Upon deliberation, my favorite part:

He led the landing party personally on 29 June 1817 with the words: “I shall sleep either in hell or Amelia tonight!” The Spanish commander at Fort San Carlos, with 51 men and several cannon, vastly overestimated the size of MacGregor’s force and surrendered without either side firing a shot.

Spanish forces congregated on the mainland opposite Amelia, and MacGregor and most of his officers decided on 3 September 1817 that the situation was hopeless and that they would abandon the venture. MacGregor announced to the men that he was leaving, explaining vaguely that he had been “deceived by my friends.”

He turned over the command to one of his subordinates,** a former Pennsylvania congressman** named Jared Irwin, and he boarded the Morgiana with his wife on 4 September 1817 with an angry crowd looking on and hurling insults at him. He waited offshore for a few days, then left on the schooner Venus on 8 September.

Irwin’s troops defeated two Spanish assaults and were then joined by 300 men under Louis-Michel Aury, who held Amelia for three months before surrendering to American forces, who held the island “in trust for Spain” until the Florida Purchase in 1819.

Two weeks later, the MacGregors arrived at Nassau in the Bahamas, where he arranged to have commemorative medallions struck bearing the Green Cross motif and the Latin inscriptions Amalia Veni Vidi Vici (“Amelia, I Came, I Saw, I Conquered”) and Duce Mac Gregorio Libertas Floridarium (“Liberty for the Floridas under the leadership of MacGregor”).

He made no attempt to repay those who had funded the Amelia expedition.

Press reports of the Amelia Island affair were wildly inaccurate, partly because of misinformation disseminated by MacGregor himself.

Imagine what this man could do social media.

Oh, and he his born shortly thereafter was named

spoiler

Gregorio, Gregor MacGregor fathered Gregorio MacGregor