Filibustering with Gregor MacGregor

I've been dipping into a Project Gutenberg book about the Spanish-American war recently. Interesting reading - I knew the vague outlines of the fighting and the colonies that changed hands but I'd never heard about the Battleship Maine incident or the other reasons why the war started.

Anyway I was most confused when I came to a chapter that talked about the 'filibustering' of Americans in Spanish-occupied Cuba. Previously I'd thought this term only referred to a parliamentary technique where representatives time out a bill they disagree with by talking incessantly so as not to allow the opposition to get a word in edgeways.

Apparently this political meaning derives from an earlier military activity. The political tactic was seen as the sort of sneaky technique that a filibuster would engage in. A filibuster was something like a freebooter in British English - a piratical individual who attempted to launch revolutions in foreign countries through military intervention.

While skimming through some web pages on this I came across the sort of story that Neal Stephenson (I'm reading 'The Confusion' at the moment) would love. Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish filibuster who fought alongside Simon Bolivar in the South American wars of independence. However, after leaving Latin America he decided to skip the hassle of actually taking over a country and instead simply said he had. He sold land in the fictional country of Poyais and even sent a ship full of colonists out to live there (most of them died).

Have a read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_MacGregor

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gregor-Macgregor-Land-That-Never/dp/0755310802