural defences had preserved it from Spanish domination and in fact the country had been sporadically settled by British people since its discovery by British pirates and loggers, as seen in the colony of Belize.
But for political reasons, Poyais had never been officially claimed as a British colony, in spite of close links between its native rulers and the British West Indies, and several approaches by Poyaisian Kings to the government in London with offers to attach their country to the Empire. As a result, the immense natural resources of Poyais—its extremely rich and fertile soil, its luxuriant forests, its gold and its abundant marine life—had been left largely undisturbed.
So, as the colonists waited impatiently for the storm to pass in Leith, they effusively returned to the widely circulated guidebook. Titled, A Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, Including the Territory of Poyais, the author, Captain Thomas Strangeways, left no detail unturned. The mind of the naturalist and the economist seamlessly intertwined, in which biological description dovetailed with latent market exploitation: while the working men talked of digging gold mines or constructing sawmills, the new landowners debated the cash crops they might grow. Indian corn was a staple and it appeared that three harvests a year might be obtained from the rich soil. But the real money would no doubt come from the coffee and cocoa beans and the sugar cane, for which the land and the climate were ideally suited.
Then there was cotton, one of the mainstays of the industrial revolution that was gathering pace back in Britain. The mechanisation of the production process during the past thirty years had led to the establishment of vast mills and their owners scoured the world for supplies of the raw material they needed to meet the rapidly growing demand for cotton clothing. Fortunately, the cotton plant grew wild in Poyais.
Day after day, under the grey Scottish seaside skies, hopeful discussions disbanded natural anxieties, and a sense of anticipation grew. The more people thought about it, the wiser their decision to emigrate. Obviously, Poyais was genuinely a land of opportunity where only idleness could lead to failure. Everyone shared the optimism of Captain Strangeways, expressed in the closing paragraph of his useful book:
“Enough has been said to prove the great encouragement, and manifold advantages, which must be derived from commercial establishments in the Territory of Poyais: and now that the well known political circumstances are removed, which have hitherto retarded the advancement of this fine country, in civilization and in the scale of independent states, there seems no reason whatever to doubt, that, protected by the wise and vigorous administration, sound policy, and comprehensive view of His Highness the Cazique of Poyais, this beautiful country will rapidly advance in prosperity and civilization, and will become, in every point of view, and within a very short period, not the least considerable of those ‘radiant realms beyond the Atlantic wave.’”
So finally, with favourable winds in its sails, and hope and expectation in the hearts of its passengers, the Kennersley Castle set off across the Atlantic waves, in anticipation of the radiant realm of Poyais.
The Cazique
As the colonists prepared themselves for their arrival at Poyais, His Highness the Cazique was in London, busily putting the finishing touches to the elaborate financial structure necessary to underpin the economic advancement of his country.
And in doing so, by early 1823, Gregor MacGregor had become firmly established as a celebrity in Britain’s capital. He was eulogised in the press, sought after as a guest among the high society, and enthusiastically supported in the City of London, the world's most influential financial centre. MacGregor was that rare species, a political leader with entrepreneurial imagination and a thorough understanding of the importance of the capital markets. For a man who had arrived in London two years earlier as the virtually unknown representative of a faraway country of which no one had ever heard, it was a remarkable achievement.
However, in coming to Britain to promote the development of his adopted country, MacGregor had enjoyed certain advantages that made him a natural candidate for rapid renown. As ever in British history, class was of excessive import. To begin with, MacGregor could claim descent from Rob Roy MacGregor, the legendary clan leader who had been recently immortalised in a novel by one of the most popular writers and leaders in Scottish Romanticism, Sir Walter Scott. Moreover, the name MacGregor held particular resonance at the time of Sir Gregor's appearance in London, since it was announced that the once outlawed clan would receive the privilege of escorting the Honours of Scotland to greet the new King, George IV, when he arrived at Edinburgh for the first royal visit since the union of Scotland with England in 1707.
Nor was this the only connection that worked in the Cazique's favour. It became known that he had been an officer in the British army, serving under the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War. His regiment was the 57th Foot, the famous “Die Hards” who had fought heroically at the battle of Albuera in 1811, when two-thirds of the First Battalion were killed. Even more notable, though, was MacGregor’s subsequent military career on the staff of the late and much celebrated General Francisco de Miranda in South America, considered to be one of the most admired soldiers and champions of liberty in the Western World.
George Watson (1767-1837) - Gregor MacGregor (1786–1845), Adventurer
In Europe, the military campaigns of Simón Bolívar and Miranda against the Spanish had been widely reported, and the mysterious General MacGregor had appeared in some of those dispatches. He had distinguished himself during notable battles and his tactical retreat from Ocumare—during which it was reported that he led an army through hundreds of miles of jungle infested by overwhelming numbers of Spanish forces—had become a classic tale of derring-do. Then there had been the crushing defeat of the Spaniards at Juncal, in which MacGregor's military skill had earned him the Order of the Liberators, presented by Bolívar himself.
If the stories that preceded were not enough, the Cazique certainly impressed all who encountered him. Standing about five feet nine inches tall, with a long nose and full lips above a strong chin, his depiction can be seen in the 1804 portrait by George Watson now held at the National Gallery of Scotland, and shows that even a young MacGregor, with his elegant bearing, carried an air of authority and ceremony. Now in 1823, following his two decades of military experience, it was observed that he talked with energy, enthusiasm and directness, and his conversation evidenced a broad education, informed with the wisdom of experience and knowledge of the world. He referred with pride to the honour of knighthood bestowed on him by the King of Spain for his services during the Peninsular War, occasionally mentioned his brief leadership of the “Republic of the Floridas” on Amelia Island, and of the kindness of the present King of England, when he had been Prince Regent, in permitting him to apply the foreign title and style himself Sir Gregor. That was all in the past, however, and the Cazique was at pains to point out that Poyais was now his country, granted to him by the native King George Frederic Augustus of the Mosquito Coast.
MacGregor was blessed with titles, looks and charm, but it was his wife Josefa, the Princess of Poyais, who appeared to many as his greatest adornment at the banquet halls and ballrooms of London’s high society. The Princess Josefa was a sultry Spanish-American beauty, a cousin of the great Bolívar himself, who displayed all the reserve and hauteur of her class: her presence could only enhance MacGregor's appeal. Soon, the couple were almost overwhelmed with invitations, and their names were on the lips of everyone who was anyone. There was even an official reception for them, hosted at the Guildhall, the ancient seat of City government, by the Lord Mayor of London.
But beyond such pomp and circumstance, it was the sense of service and purpose which drove the Cazique, and this sentiment could be no better conveyed than in his own words within the Poyais Proclamation. It reads:
POYERS!
On the 29th April 1820, the King of the Mosquito Shore and Nation, by a deed, executed at Cape Gracias a Dios, granted to me and my heirs for ever, the Territory of Poyais.
POYERS! It shall be my constant duty to render you happy, and to exert myself in improving your situation, by every means in my power.
The Territory of Poyais shall be an asylum only for the industrious and honest, none others shall be admitted amongst us; and THOSE, I trust, you will receive with open arms, as brothers and fellow-citizens.
With a view to avoiding a misunderstanding with our Spanish neighbours, which, under all circumstances, would be disadvantageous to both parties, I have this day published a MANIFESTO, addressed to the AUTHORITIES and INHABITANTS of the adjoining SPANISH AMERICAN PROVINCES of HONDURAS and NICARAGUA, giving them the most positive assurances, that I have no other views here, than those which my duty as Chief of this Territory inspires.
This last paragraph, MacGregor pointed out, was important for the development of Poyais. Anyone seeking to invest or settle in the Territory must be assured that it had no intention of challenging the authority of Spain. He finished with a flourish:
POYERS! I now bid you farewell for a while, in the full confidence that the measures I have adopted for your security, defence, government, and future prosperity, will be fully realised; and I trust, that through the kindness of Almighty Providence, I shall be again enabled to return amongst you, and that then it will be my pleasing duty to hail you as affectionate friends, and yours to receive me as your faithful Cazique and Father.
Political benevolence intertwined with commercial sense. The adoptive monarch was as paternal as he was entrepreneurial, and thus a Poyais office was opened at Dowgate Hill in the heart of the City.
Advertisements in the press quickly produced an office staff, and MacGregor marked the creation of this Poyaisian outpost with a series of state banquets, to which were invited government ministers, foreign ambassadors, leading figures from Court, and senior military officers. The seriousness of the Cazique's purpose became apparent to all, as he described the system of government in his country, with its twelve provinces and three legislative assemblies, which ensured that all sections of society were represented.
Away from these splendid banquets and public engagements, MacGregor confided privately that his enthusiasm for the resettlement of Poyais was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to compensate in some way for the failure of an earlier attempt at South American colonisation in which a member of his family had been involved. He, like many other Scots, had grown up hearing terrible stories of the Darién Scheme, a disastrous venture of the 1690s that was meant to establish a settlement on the eastern side of the isthmus of Panama. One of his ancestors had been among the 2,800 Scots who had set out from Leith for the colony of New Caledonia, and had been lucky to escape with his life as disease, mismanagement, lack of supplies and attacks by Spanish troops had wiped out two-thirds of the settlers. Nearly a century and a half later, the Darién affair still weighed heavily on the conscience of Scotland, which had invested and lost an estimated half of the entire capital available in the country at the time.
It was to make up for the failure of Darién, MacGregor said, that he proposed to draw the majority of his Poyais settlers from Scotland. While Dowgate Hill in London would be the clearing house for the sale of land, agents would be appointed and sales offices opened in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and as well as Stirling, to attract the hardy folk of the Highlands. With so much in its favour, the inevitable success of Poyais would obliterate the stain of Darién, many Scots would deservedly benefit, and Gregor MacGregor would have played his part in restoring the honour of Scotland.
With such fundamental arrangements in place, it remained for the public to be made aware of the unique opportunities Poyais had to offer. The first step was to invite reporters for interviews such as the man from The Times, whose probing questions were answered in great detail: “His Highness was excessively civil; he had just come in from riding in the park ... He called me into his private closet, where he sent for wine and called for his assistant to join him. They discoursed seriously for over an hour, and I marvelled to learn of the enlightened conditions in His Highness's dominions.” The resulting informative articles were followed by advertisements that set out the manifold benefits of emigration to Poyais and advised interested parties to visit their nearest Poyais Office, where they would be shown the maps and documents relating to the sale of land and where, for a deposit of just twenty-five per cent of the purchase price, they could secure a stake in the new El Dorado.
Josefa MacGregor, Princess of Poyais
Meanwhile, doubts were starting to arise in the mind of the Cazique, as he confessed to those closest to him. He had begun to realise that putting his plan into action was going to prove more expensive than he had expected, and he was becoming concerned about the impact of all this expenditure on the limited resources of a small country such as Poyais. With Dowgate Hill now fully staffed, and the Scottish offices due to open shortly, the financial demands seemed to be growing daily. Then, if the response from the public was anything like it ought to be, there would be the costs of chartering more ships to take them across the Atlantic, purchasing supplies to sustain the emigrants while they established themselves, and paying the new government officials who would oversee the whole enterprise. It would be a tragedy if the whole scheme were to fail because of a lack of funds.
Some of the most well connected guests at MacGregor’s banquets suggested talking over the matter with friends in political and financial circles. With London as the greatest capital market in the world, it was becoming common even for governments to raise finance in the City. Meetings were arranged, and a consensus soon emerged. Poyais should underwrite its bold project by means of long-term debt in the form of bonds offering investors repayment at some future date, with a good rate of annual interest guaranteed by the revenues of the government. The bankers were sure there would be no difficulty. What sort of figure did the Cazique have it in mind to raise? Given the mood and prevailing economic mood, the market would snap up as many Poyais bonds as MacGregor cared to issue.
The Conceit
The market’s buoyant mood of optimism was in stark contrast to that on the other side of the Atlantic. Colonel Hall, Captain of the Kennersley Castle, was sceptical. He had finally set sail on January 22nd and made safe passage across the ocean and navigated the natural and human dangers of the Caribbean, only to find that, in truth, there was very little to find at all. Marooned with his colonists amid the desolate swamps of the Mosquito Coast, Colonel Hall was entirely correct in his scepticism. It was not simply that there was no port at Black River and no elegant capital city at St Joseph—no theatres, no libraries, no banks—but there was no Poyaisian government, or civil service, or army. Indeed, there were no substantial settlements at all.
In fact, there was no such country as Poyais.
There was, evidently, a king of sorts in the region, and it was also a fact that His Majesty George Frederic Augustus had put his name to a piece of paper granting a large tract of land to General Sir Gregor MacGregor. But the rest of the story that had convinced hundreds of people to stake their fortunes and their futures on emigrating to Poyais, and still more to invest their savings in financing the emigration, was a complete and total fiction.
Far from lending itself to easy cultivation, the land acquired by MacGregor was rugged wilderness, and even if the supreme efforts required to grow coffee, sugar and cotton were to be successful, there was no population to buy them and little prospect of export, since the infrastructure to make trade possible did not exist. If there were gold mines, the country would have to be explored in order to find them, something at which even the determined Spaniards had baulked.
The whole Poyais project outlined by MacGregor and his associates was a gigantic fraud.
“The Cazique impressed all who encountered him.”
Nor was MacGregor himself quite the eminence he pretended to be. He did hold the rank of general in the Venezuelan army of liberation, and he certainly had some notable military achievements to his name—though not as many as he claimed, and they were rather outweighed by equally memorable military disasters. As for the rest of his story, it was largely invented.
His title of Cazique he had conferred upon himself: how could it be otherwise, since there was no Poyais, and therefore no government of which he could be head, and no authority to award such an honour? Equally bogus were his knighthood and the British army record he professed to have. Meanwhile, his direct line of MacGregor descent was from the side of the family whose claim to the chieftainship had been disproved when the proscription of the clan had finally been set aside.
The destitution, dire conditions—and, for some, death—of the Poyais colonists was first made apparent in Belize when a schooner arrived with the most infirm. Quickly it was realised that extensive support was required, and by the time a second and third boat left Belize for the Mosquito Coast on missions of mercy, the Superintendent of the colony, Major General Edward Codd, announced an official investigation to lay open the true situation of the imaginary State of Poyais to show the suffering of the unfortunate emigrants. He also advised his ministerial masters in London of the fate of the settlers, but his warning came too late to prevent the departure of five more ships bound for Poyais on the promises of Gregor MacGregor. Naval vessels had to be sent out to intercept them, and prevent an even greater tragedy.
But General Codd's enthusiasm to expose the Poyais deception began to wane somewhat when he received a complaint from MacGregor's agents in London, who still had no reason not to believe in the existence of Poyais. A petition sent to General Codd related to the disposal of the settlers' stores, claiming that they had been carried off by one of the rescue ships and, it seemed, subsequently sold in Belize. There were questions, too, about the remaining property of the settlement brought back by the another rescue vessel, which included, according to one of the most vocal surviving colonists James Hastie, “beef, flour, rice, and other provisions, tools, school-books, printing presses', all sold by auction for what they could fetch.”
In the first case, the merchants who had bought the cargo claimed that nobody had told them it belonged to Poyais, so they could not be held accountable. As for the goods sold, it may well have been a matter of the authorities in Belize doing what they could to recoup some of the £4,290 they had spent in rescuing, nursing, feeding and clothing the Poyais survivors. In the end, the report sent to London by General Codd was nothing more than a whitewash, absolving everybody of responsibility for everything.
And to the survivors themselves, it hardly mattered. About 180 of them had died, either on the Mosquito Coast or, more tragically, in Belize after their rescue. The rest were in no position to take any action against guilty parties, even if guilt could ever actually be proved. In October, the small group of surviving colonists who had decided to return to Britain (with the others trying their luck in Belize, or the United States) arrived in London, bringing a renewed bout of Poyais-hysteria with litigious threats from afar having less ability to silence the testimony of the survivors.
The newspapers published colourful reports of the fiasco, full of details of the sufferings of the emigrants, and clearly suggesting that the whole scheme had been a fraud conceived and executed by MacGregor. Much of the information was attributed to one man from Pimlico, Edward Lowe—who, a week later, would publish his personal account of the “Poyaise [sic] Settler” in The Times—but James Hastie was astonished to see himself and some of his fellow labourers quoted with, what he described as: “statements which none of us had ever uttered, and which we found incumbent upon us to contradict upon oath.”
And on October 22nd, Hastie along with four other survivors went to Mansion House to visit the Lord Mayor, armed with a most astonishing signed affidavit:
“The statements published in the newspapers of Saturday and last Tuesday are not the statements that we made, but are false and unfounded in the greater part. Especially that part of the report which states that Sir Gregor MacGregor took money from us, it is false and unfounded; on the contrary, we ourselves received money, with many others, from Sir Gregor MacGregor.
“We voluntarily swear that he never told us, nor did his agents in Scotland, that we should find a theatre at St Joseph, nor a government house; but a young man named Picken, who afterwards made an affidavit at Belize, it was he that told us these falsehoods in our passage out in the Kennersley Castle, and in Leith.
“We likewise swear and make known to the public, that from the best of our judgement we believe that Sir Gregor MacGregor has been worse used by Colonel Hall and his other agents than was ever man before; and that had they have done their duty by Sir Gregor and by us, things would have turned out very differently at Poyais, and we should have been now there doing well for ourselves, instead of being in England without a shilling to support us.”
That these poor deluded men should have so strongly defended a man who had brought about their downfall, and the deaths of so many of their companions in misfortune, must be a twisted tribute to what must be described as the undeniable charisma of Gregor MacGregor, and must also help to explain how it was that he preyed on human weakness and credulity to carry out arguably one of the most ambitious confidence tricks in history.
The man to whom such fierce but misplaced loyalty had been attached was now, needless to say, conspicuously absent. Hastie wrote that, while stranded in Belize, he and his fellow colonists “experienced great attention and assistance from Sir Gregor's agent in London, with himself being in Paris.” No doubt the agent to whom he referred also continued to harbour faith in MacGregor. Yet it is extraordinary that these men drew no inference from MacGregor's absence at a time when he must have known that the survivors were on their way home, or from his failure to return to London when their arrival had been reported and he was being showered with what Hastie would presumably have regarded as unwarranted opprobrium.
Had they minded to pay the slightest attention to all the evidence that was accumulating against MacGregor, instead of merely dismissing it as the libels of his enemies, they would have understood at once that he had done what we now know he always did. When the course of events which he himself had set in motion turned round to threaten him directly he fled, leaving others to suffer the consequences.
“MacGregor preyed on human weakness and credulity to carry out one of the most ambitious confidence tricks in history.”
While Hastie published an entire book completely exonerating MacGregor from blame for the fatal fiasco, a loyal agent called Major Richardson issued libel writs against some newspapers on behalf of the Cazique, while another interested supporter called Colonel Hippisley wrote, “to refute enthusiastically the bare-faced calumnies of a hireling press!” He went on to present a brief and largely fictitious biography of MacGregor, with a suitably dramatic account of his heroics in the service of Venezuela—omitting his famous defeats and cowardly escapes such as at Porto Bello, and at Rio de la Hacha, and his later bizarre interlude as self-proclaimed Emperor of Amelia Island in Florida. And he castigated any journalist who dared to designate him by the title of “penniless adventurer”, in referring to the Poyais affair. Large sums of money, he asserted, had been expended in attempts to settle this fertile country; but the greed of the agents employed, their “disgraceful abuse of the funds entrusted to their disposal,” and the “malignity of the Belize merchants” and colonial authorities had hampered the scheme—a “deep state” argument from the nineteenth century.
MacGregor himself, however, appeared to take little time to reflect in Paris, and if he was at all remorseful, he had a strange way of showing it. Not long after his arrival in the French capital, he started the Poyais pitch all over again. His initial investment may have evaporated, but his mastery of the art of persuasion was undiminished. In a matter of months, he had a new group of settlers and investors ready to go. France, though, was rather more stringent and bureaucratic than Britain in its passport requirements, and when the government saw a flood of applications for a country no one had heard of, a commission was set up to investigate the matter. MacGregor was thrown in jail to join other colleagues already imprisoned, after briefly evading Parisian justice. His inclination, he said, had been to surrender himself to the police as soon as he knew a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Artifice and evasion, he went on, were foreign to his character, and he refused to practise them even when threatened by great danger. However, he had been advised against trusting in justice by “those whose counsel he had a right, in some measure, to make the guide of his conduct.”
Having escaped a longer sentence, with a Belgian investor taking the brunt of the punishment, MacGregor quietly returned to Edinburgh, and slowly started to refloat Poyaisian possibilities. But he found that the world was changing. The interests of businessmen and investors had started to move away from South America. One reason for this was that the new Republics owed British bondholders a total of nearly £27 million in unredeemed loans and interest payments on them—though that sum, of course, did not include the indebtedness of Poyais.
North America, which was rapidly industrialising, was a much better prospect, and throughout the 1830s, both federal and state governments found no shortage of takers for their stocks and bonds. The United States also became one of the favourite destinations for British emigrants, along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which were heavily promoted by a British government prepared to finance the foundation of settlements there as part of its (rapid) expansion of an empire.
Poyais had had its day, and so had Cazique MacGregor—or indeed ‘President’ as he now styled himself in the false documents that he produced. His last recorded transactions on behalf of the country he had invented took place in 1837, with the sale of some land certificates. Thereafter, MacGregor might have passed the rest of his days not only in obscurity but in penury as well, had he not possessed such boldness, delusions of grandeur and total lack of remorse.
When a letter from General Gregor MacGregor arrived on the desk of President José Antonio Páez in Caracas, it awakened a flood of memories for the premier of Venezuela. Victory had erased the stains of defeat at Porto Bello and Rio de la Hacha, and the country was in a mood to honour the great deeds of its revolutionary past. Páez instructed one of his staff to reply to MacGregor, telling him that he would be most welcome to return to Venezuela and to benefit from what was certainly due to him.
No details are available of how MacGregor obtained a sea passage, but sometime in 1839 he appeared in Caracas, where confirmation of his former military rank was gazetted and he was awarded both his back pay and his general's pension. The money was sufficient to allow him to live in the capital in some style, and to indulge in one of his favourite pastimes, regaling all who would listen with dramatic stories of his military adventures, from the Peninsular War to the rout of the Spaniards at Rio de la Hacha. He continued to play up to the paradigms of power for the era: a veteran of the empire, a decorated military man, a liberator of the colonies, a victor.
And so it was that on 4th December 1845, the fabulist Gregor MacGregor died in Caracas, just three weeks short of his fifty-ninth birthday, and along with him, the fatal fable of Poyais.
This is Part I of a three-part essay. Read Part II here.
