Copyright

Dedication

For Elise

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Introduction

7  Chancers & Crackpots

8  The Kingdom of Sarawak

9  The Kingdom of Bavaria

10  The Islands of Refreshment

11  The Kingdom of Corsica

12  The State of Muskogee

13  The Republic of Sonora

14  The Kingdom of Araucanía & Patagonia

15  The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace

16  Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

17  The Principality of Trinidad

18  The Fiume Endeavour

19  The Kingdom of Sedang

20  Mistakes & Micronations

21  The Republic of Cospaia

22  New Caledonia

23  The Principality of Elba

24  Franceville

25  The Republic of Vemerana

26  The Soviet Republic of Soldiers & Fortress-Builders of Naissaar

27  Neutral Moresnet

28  The Republic of Perloja

29  The Quilombo of Palmares

30  The Free State of Bottleneck

31  The Tangier International Zone

32  Ottawa Civic Hospital Maternity Ward

33  Lies & Lost Kingdoms

34  The Republic of Goust

35  Poyais

36  The Great Republic of Rough & Ready

37  Libertalia

38  The Kingdom of Sikkim

39  The Kingdom of Axum

40  Dahomey

41  The Most Serene Republic of Venice

42  The Golden Kingdom of Silla

43  Khwarezmia

44  Puppets & Political Footballs

45  The Republic of Formosa

46  The Republic of West Florida

47  Manchukuo

48  The Riograndense Republic

49  Maryland in Africa

50  The Republic of Texas

51  The Congo Free State

52  Ruthenia (Carpatho-Ukraine)

53  The People’s Republic of Tannu Tuva

54  The Republic of Salò

55  The German Democratic Republic

56  Bophuthatswana

57  The Republic of Crimea

58  Yugoslavia

59  Flags

60  Anthems

61  Select Bibliography

62  Acknowledgements

63  Also by Gideon Defoe

64  About the Author

65  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Introduction

Generous to a Fault, they Died Doing What they Loved, Exporting Tin

Countries die. Sometimes it’s murder. Sometimes it’s an accident. Sometimes it’s because they were too ludicrous to exist in the first place. Every so often they explode violently. A few slip away unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either ‘got too greedy’ or ‘Napoleon turned up’. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence.

These are the obituaries of the nations that fell off the map. The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. A book about dead nations can’t really do that, because it’s impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff – there’s far too much of it. The life stories of the sadly deceased involve a catalogue of chancers, racists, racist chancers, con men, madmen, people trying to get out of paying taxes, mistakes, lies, stupid schemes and a lot of things that you’d file under the umbrella term of ‘general idiocy’. Because of this – and because treating nation states with too much respect is maybe the entire problem with pretty much everything – these accounts do not respectfully add to all the earnest flag-saluting in the world, however nice some of the flags are.

If you’re a contestant on Pointless and want a book that sticks to a firm definition of what a country is, you are owed an apology.* You could write a very dry essay on all the failed attempts to define what counts as a ‘country’, and if very dry essays are your thing then there are already a fair few out there. None of them get particularly close to an answer. There is something in biology called ‘the species problem’. The problem being: after years of arguing about it, nobody can agree what criteria actually define a ‘species’. Countries are no different. We switch definitions depending on whether we’re at the United Nations, playing football, singing in Eurovision or buying cheese. It’s a mess.

Having said that, here are some arbitrary rules: I’ve avoided delving too far into the past, because talking about ancient places as ‘nation states’ is sort of meaningless when the idea itself didn’t exist until the last few hundred years. I’ve ignored empires and colonies. I’ve left out places where the name has changed but the shape on the map has stayed the same. I’ve then immediately forgotten those rules by including Silla, Axum, New Caledonia and the Congo Free State. Please address angry letters about that to Richard Osman or the UN Secretary-General. Or just pretend it’s ‘in the tradition of Herodotus’, which is a fancy way of saying that the story is more important than getting bogged down in endless caveats (caveat: caveats are good, and you should be rightfully suspicious of anything that tries to sum up the history of a place in 500 words).

If ex-nations seem unimportant in the big scheme of things then it’s worth remembering that, like a Marvel superhero cash cow, countries don’t always stay dead. Humans live in a constant state of changing their minds about the type and number of other humans they want to be categorised with, so we oscillate from tiny blobs to huge empires and back again, and there’s no reason to assume that process will ever stop. Within a decade, some of these geographical zombies might claw their way out of the graveyard and back into the atlas.

Please send hard currency in lieu of flowers. ALL HAIL NEUTRAL MORESNET.

A note on the locations: These maps use the what3words geocoding system. Instead of latitude and longitude, a set of three randomly assigned words can be used to uniquely identify the location of anything in the world, down to a resolution of three metres squared. One of the benefits of this is that it’s much easier to remember three words than a string of numbers.

Visit what3words.com for more information.

* Another apology: a lot of these places are the stories of Posh White Guys, which is an unavoidable product of a time when only Posh White Guys felt entitled enough to go and set up countries.

Chancers & Crackpots

The Kingdom of Sarawak

1841–1946

Population: between 8,000 (1841) and 600,000 (1946)

Capital: Kuching

Languages: English, Iban, Melanau, Bidayuh, Sarawak Malay, Chinese

Currency: Sarawak dollar

Cause of death: sold to the British

Today: part of Malaysia

///compound.melons.orchestra

While still a school kid, James Brooke declared his intention to run away to sea. He got as far as his gran’s garden in Reigate. This combination of a lust for adventure, being slightly overdramatic and messing stuff up would be the main themes running through the rest of his life.

No less determined to see the world by the time he was a teen, he joined the army, where his glorious military career ended as soon as it began. Charging into battle he was immediately shot, possibly in the lung, possibly somewhere significantly worse.*

After a painful recuperation, Brooke tried again. He already knew that his fabulously wealthy father was a soft touch, because when his brother had asked for an elephant, Brooke Senior obligingly had one shipped over at huge expense. James didn’t want an elephant. He wanted a boat. Daddy obliged.

With his new toy, Brooke sailed for Borneo: the nineteenth-century poster child for savage, lush exoticism. The indigenous population, the Dayak, was divided into complicated rival factions, constantly skirmishing with each other, though mostly in the form of violent dance-offs. Brooke successfully played the competing groups against each other – taking the side of the ‘land dayaks’, rather than the piratical ‘sea dayaks’ (a terminology that he invented). Bringing a measure of order to the local chaos, he was awarded a chunk of territory by a grateful Sultan of Brunei, who had wrongly assumed that Brooke, very much a private citizen chancer, somehow represented the British Empire. He was also given a pet orangutan called Betsy.

Aged just 38, he had his own kingdom. ‘I am really becoming a great man, dearest mother,’ Brooke wrote in a letter home, displaying all the modest self-effacement that rich English Victorian white dudes are generally famous for. But in an era of greedy Brits abroad, Brooke only registers as about a five-out-of-ten on the Imperialistic Git scale. He seems to have genuinely wanted the best for ‘his people’, albeit in the patronising paternalistic way of the time. He set up a court of justice to bring law to his new domain, and famously sentenced a man-eating crocodile to death (because, though he respected and sympathised with the animal, he didn’t want the other crocodiles to get the wrong idea about what was ‘acceptable behaviour’). The local Dayak population were keen headhunters,† an activity Brooke tried semi-successfully to discourage – and however much of a cultural relativist you are, that’s probably not the worst thing in the world.

At first, Brooke became a national hero back in Britain. But in a rare bit of imperial navel-gazing, some wondered if swanning off and starting your own kingdom was perhaps a Bit Much. Political enemies accused him of massacring innocents. Brooke claimed they were pirates. There was an enquiry, which in the usual style of government enquiries quickly got bogged down in weird little details, like trying to define what a pirate was. Did pirates have to have sails? What if they just had paddles? Predictably, nothing came of it.

Sarawak slid into debt, and Brooke’s local crush‡ was killed during a Chinese insurrection. He became increasingly depressed and hoped the United Kingdom would buy the country off him, but they weren’t keen. So the rule of the ‘White Rajahs’ bumbled on, with the title passing to Brooke’s nephew, Charles, who did a decent job of getting the place back on its feet, and whose most distinguishing feature was a glass eye (purchased at a taxidermist’s and intended for an albatross – though one rumour suggested that he had a range of different fake eyes from different creatures, to wear according to his mood). Charles in turn was succeeded by his son, Vyner. Vyner had a difficult time of it. He had been forbidden from eating jam as a child because his dad deemed it ‘effeminate’ and grew up so socially anxious that he would hide from guests in a cupboard. Hiding in a cupboard wasn’t going to be enough to avoid World War II and the Japanese invasion that came with it. Vyner fled to Australia. Once the war was over he briefly regained his kingdom, only to find it bombed to bits. With nothing left in the Sarawak coffers to rebuild, Vyner faced up to the inevitable. He finally persuaded the British to take it off his hands in exchange for a big lump of cash and all the jam he could eat.

* Probably lies: it seems likely that, in an era when homosexuality was punishable by death, the rumour that Brooke had been shot through the penis was just a neat way to explain away his perpetual bachelordom.

† The Dayak viewed headhunting as means of consecrating important events. It was considered extreme bad luck not to give a human skull to your wife at the birth of your child.

‡ James Brooke seems to have fallen for the local rajah’s brother, Badrudeen, and wrote a lot of torturously evasive diary entries about him.

The Kingdom of Bavaria

1805–1918

Population: circa 6.5 million (1910)

Capital: Munich

Languages: Bavarian, Upper German

Currency: Bavarian gulden, German goldmark

Cause of death: bad genes and Bismarck

Today: part of Germany

///subtexts.photos.dietary

Every morning, Ludwig II, the fourth King of Bavaria, would have his barber tease out his hair into a weird bouffant that made his head look massive. He claimed that without his daily coiffure he could not enjoy his food. If a servant happened to accidentally stare at him and his big hair for too long, Ludwig would empty a washbasin over them. That’s what a few hundred years of royal inbreeding gets you.

Bavaria existed as part of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries, but it was only after Napoleon steamrollered Austria in 1805 that it became a kingdom. The relatively normal King Maximilian helped defeat the French and managed to expand the country’s borders as a reward for his troubles. Maximilian was followed by his son Ludwig. Ludwig I was both a patron of the arts and a notorious lothario* (he commissioned a series of portraits of ‘famous beauties of the day’) but the old lech (61) met his match in Lola Montez (28). An Irish dancer posing as an exotic Andalusian, Lola had already barrelled through Europe, leaving chaos in her wake. She’d caused a riot in Warsaw, shocked high society in Paris, and had a scrape with the cops in Berlin. When she arrived in Munich she shacked up with Ludwig and persuaded him to liberalise the place, which didn’t win him many friends among the ultra-conservative Catholic aristocracy. At the same time, revolutionary fervour swept through Europe in 1848, and Ludwig, besieged from all sides, decided to abdicate, correctly guessing that a nice retirement pottering around his garden would be a lot more fun than being a head of state.†

His son, Maximilian II, valiantly tried to keep the kingdom from getting hoovered up by Otto von Bismarck, who was now embarked upon his grand project to unify Germany under a dominant Prussia. But the new king inconveniently died young in 1864, which brought on the reign of Ludwig II and his big hair. It’s unfair to say that Ludwig didn’t care about ruling Bavaria – he worked quite hard at the job – but it certainly wasn’t where his heart lay. That was with opera. More specifically, the operas of genius/all-round horrible anti-Semite Richard Wagner. Ludwig was Wagner’s number-one fan. He built his idol a world-famous opera house. He wrote stacks of letters to the composer, none of which contain a single joke. He almost bankrupted himself constructing over-the-top fairy-tale castles (sketched out by Wagner’s stage designer). Contemporary wags started referring to Wagner as ‘Lola Two’. Faced with the task of having to juggle loyalties to wily Bismarck and the Austrians, all Ludwig wanted to do was run away with his pal to Switzerland. He backed the wrong side in the Austro-Prussian War, and by 1870 had been forced, distracted by toothache, to join victorious Prussia’s North German Confederation.‡ He at least managed to maintain a degree of independence for his kingdom – they kept their own army, railways and postal service, and he could go on building his fantastically camp castles.

The strain of trying to navigate Bavaria’s path through the tangled politics of the times started to show. The revisionist take is that Ludwig wasn’t mad in any medically recognised way, but that his doctors plotted with political enemies to label him as such. It’s impossible to say, though nobody disputes that he became troublingly erratic and, if not mad, then certainly a bit of a dick. He took to ordering people to be executed for sneezing (orders which were quietly ignored). At one point he tried to hire bandits in a bizarre scheme to capture the Prussian crown prince and have him ‘chained up in a cave’. He’d organise expensive performances of plays for which he was the only audience member.§

Concerned ministers or political rivals (delete at your discretion) decided enough was enough and took him away to be ‘cured’. Locked in the grounds of Berg Castle, Ludwig went for an evening walk with his physician. The bodies of both men were found a little later floating in the nearby lake. Whether misadventure or suicide or good old-fashioned murder, the kingdom wouldn’t recover. The title officially passed to Ludwig’s brother Otto at first, but he was definitely insane, and so his uncle Luitpold ruled as regent. For the next few years Bavaria passively slipped further and further into the clutches of the German Empire, almost without anyone noticing. It was an oddly underwhelming end for such a headline-grabbing dynasty.

* Ludwig I’s wedding was the first Oktoberfest. Bavaria would later make the adoption of its beer purity law a condition of joining the German Empire.

† After her stint in Bavaria, Lola headed to California where appreciative miners would supposedly throw gold nuggets at her.

‡ Bismarck did not endear himself to the Bavarians when he described them as ‘half-way between an Austrian and a human being’.

§ Ludwig II tried to go on holiday with an actor friend, but his efforts to travel incognito went awry when a boat he hired in Lucerne turned up decked out in Bavarian flags and the captain greeted him as ‘your majesty’.

The Islands of Refreshment

1811–16

Population: 4

Cause of death: a boating accident

Today: a British Overseas Territory

///untiring.cranes.skimmed

Today there is a sign on Tristan da Cunha welcoming visitors to ‘the Remotest Island’. 1,500 miles from anywhere, this isn’t tourist-board hyperbole. The Portuguese explorer Tristão da Cunha spotted the tiny volcanic speck in 1506, but decided it looked too unappealing to stop off at. It wasn’t until 1811 that the first would-be permanent settler showed up, a young adventurer from Salem, Massachusetts, named Jonathan Lambert.*

He’d hitched a lift on a whaling ship, along with a dog and three companions. One of these, Thomas Currie, had been promised 12 Spanish dollars a month to help set up a new country. They rowed ashore and Lambert boldly announced the land as his own, ‘solely for myself and my heirs for ever’. He instantly embarked on a rebranding exercise, collectively rechristening da Cunha and its two equally windswept neighbours (‘Nightingale’ and ‘Inaccessible’) with a more approachable-sounding name – the Islands of Refreshment. This welcoming kingdom had the stated aim of providing refreshment to passing travellers – ‘all vessels, of whatever description, and belonging to whatever nation, will visit me for that purpose’. Lambert had, in effect, set up a glorified motorway service station, but in the stupidest place possible: an obscure part of the Atlantic where the only passing ships, as far from civilisation as they could be, were inclined to nick stuff rather than pay for it.†

Just like a real motorway services, things were bleak. The new inhabitants butchered an enormous number of seals, hoping to make enough oil from the blubber to sell to passing mariners to pay for a nicer boat. They ate a lot of turnips, their only substitute for bread. Life proved difficult. Then, in 1812, one year into the project, Lambert and two others disappeared: presumed drowned in a boating accident while out fishing. Thomas Currie – seething about never having been paid by his vanished boss – was left to fend for himself.

It was a grumpy Currie who recounted the whole sorry escapade to the British when they turned up four years later. They’d come to claim the island as a naval base, worried it might otherwise be used as a stopping-off point from which to mount a rescue of Napoleon, newly exiled on St Helena. It seems like precautionary overkill, because St Helena is still 1,343 miles away, but they’d learned their lesson from the whole Elba fiasco.

Swallowed by the British Empire, the independent Islands of Refreshment were no more, but this new occupation finally led to a slightly more successful community getting established there. Nowadays they even have a British postcode.‡ Though they also have several cases of progressive blindness caused by retinitis pigmentosa, because Tristan da Cunha has become an unfortunate case study in why tiny gene pools are Not A Great Thing.

* Probably lies: Lambert thought he was the first person to ever stay on the island, but the presence of pigs suggests other people, possibly Dutch traders, must have stopped off first, at least briefly.

† Today, it is still a six-day boat journey from the nearest mainland, South Africa.

‡ Evacuated to Hampshire in 1961 after a volcanic eruption, virtually the entire population voted to return to the island, so it can’t be as bad as Currie made out.

The Kingdom of Corsica

March–November 1736

Capital: Cervione

Languages: Italian, Corsican, French, German

Currency: soldi

Cause of death: in-fighting and bad debts

Today: part of France

///auctioning.politicians.fatten

Theodore Stephan Freiherr von Neuhoff – of ‘fine form and a handsome face’ – left a trail of debts, inspired an opera and a couple of novels, got punched by jealous husbands, and basically did all the eighteenth-century Errol Flynn stuff you could hope for.

Born into a semi-noble family in Cologne, he joined the army at 17, where he started a lifelong habit of racking up huge gambling losses.* Then he did a runner across Europe, marrying one of the Queen of Spain’s maids en route. Whose jewellery he then stole, before heading back to Paris where he used the swag to invest in one of the first financial bubbles.†

Aged 26, bankrupt and living in south London, von Neuhoff hid in bed to avoid his creditors, read books about highwaymen and got heavily into alchemy. He quit England and headed back to the continent, where he had an affair with a nun. The only thing more illegal than having an affair with a nun was working as a ‘magicotherapist’, so he did that too, telling people he could predict lottery numbers, exorcise demons and make love potions.‡ While plying this slippery trade in Genoa, he encountered some Corsican rebels. The rebels were after self-determination, free from the yoke of the Genoese. Everyone hated Genoa by this point in history, and the Corsicans had a legitimate grievance – they were regarded as ‘barbarians’ by their rulers, and forbidden from hunting or fishing.§ Partly attracted by the romance of helping the plucky underdog, mostly attracted to the opportunity of smuggling coral, Theodore agreed to help them, on the proviso that, should this all work out, he be declared king. He borrowed money – borrowing money being his main skill – and purchased arms for the cause. He sought alliances in Turkey and Morocco but, sympathetic as they were, nobody wanted to get involved. So, he returned to Corsica, decked out in his new king outfit (fur-trimmed robe, plumed tricorn, gilded cane) and – either by luck or unexpected military skill – drove the Genoese back to a couple of fortified enclaves.

Theodore then issued a set of articles: there would be low taxes, he would found a university and no foreigners could be king (apart from him). He got rid of the unpopular attacar custom, which dictated that a man who touched or was seen alone with a woman was required to marry her, regardless of either party’s feelings on the matter. After a good harvest, Corsica improbably found itself doing better under its dubious king than anyone had the right to expect.

But the island famous for its vendettas was never going to be an easy place to run.¶ One of the Corsican rebels in particular, Giacinthio Paoli, had it in for Theodore. By nature liberal, and always with one eye on the financial side of things, Theodore had proclaimed religious tolerance of Jews – which was a step too far for Paoli and the conservative Corsicans. When the Genoese posted up notices telling the islanders about their king’s iffy past, Paoli happily stoked the rumours and discontent. Theodore was forced to flee, first to Florence and eventually to Amsterdam, where he went on trying to raise the funds he needed to secure his kingdom.

In an Amsterdam pub, one of his creditors recognised him and Theodore’s luck ran out. He ignobly offered Corsica to Spain if they’d pay his debt for him, but Spain refused. Thrown into a debtor’s jail,** but a huckster to the end, he still managed to produce a prospectus trying to lure investors with lucrative-sounding tales of Corsica’s olive oil, almonds and figs, despite the obvious lost cause of the whole enterprise. If he had been alive today, he would almost certainly be raising venture capital millions for pointless juicers.

* Theodore would try to pay off his creditors with promissory notes which, when opened, turned out to be blank bits of paper.

† The Mississippi scheme was the brainchild of John Law, a Scottish banker who invented most of the traits of bankers we still know and love – ruinous financial products, rampant speculation and a ridiculous property bubble that almost ruined France.

‡ Other jobs attempted by Theodore: ‘virtuoso’, ‘language teacher’ and ‘connoisseur of pictures’. During his magicotherapist years he went by the name ‘Baron von Syburg’.

§ One person who later tried to defend Genoa’s treatment of the Corsicans was Mussolini, which is not much of an endorsement.

¶ Corsica today has the highest per capita murder rate in Europe.

** Later in life, incarcerated in England, Theodore successfully campaigned to have a nicer prison built. He died in Soho, aged 62.

The State of Muskogee

1799–1803

Population: circa 50,000

Capital: Mikasuke

Languages: English, various Muskogean

Cause of death: a double cross

Today: part of Florida, USA

///live.bursting.smoke

In the eighteenth century, William Bowles, a bored 14-year-old in the US state of Maryland, joined a Loyalist regiment fighting on the side of the British in the American War of Independence. He found the military even duller than his previous life, and fast became ‘stir crazy and insubordinate’. Before long, his commanding officers had had enough of Bowles turning up late to everything and kicked him out, so he ran away to live with the Native Americans. He wasn’t unique in this – hundreds of white men threw in their lot with the locals – but he was unique in the size of his dreams.

Bowles envisaged ‘an entirely new nation state rising up out of the swamps’ under the leadership of – don’t drop your monocle in shock at this – William Bowles. It would be called Muskogee, after the Muscogee (or Creek) people, and it would be a self-governing ‘Indian nation’, right where what is now Florida starts to droop into the Gulf of Mexico. Here the indigenous Creek and Cherokee would live free from both the Spanish (currently in charge) and the Americans (looming ominously). The way the country would maintain this unlikely independence was by pledging loyalty to the British Empire, who would help defend it should the need arise. Note: if your plan involves the British coming to your rescue at any point, then it is a Bad Plan. Can’t emphasise this enough.

Nonetheless, Bowles left his Creek wife and headed off on a sort of glad-handing tour, trying to secure aid for the project. He went to Nova Scotia and the Bahamas and Quebec and finally London, where he petitioned George III (not yet loopy), introducing himself as ‘the leader of an independent and populous nation’.* The British gave a shrug and some vague words of tacit approval. Satisfied, Bowles got to work on designing a flag, because these types always jump straight to that. Flag and motto hammered out – ‘Liberty or death!’ – in 1792 he sailed into New Orleans, looking to sit down with the Spanish and come to an agreement that would avoid war. The Spanish governor listened hard and nodded along and suggested that it all sounded fine but advised Bowles that he should head over to Cuba to speak to some slightly higher-up authorities. Just to rubberstamp everything.

It was a trap. As soon as Bowles showed up in Cuba, the Spanish clapped him in irons and shipped him off to Cádiz. From there they shipped him another few thousand miles away to the Philippines – far enough, they felt, to be permanently out of their hair. Bowles wasn’t to be put off so easily. He borrowed a tenner and made his way to London, then booked passage back to America, where, in 1800, he tried it all again.

Bowles and 300 Creek warriors seized a Spanish fort and hoisted his flag. Near to present-day Tallahassee, he began building his capital. He unveiled bold plans to start a newspaper and a university. But news of a truce between Britain and Spain, coupled with growing doubts about the flamboyant Bowles’s skill as a statesman, meant the Creek had already lost faith in their would-be leader. They struck a deal behind his back: in exchange for debt forgiveness, they would turn him over to the Spanish once again.

For the second time, Bowles found himself a prisoner in Havana. This time there wouldn’t be an escape – refusing to eat, because he was understandably fed up by this point, Bowles wasted away. The Creek fared no better without him – the United States would soon swoop into Muscogee territory. The town Bowles had built, and the nation he had tried to lead, were all but wiped out by genocidal future-president Andrew Jackson, who got himself put on the twenty-dollar bill for his troubles.

* The title William Bowles awarded himself was ‘Director General and Commander-In-Chief of the Muskogee Nation’.

The Republic of Sonora

1853–4

Capital: La Paz

Cause of death: nobody took it seriously

Today: part of Mexico

///betrayed.plunge.debating

By 1848 the United States seemed to have stopped growing, and that annoyed a lot of people. Continual expansion – ‘Manifest Destiny’ – was regarded as a God-given right. If the government wasn’t up to the task, then it was down to individuals with the Right Stuff, individuals who would take that Manifest Destiny into their own strong, patriotic hands. This was the age of the filibusters, back when the term still referred to plundering adventurers rather than politicians talking for ages. Enter William Walker – five foot two, pale and slight, ‘as unprepossessing-looking a person as one would meet in a day’s walk’.

Walker had already studied medicine and law* and watched his fiancée die of yellow fever by the time he moved out west to San Francisco, where he managed to get sent to jail for writing an article criticising a local judge. He became briefly famous for a duel in which he was shot twice because he’d never used a revolver before and didn’t know how to work it properly. Not letting any of that dampen his spirits, he travelled to the Mexican-controlled region of Sonora, where he approached the government with a simple request: he wanted to turn the place into an American colony. A lot of Mexicans had headed north to work in California, Walker pointed out, and the land was now vulnerable to attack from the Apache. It would be in Mexico’s best interests for him to take over. Mexico unsurprisingly failed to follow his logic and turned him down. Without missing a beat, Walker returned to San Francisco where he set about selling bonds for his proposed new nation and started to raise an army. Men who had failed to strike lucky in the gold rush eagerly signed up, promised land rich in silver as a reward.

Walker’s tiny army, 50 or so strong, successfully seized the city of La Paz in Baja California. The eagle-eyed might note that La Paz is still a few hundred miles away from Sonora, but that didn’t stop Walker proclaiming it ‘a great victory’. Back in San Francisco, they went nuts for this news. Walker declared all of Baja California his, which was bold, if a bit meaningless.† The Mexicans attacked his new ‘capital’ in Ensenada but were held back. Unfortunately, at about this point Walker’s only boat sailed off unexpectedly (the captain possibly bribed by the prisoners on board) and he was left without any supplies. An already semi-farcical situation had become really farcical, but Walker took no notice whatsoever. He pressed on towards the east, and – again having barely done anything in terms of actual conquering – proclaimed the land successfully annexed, christened it the Republic of Sonora and named himself president.

Illness, desertions and bandits quickly reduced his very small army into a band of about 30. Even for someone with the Tom Cruise-like level of self-belief displayed by Walker, it was pretty obvious that you couldn’t seriously be considered to be running a country with a force of 30. He reluctantly trudged his men to the relative safety of the American fort at San Diego. They arrested him, because setting up countries in direct contravention of international treaties is fairly illegal. But at his trial, in the spirit of the time, it took a jury just eight minutes to acquit him.

It might have been a kindness if they hadn’t. Walker had gotten a taste for filibustering, and would later try the exact same trick in Nicaragua,‡ where he once again managed to become president/mess up/get captured/be sent back to the United States/get put on trial/have a jury instantly acquit him. A lesser/more sensible man would have called that a day. Not Walker. His final, fatal attempt to do it all for a third time saw him come unstuck in Honduras. This time though, when it all went wrong, Walker wound up facing a Honduran firing squad rather than an American jury. He was still only 36.

* Having grown up an obvious prodigy in Nashville, Tennessee, Walker – who liked to get about – attended both the University of Edinburgh and the University of Heidelberg.

† A newspaper of the day idly wondered why Walker didn’t save himself a lot of bother and simply claim to have conquered the whole of Mexico while he was busy claiming things.

‡ After a military defeat in Rivas, Nicaragua, he deliberately contaminated the local water wells with corpses, causing a cholera epidemic that killed thousands.

The Kingdom of Araucanía & Patagonia

1860–62

Capital: Perquenco (hypothetically)

Language: Mapudungu (hypothetically)

Cause of death: would-be king declared a lunatic

Today: part of Chile

///stargazing.shopkeepers.flogging

The indigenous Mapuche peoples of South America hadn’t been treated well by new arrivals to their lands – a sentence so predictable it’s almost not worth typing. They had done their best to hold off first the Incas and then the Spanish, but the establishment of an independent Chile in the middle of the nineteenth century proved disastrous for them. The Mapuche found themselves displaced and stateless. What they needed was a wily French lawyer. At least, that’s what wily French lawyer Orélie-Antoine de Tounens decided they needed. A wily French lawyer who could also be their king.

In 1858 de Tounens read a sixteenth-century epic poem about the conquest of Chile and liked it so much he decided to borrow 25,000 francs and set sail for a new life in the Andes.* He arrived at Coquimbo, a bustling port clinging to rocky hills, and set about learning Spanish. He bought himself a poncho to complement a look which was already very ‘failed magician’. After a couple of years hanging around the neighbourhood, he managed to arrange a meeting with a group of Mapuche tribal leaders. The deal he proposed was simple: Chile had no legal claim on the Mapuche territory. He would argue their case, help them find arms and win the French over to their side. In return, he would be elected Great Toqui, Supreme Chieftain of the Mapuches. It’s not totally clear to what extent the locals went along with this, but before long de Tounens had issued a decree, published in the Chilean newspapers. It announced Araucanía and Patagonia as an independent state.

He’d assumed that the French, who were rapidly losing their empire, would be interested in helping this new potential ally gain a foothold in the continent. They weren’t. When de Tounens tried to raise an army, the Chilean forces captured him. He was thrown in jail, and then a lunatic asylum. The French consulate managed to secure his release and he was shipped back home.

A Parisian court decided that his claims to the kingdom were bogus and agreed with Chile that de Tounens was mad. Royal decrees signed by non-existent ministers named ‘the chair’ didn’t help his case. De Tounens refused to give up, established an Araucanían newspaper – The Steel Crown – and soon attempted to return to his kingdom. Despite his fake passport, the Chilean authorities instantly recognised him. They deported him for a second time. On his final attempt at venturing to Araucanía he wound up getting robbed, was captured again and fell gravely ill, forcing him back to France once more.

In 1872, de Tounens had placed an advert announcing that he was seeking a bride – ‘a maid who would be willing to share my destiny … so that I might sire an heir’. This smooth line didn’t work, so after he died, miserable and still unrecognised as a legitimate king, his heir ended up being a random champagne salesman he had met on his travels. The crown of Araucanía has since changed hands down the years, and while Orélie’s ‘successors’ continue to squabble over a non-existent title, the Mapuche are still fighting for their land and their rights. Given that the rest of us are very into our mobile phones and there’s a lot of lithium buried in those ancestral lands, the odds are not on their side.

* De Tounens had big plans right from the start. ‘Forced to choose a career,’ he wrote, ‘I quickly made up my mind to study law, with the sole objective of preparing myself for my future endeavours as a king.’

The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace

1851–64

Population: 30 million (at greatest extent)

Capital: Tianjing (present-day Nanjing)

Currency: ‘Shengbao’ coinage

Cause of death: an unreliable prophet

Today: part of China

///pinks.hourglass.bins

In 1964, Pepsi ditched ‘The Sociables Prefer Pepsi’ as a slogan in favour of the slicker ‘Come alive! You’re in the Pepsi generation!’. When they exported this marketing campaign to China, their ad agency mistranslated it as the bold but misleading ‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave’. Even if this story is not as apocryphal as it sounds, it is very much not the worst case of things getting lost in translation between the East and West. For that, you need to go back to the first half of the nineteenth century, and a mistake that led to the deadliest civil war in history.

Hong Xiuquan was desperate to become a civil servant, but to do so he had to travel to the big city and pass an exam. He failed the first time. The second time he failed again, but on his way out of the exam someone handed him a Christian pamphlet: a slightly garbled translation of the Bible’s greatest hits, with added demons. Hong didn’t read the tract particularly thoroughly, but on the contents page he saw a symbol he recognised: the Chinese character for his own name. In a cosmic bit of bad luck hong means ‘flood’, and he noted that his namesake ‘destroyed every living thing upon the Earth’.

When he failed his exam for the third time, Hong had what today we’d probably recognise as a total nervous breakdown. He took to bed with a feverish vision, in which a bearded man gave him a sword. Reading through the pamphlet once again, confused chunks of his dream and the biblical tales tumbled together. The upshot was that Hong skipped a few logical steps and concluded that he must be the Chinese younger brother of Jesus, and that his mission was to rid the world of demons.

Word spread quickly through a febrile populace,* and a devoted cult grew up around Hong, known as the God Worshippers. Mao would later airbrush out the more bonkers religious component and celebrate the movement as the first workers’ uprising, which to an extent is what it was.† The ‘demons’ Hong believed he had to vanquish took the form of the oppressive Qing dynasty. Convinced of his destiny, Hong and his army managed to win a series of ever more bloody battles, culminating in the capture of the city of Nanjing, where he established the capital of his Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.

But the Qing fought back. Gradually, Hong’s God Worshippers found themselves on the losing side of what had become ‘total war’, with everything and everywhere a target.‡ By 1864, the enemy had the Heavenly Capital entirely surrounded. The fighting headed underground – Qing forces dug tunnels to get past the city’s impenetrable walls, while the God Worshippers dug counter-tunnels, flooding the enemy tunnels with sewage. Inside the blockaded city, starvation loomed. But Hong, serenely unperturbed, told his followers not to worry – instead of food they could eat ‘manna’. He never bothered to define the exact nature of this magical substance, but he himself took to eating old weeds from the palace grounds. Before very long he fell unsurprisingly ill, because rotten vegetation will do that. Twenty days later, he died.

Soon after Hong’s death, the Qing general Zeng Guoquan set off a series of explosions deep in the tunnels, and the walls of Nanjing fell. To really make their point, in a literal definition of overkill, the victorious Qing exhumed Hong’s body, beheaded him, burned the corpse and, finally, shot the ashes out of a cannon. Even Jesus’s younger brother couldn’t come back from that.§

* An important context is that the First Opium War with the drug-pushing British had left China on the edge by this point.

† Hong’s teachings included equality of the sexes (though they had to be segregated) and for the people to pool their resources, which is the bit Mao picked up on.

‡ Estimates of the number of dead are all over the place, but the most conservative guess puts it at 20 million. It might have been as many as 100 million.

§ Though it took another seven years after Hong’s death for the last vestiges of the God Worshippers to be wiped out.

Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

circa 1200–1888

Population: 12,000 (at maximum)

Capital: not a ‘capital’ as such, but Hanga Roa is the main bay

Language: Rapa Nui

Cause of death: a combination of rats, disease, not thinking things through, godawful Europeans

Today: part of Chile

///identification.repays.rats

In 1866, a boat arrived at Easter Island with two missionaries on board. Unfortunately, also on board: former arms dealer and all-round murderous psychopath Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier. Within 12 years he would have proclaimed himself king, wiped out most of the population and turned the entire island into a sheep ranch.

The origin myths of the indigenous Rapa Nui people tell of a primeval being called Makemake who failed to have sex with first a gourd, then a stone, but got lucky with a mound of soil, out of which emerged a human. Radiocarbon dating and mitochondrial DNA suggest a more recent Polynesian origin for the Rapa Nui, who seem to have emigrated to the island about 800 years ago. These first settlers soon settled down into two warring clans: the Tu’u to the west and the ’Oto ’Itu to the east. Each clan erected their own examples of the famous giant-headed moai sculptures, and then did their best to knock the other side’s efforts down.* Even when stuck in the middle of the ocean, humans will still find a way to disagree with approximately 50 per cent of their neighbours over some stupid thing.

Of course, the other skill humans are good at is ruining the environment, so the Rapa Nui set about doing that too. They cut down trees at a prodigious rate. Which they might have gotten away with, but they’d accidentally imported the Polynesian rat with them. The rats gobbled all the Jubaea nuts that would have provided new palm trees. Grass replaced wood as fuel, the population declined, the seabirds vanished, Eden became a desert.† This was a relative golden time compared to what came next.

In the nineteenth century, traders from Peru started to target the islanders, capturing an estimated half of the population. Tuberculosis and smallpox added to their woes. The Brits nicked a couple of sacred statues. Then the missionaries turned up, and the captain of their boat, Dutrou-Bornier. With a megalomaniacal zeal, he set about terrorising the place. First, he dabbled in his own bit of slave trading. Then he started buying up the island, piece by piece. He hoisted his own flag. He kidnapped local women – one of whom, Koreto, he took as a ‘wife’. On sales receipts for the land he was supposedly purchasing, she was recorded as ‘the Queen of Easter Island’.

When the missionaries tried to stop him, he attacked them. The islanders wrote a letter to the bishop of Tahiti requesting help, the first time they had ever sought outside assistance. The bishop asked the French navy to step in. They didn’t bother. The missionaries fled with as many islanders as could fit on their boat. Dutrou-Bornier set about building his sheep ranch.

In the end, the few remaining Rapa Nui took matters into their own hands. A small group ambushed and murdered Dutrou-Bornier,‡ but the damage had already been done. By the time of his death there were only 110 people left, 26 of them women. Not long after that, Chile – a country 2,000 miles away, with no Polynesian population – decided to stake its dubious claim. It employed an age-old contractual trick: the Chilean version of the paperwork made it clear that the island would become part of the territory of Chile. The Rapa Nui version simply referred to their being ‘a friend of the island’.

* ‘El Gigante’ is an unfinished moai statue that would have been over 20 metres tall if the islanders had ever been able to stand it up.

† Though some recent archaeological research posits that the Rapa Nui culture made a better fist of things than previously supposed, prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

‡ The specific event that supposedly led to Dutrou-Bornier’s murder was an argument about the poor quality of one of Queen Koreto’s dresses.

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