Redonda and its Kings

Redonda is a small island in the Caribbean, politically part of Barbados but closer to Montserrat. Nobody lives there now, but from around 1860 to 1918 it was the site of a major guano mining operation.

In 1929, British writer M.P. Shiel told a story about this island. Shiel had been born on Montserrat in 1865. He claimed that his father was fascinated by the unoccupied island and had himself proclaimed king of Redonda, passing this title on to his son when M.P. was 15. According to the fully embelished story, the kingdom was recognized by the British colonial office and M.P.'s ascension to the throne was attended by a bishop. This is not remotely plausible; for one thing, when M.P. Shiel was 15 guano mining was in full swing on the island, and far from being a forgotten spot it was valuable and bustling. Shiel was also a very dubious character who spent time in prison for molesting his 12-year-old stepdaughter.

Anyway, from 1929 on Shiel made much of being Redonda's king. Shiel had written a lot of bad novels with titles like Empress of the Earth and The Yellow Peril. His biggest success was The Purple Cloud, which wikpedia summarizes like this:

Shiel's lasting literary reputation is largely based on Notebook III of the series which was serialised in The Royal Magazine in abridged form before book publication that autumn as The Purple Cloud (1901). The Purple Cloud is an important text of early British science fiction, a dystopian, post-apocalytic novel that tells the tale of Adam Jeffson, who, returning alone from an expedition to the North Pole, discovers that a worldwide catastrophe has left him as the last man alive.

He was friends with many other writers of speculative bent and decadent morals, and he made some of them peers of Redonda.

After Shiel's death in 1947 the title of king passed to John Gawsworth, his literary executor, who billed himself King Juan I. Gawsworth was a poet and short story writer best known for his biography of Arthur Machen, another speculative and decadent British writer. Gawsworth also had a lot of fun with Redonda until he sank into pathetic alcoholism, creating great trouble for the future history of Redonda by selling the title to three different people, one of them the manager of his favorite pub.

None of whom ended up being the most widely recognized King of Redonda:

Yet when Gawsworth died in 1970, the crown became publicly identified with another individual, the novelist and publisher Jon Wynne-Tyson. "King Juan II" had assisted Gawsworth during his final, homeless years, and agreed to serve as his literary executor. He was surprised to learn that the job also entailed serving as king – or so he insisted when he was challenged by the pub manager. Wynne-Tyson did not campaign for the crown, but influential Redondan peers felt that his literary pedigree rendered him the most suitable sovereign for a fictionalizing fiefdom. The fact that he wrote most of his novels under pseudonyms was another advantage.

Wynne-Tyson went on to write a novel that drew on the Redonda myth,

So Say Banana Bird (1984), about a burnt-out English writer who is rejuvenated through his sojourn to the tiny Caribbean island of "Zafada," said to be ruled by a "down-market king."

And it still goes on. In 2007 the BBC produced a documentary about three rivals vying for the title of King in that year; this web page says that in 2021 there were nine claimants in Britain. The most widely accepted is the one appointed by Wynne-Tyson as his successor, the Spanish novelist Javier Marías (King Xavier). The more than 100 peers of Redonda have included Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Sayers, Alice Munro, and J. M Coetze. There are flags, stamps, a motto, an anthem. A new book about the kingdom appeared last year; the passages quoted above from the review of that book in the TLS. Among other discoveries, the author found several non-literary residents of Montserrat claiming that they were Redonda's king, including Bob the Bad, who had a gold crown painted on the roof of his BMW.

All in all it's quite a history to have sprung from a lie told by a creep.