THE SOUTH SEA Company had never stopped being a company in love with financial tricks. For example, by 1715 the government had failed to make almost a million pounds of the interest payments due to the company and its shareholders on the debts that had been converted into stock at the Company’s founding. There was a simple solution to the problem: more financial alchemy, transmuting the interest arrears into South Sea capital—which in theory could have funded more trading adventures.
