by Gideon Defoe
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 se
ttled 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.
The Principality of Trinidad
1893–5
Population: 0
Cause of death: telephones
Today: part of Brazil
///beret.private.distorting
There is the nice Trinidad which everyone knows about, the one in the Caribbean with the beaches and the palm trees, but there is also a comparatively rubbish Trinidad – an island in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil, full of jagged rocks, the occasional turtle and a lot of miserable crabs.
It was the less-good Trinidad that got the attention of James Harden-Hickey. Born in San Francisco but having moved to republican Paris when he was kid, Harden-Hickey was a fan of royalty in that full-set-of-mail-order-commemorative-Diana-plates kind of way. He started a newspaper that was so offensively pro-monarchy that it led him to multiple duels and dozens of lawsuits. By 1880 he had published 11 novels (some with plots ‘borrowed’ from Jules Verne), most of which were deeply anti-democratic in tone. He also wrote a book about the aesthetics of suicide, which included a list of poisons.
While on his extremely circuitous way to Tibet – having been kicked out of France on account of all the lawsuits – Harden-Hickey noticed a tiny island. It was, so far as he could tell, unclaimed by anyone. Too good an opportunity for a man who despised democracy to ignore, he proclaimed himself James I, Prince of Trinidad.
This ‘principality’ already had a bit of history to it. The Portuguese had tried to settle there years before but gave it up as a bad job. A persistent rumour of buried treasure had seen several expeditions to the island,* none of which came to anything. But Harden-Hickey was determined to put the place on the map. Partially bankrolled by his industrialist father-in-law, who he complained about constantly – which seems a little unfair given how much the man seemed to tolerate his son-in-law’s stupid schemes – he established an embassy in New York and had a flashy crown designed by a firm of jewellers. He tried to raise some extra cash by establishing an order of chivalry, selling bonds for 200 dollars that would get you free passage to the new kingdom.
Unfortunately for his grand scheme, by 1895 telecommunications had started to be a thing, and the British were laying a transatlantic cable to Brazil. Trinidad happened to be a convenient stopping-off point along the route, and so the British Empire claimed it as its own.† The suddenly deposed prince wrote angry letters from his New York embassy denouncing this bit of imperialism.‡ But Harden-Hickey’s overly generous father-in-law drew the line at helping him fund a ludicrous plan to get revenge by invading England from Ireland, and so he slipped into a bitter depression. By 1898, widely mocked in the media, he booked into a hotel in El Paso, where he killed himself using one of the poisons suggested in his own book. The Los Angeles Herald from the time bleakly noted that ‘Baron Harden Hickey Prefers to Be a Deceased Gentleman’.
* Probably lies: the treasure rumour is so stuffed with pirate clichés (dying breath of an old seafarer, etc., etc.), it’s amazing anyone ever took it seriously enough to go looking for it. But they did, with one expedition reporting: ‘[I surveyed] great trenches, the piled-up mounds of earth, the uprooted rocks, with broken wheelbarrows and blocks, worn-out tools, and other relics of our three months strewn over the ground; and it was sad to think that all the energy of these men had been spent in vain.’
† The British claim to the island, based on the tenuous fact that English astronomer Edmond Halley had once visited it, also failed, and Brazil successfully took it over in 1897. Today it is a Brazilian naval base.
‡ Hickey’s New York embassy is now a fashion store.
The Fiume Endeavour
1919–20
Population: 60,000
Languages: Italian, Hungarian, German, Venetian
Cause of death: tails
Today: part of Croatia
///teaspoons.rooftop.mattress
In the aftermath of World War I, the Big Four powers redrew the map of Europe with the (100 per cent successful) aim of preventing any more trouble in the Balkans. The largely Italian-speaking Fiume ended up in newly formed Yugoslavia. US president Woodrow Wilson earmarked it as a potential HQ for the League of Nations, but the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio – flagrant self-publicist, would-be necromancer, womaniser, terrible teeth – had other ideas.
‘The eyebrows drawn in such a pure line as to give something indefinably virginal to the melancholy of the big eyes. The beautiful half-open mouth.’ This is Gabriele D’Annunzio’s description of his own face. Ernest Hemingway also described him, but typically he was pithier: he thought D’Annunzio was ‘a jerk’.
Evidence to back up Hemingway’s opinion:
D’Annunzio’s kids weren’t allowed to call him ‘papa’, they had to call him ‘maestro’.
He got out of a lunch date by sending his chauffeur to explain that ‘he’s gone up in a balloon and might not be back for ages’.
He basically invented all the trappings of fascism that still hang about today.
In September 1919, D’Annunzio drove into the city of Fiume at the head of his ‘legionnaires’, an ultra-violent piratical fan rabble. The Ital
ian army – expressly ordered to stop him – gave a collective ‘more than my pay grade’ shrug and let him continue on his way. As an ardent nationalist, D’Annunzio’s intention was to claim Fiume on behalf of Italy, but Italy – or at least the government of Prime Minister Francesco Nitti – didn’t want anything to do with this circus. So, having taken the place over, he found himself in charge of his own tiny fiefdom, and set about making it a ‘beacon for the world’. This translated as ‘a lot of ice cream and borderline anarchy’.
Beyond really liking torpedoes and thinking that death was sexy, D’Annunzio couldn’t be said to have a coherent political philosophy, but he very much enjoyed styling it out. He issued decrees and proclamations and nailed them up around town, only to change his mind and issue a contradictory set later the same day. He decked everywhere out with flowers, because he was a big fan of flowers. If you could ignore the occasional lynching and didn’t mind the endless speeches crammed with those rhetorical flourishes that dictators everywhere would soon adopt as their own, life in Fiume was a party. D’Annunzio even appointed World War I flying ace Guido Keller as his ‘Action Secretary’. Keller, a keen naturist, spent as much time as possible naked, and slept in the same bed as his pet eagle. It is also said that he once crashed his plane in a field next to a donkey, took a shine to the donkey while doing repairs, strapped the donkey to his plane’s fuselage and flew it back to Fiume as a gift for his boss.
