An Atlas of Extinct Countries

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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