by Gideon Defoe
* Goust’s claim to have had a resident live to 123 is doubtful. While the UN estimates there are well over 300,000 living centenarians in the world, only one person in history has been verified as having lived longer than 120.
† These days there are more high-tech ways of disposing of bodies: you can have yourself liquefied, or your ashes pressed into a vinyl record. Some parts of Papua New Guinea and Brazil used to go with the extremely eco-friendly practice of endocannibalism. Tibet had the ‘sky burial’ – i.e. being eaten by birds.
Poyais
1821–37
Currency: Poyais dollar (worthless)
Cause of death: crushing reality
Today: part of Honduras and Nicaragua
///punchline.maternally.threadlike
One fun new Christmas tradition is the Very Disappointing Winter Wonderland. Each year, someone sells lots of expensive tickets to a Santa-based holiday extravaganza and it turns out to be a car park in Catford with a couple of ratty plastic trees and a trestle table with a solitary grumpy teen dressed as an elf, and everybody gets duly upset. The country of Poyais was the same deal – just scaled up a bit.
Gregor MacGregor (somehow his real name, one of the few genuine things about him) was yet another decorated war hero turned shady businessman. In 1821 he surprised London’s high society by unexpectedly revealing that he was now the ‘Cazique’ of a country called Poyais. The title had been bestowed on him by the King of the Mosquito Coast (the eastern portion of modern-day Nicaragua and Honduras). And Poyais? ‘What do you mean you haven’t heard of Poyais? Perhaps you would care to read this 355-page guidebook, written by one Thomas Strangeways, who is definitely real and not a made-up pen name of me, Gregor MacGregor …’
The guide – complete with illustrations – detailed this remarkable and hitherto-overlooked nation. It told of rivers in which chunks of gold regularly washed up. It told of natives who weren’t just friendly but avidly Anglophile. There was a thriving port and city. Plans for an opera house. You could somehow harvest maize three times a year. And for the older members of the audience keen on getting their free pen, the moon was of such a special quality that ‘the smallest print is legible by her light’.*
Investors and potential settlers were hurried along with ‘One Time Only, Grab It While Stocks Last’ deals. It worked. MacGregor had picked his spot well: by the 1820s the Spanish Empire in South America was crumbling, and new nations were springing into existence. It was becoming a common thing for governments to raise funds in the City of London, and speculators were hungry for new opportunities. The only reason that Poyais hadn’t cropped up on anyone’s radar, MacGregor explained, was that a reluctance to antagonise the Spanish had stopped all its bountiful riches flowing out into the world. But now they were free to trade, and the sky was the limit.
He had another trick too: the bitter memories of the Darien fiasco a hundred years before. Here was a chance for fellow Scots to put the shame of ill-fated New Caledonia behind them. MacGregor soon packed a boat with willing colonists: bankers, artisans, doctors, civil servants, everything you needed for a new society. The unfortunate rubes made the long journey across the Atlantic. When they arrived they found lots of impenetrably lush jungle. And nothing else. No buildings, no city, no chunks of gold floating in rivers, a suspiciously normal-looking moon. A second expedition arrived months later and found only the first set of suckers, miserable and half-dead from tropical diseases.†
The obvious question is: why did MacGregor feel the need to take his scheme to the crazy lengths he did? He’d already carried out a successful scam in Florida and done a runner with the proceeds. He could have tried the same thing here, exiting with the cash before anyone had to sail to their doom. Perhaps he really did have dreams of running his own country. The Mosquito King had genuinely, it seems, ‘given’ MacGregor the territory – a whopping 12,500 square miles – in return for some ‘rum and trinkets’. The fact that a promise and a piece of paper couldn’t mean much fitted with the times: plenty of places had a similarly dubious start. Maybe MacGregor thought the settlers might somehow make a go of it. Maybe he was a bit of a sociopath. Whichever it was, when news of the colonists’ plight got back to London, his already shaky operation collapsed, and he hightailed it to France.‡ Where, obviously, he started the whole exact same ruse up again.§
* He also produced a series of adverts and pamphlets written in the hyperactive style of the late, great Stan Lee. ‘POYERS! It shall be my constant study to render you happy!’, ‘POYERS! Your future prosperity will be fully realised!’
† It is a measure of MacGregor’s personal charm that when the settlers found Poyais to be a big pile of nothing, they refused to blame him, instead pinning it on the ‘bad advice’ he must have received.
‡ In terms of sheer size of fraud, only Bernie Madoff has managed to top MacGregor since.
§ The French, a little more on the ball, arrested MacGregor. But he and his lawyer wrote a fictional 5,000-word character statement explaining what a great guy he was, and so they ended up acquitting him.
The Great Republic of Rough & Ready
7 April–4 July 1850
Population: circa 3,000
Cause of death: alcohol
Today: part of California, USA
///situated.displaying.indecision
Anywhere with ‘great’ in the title is a bit dubious. It smacks of trying too hard. Raises the suspicion that maybe you’re compensating for something. It’s the personalised number plate of national nomenclature. In the case of Rough and Ready, the thing it’s compensating for is almost certainly not being historically legitimate in the slightest, but that’s not going to stop it from being in this book, because it’s a daft story, and countries are just daft stories we tell each other. They’re all equally implausible once you get up close.
In 1849 it was gold rush time in California, and a company of miners set up the outpost of Rough and Ready in the lucrative foothills of the Sierra Nevada, near a spot where an 18-pound gold nugget had been unearthed. It quickly turned into a little boomtown of 3,000 people. But trouble came along in the form of two incidents: an unpopular state-wide mining tax, and a legal case in which a local, going by the honest-sounding name of ‘Joe Sweigart’, lost out to a non-local con man going by the much-less-honest-sounding name of ‘Boston Ravine Slicker’.* The upset citizens took a vote and decided to secede from the United States. Seceding from places had always been popular out west; it’s how the States got going in the first place, and it played into the American myth of rugged individualism. In the middle of the nineteenth century, people would have seceded from pretty much anything if they thought it would get them a free hat.
They drew up a constitution (basically a find-and-replace job on the US one), made a flag,† appointed a retired colonel as president and went on their distinctive way. Which was fine, until they headed over to a nearby town‡ to buy liquor for the upcoming Fourth of July party. Their neighbours refused to sell them the booze on the grounds that they were now ‘foreigners’. It was also pointed out that you couldn’t really celebrate the Fourth of July if you weren’t part of America any more, could you?
The town promptly had another meeting. Everyone agreed that rugged individualism wasn’t much cop if you had to be sober doing it. And so, less than three months after they’d left, they voted to re-join California. Rough and Ready got to have its party.§
Supposedly, an ongoing dispute about the name of the town (the post office insisted it be called either ‘Rough’ or ‘Ready’, but not both) led to the discovery in 1948 that the paperwork readmitting the republic to the union had never been filed. The fact that this is almost certainly because there was never any paperwork to be filed in the first place, and that the whole dubious episode is simply an excuse for a little town to put on an annual celebration and sell mugs to credulous tourists, is best ignored.
* The details of Bo
ston Ravine Slicker’s con are so weak that, if true, Sweigart deserved to get done over. Joe finds a seam of gold. Slicker bets him it’s not that great and says he (Slicker) couldn’t dig 200 dollars’ worth of gold in a day. Joe takes up the bet. Judges are appointed. Slicker starts digging but then slows down as he nears 200 dollars’ worth. Joe is somehow astounded by this clever ‘malingering’ and loses the bet. The end.
† Rough and Ready’s flag is not the flag of a country that deserves to exist. This is a flag designed by your friend’s idiot kid that you then desperately try to find something nice to say about. This is a bad flag.
‡ Famous neighbour: Lola Montez, the Irish adventurer and dancer who almost brought down another extinct country (see Bavaria), briefly lived next door in Grass Valley.
§ The twelfth US president, Zachary Taylor, nicknamed ‘Old Rough and Ready’, didn’t last much longer than the republic named after him, dying on 9 July 1850 after eating too much fruit.
Libertalia
It’s tricky, but let’s say 1707, give or take a few years
Language: a polyglot, ‘the different Languages began to be incorporated, and one made out of the many’
Cause of death: ‘a great slaughter’
Today: part of Madagascar
///beacons.fishy.governable
He coasted along this Island to the Northward, as far as the most northerly Point … and on the Larboard-Side found it afforded a large, and safe, Harbour, with plenty of fresh Water. He came here to an Anchor, went ashore and examined into the Nature of the Soil, which he found rich, the Air wholesome, and the Country level … this was an excellent place for an Asylum.
Captain Misson had already enjoyed a long and bountiful piratical career when he decided to found the socialist utopia of Libertalia on the northern coast of Madagascar. Originally from France, and oddly well-educated for a pirate – ‘a tolerable Mathematician’, even – Misson had a reputation for fairness and wisdom. After attacking a Dutch slaver with his ship, the Victoire, he freed the slaves and declared that ‘the trading for those of our own Species, cou’d never be agreeable to the Eyes of divine Justice’. Lots of pirates were comparatively egalitarian compared to the rest of the maritime world, but this was above and beyond.
Misson and his buccaneers arrived at Madagascar – at least a decade too late to meet the last dodo on nearby Mauritius – and fortified the little bay they found. There, they set about building a new country, a place where everyone of any nationality or creed could peacefully coexist alongside the natives, no man deemed greater than another. They held democratic votes on important matters, set aside religion, constructed their own pidgin language and started doing a spot of farming.
Which sounds suspiciously fantastic. But if Rough and Ready’s paperwork is a bit dubious, and Goust a confused journalistic mistake, Libertalia is (almost certainly) a flat-out lie. In 1724, the first edition of Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates appeared on the shelves of Charles Rivington’s bookshop in the city of London. The author, supposedly a sailor himself, detailed the lives of several well-known historical pirates. The book’s cover was boring, but the title was catchy, and so it sold well. Well enough that an expanded edition appeared a couple of years later. Which is where Misson – absent from the original text – suddenly turns up.
For a long time, the accounts were all taken at face value: Misson and his Libertalia were assumed to be as real as Bartholomew Roberts, William Kidd, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. But where the other piratical biographies were at least in part verifiable, Johnson’s book stubbornly remained the only source of information so far as Captain Misson was concerned. And Johnson himself seemed to be a figure who had sprung from nowhere.
Pirate havens certainly existed in places like Madagascar, but they were tough and impoverished and disease-ridden, nothing resembling the idyllic fantasy of Libertalia.* Gradually it became apparent that this was a work of fiction, albeit one that mixed a good amount of real history into the pot (though the fact that Captain Thomas Tew, a genuine pirate, turns up at Libertalia in 1707 or so – despite having died in 1695 – is possibly a bit of a giveaway).
By the 1930s, the finger of suspicion pointed at Daniel Defoe, always bendy with the truth and a man fond of a pseudonym.† The adventures of Captain Misson look a lot like the work of an author who, having run out of legitimate stories to tell and in need of some new material to sate an eager public, decided to pad out the pages by making stuff up. Which, it is important to note, is very different to sticking an entirely fake nation in your book about genuine extinct countries.
* When Woodes Rogers, an English privateer who rescued the marooned Alexander Selkirk (inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), sailed to Madagascar in order to research the pirates there, he found them to be ‘wretched’.
† At one point in the twentieth century there was a bit of a fad to pin every work by an unknown author on Defoe, but there are several other candidates who could potentially be the mysterious Captain Johnson.
The Kingdom of Sikkim
1642–1975
Population: 200,000
Capital: Gangtok (previously: Yuksom, Rabdentse, Tumlong)
Languages: Sikkimese, Choke, Lepcha, Nepali
Currency: paisa
Cause of death: wrong place at the wrong time
Today: part of India
///whimpered.harder.geek
In 1959, an American teenager called Hope Cooke found herself hanging out in Darjeeling’s Windamere Hotel on the lookout for adventure. One afternoon, over tea and cocktails, a man caught her eye, she caught his and Hope fell straight into what the press would describe as a Mills & Boon romance. And it would have been, if Mills & Boon had produced a Doomed Geopolitical Nights: Screwed by Nixon series.
The man was Crown Prince Thondup Namgyal, soon to be King of Sikkim, a romantic figure from a romantic country clinging on by its fingernails. Nobody quite knew what Sikkim was. When the British had first taken over great chunks of the globe, it suited them to engage in ‘manipulation without definition’ – so long as the empire was making cash, then, honestly, who cared about the legal niceties? This fuzziness didn’t matter until the subject of Indian independence came about, and suddenly all the murky deals and messy treaties presented a headache.
Beautiful mountainous Sikkim, with its snow leopards and its orchids, was one of the 600 princely states that should make up the new India – or was it? Historically, it had always been a place apart, Buddhist rather than Hindu, closer to the Tibetans than anyone else. Luckily for Sikkim, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had some sympathy for the little state. It managed to stay in charge of its own destiny. But strategically squashed between Tibet, India, Nepal and Bhutan, every single superpower was now looking at it in the exact same way a hungry dog looks at a nice big ham.
When Thondup proposed to her, Hope was blissfully unaware of the tight spot she’d be marrying into. The idea of a young American queen didn’t go down well. The local monks tried to delay the marriage by proclaiming the year inauspicious. A growing democratic movement within Sikkim already resented Thondup’s authority and started to plant stories in the press about Hope being a CIA spy. (In fact, though she wasn’t, both of Thondup’s sisters were covertly ferrying notes to the Dalai Lama on behalf of the agency.)
The rest of the world thought the marriage was a fairy tale, but it got rocky fast. Thondup turned to drink. Meanwhile Hope got stoned, living on ‘consommé, bananas, valium and cigarettes’. The kingdom was in an impossible position: the fickle geopolitical winds changed so fast it couldn’t cosy up to one particular side even if it wanted to. Sikkim needed friends, but JFK and Nehru eventually gave way to Nixon and Indira Gandhi, and neither of those was someone you’d trust to look after a houseplant, much less the fate of your country. In a complete about-face, the United States suddenly started to court the Chinese. I
ndia, alarmed by this, had its own about-face and started to do deals with Russia. Tiny Bhutan was granted a seat at the UN, but Sikkim conspicuously wasn’t.*
An increasingly miserable Hope unwisely took the piss out of Indira Gandhi’s obvious ambitions towards her kingdom by sending out invites for parties at a non-existent ‘India House’.† Thondup got drunker. In a plan to bolster the economy, the couple flew to New York to try to get a fashion line based on Sikkimese national dress off the ground. But the mood in the US press had chilled – instead of being the romantic dream of an American girl marrying royalty, Hope was now characterised as the Himalayan Marie Antoinette. Soviet disinformation mills, which were around a long time before Facebook, started to do their thing. Thondup’s son was accused of plotting to kill the leaders of Sikkim’s democratic movement by ‘dropping an explosive device in their vicinity’. This was an exaggeration – it was actually a felt-tip pen.
When Indira Gandhi finally made her move, it was swift – it took 20 minutes and a single fatality for Indian troops to overpower the Sikkim guards. Thondup put out a plaintive distress call on his ham radio. Hope, having already fled her unhappy marriage for New York, suddenly found herself stateless, the citizen of a country that no longer existed. In order to be allowed to remain in America, the US Congress had to pass a special law just for her.
