James Aloysius Harden-Hickey, Baron of the Holy Roman Empire by command of the Supreme Pontiff, editor, novelist, swordsman, and adventurer, who would proclaim himself James I, Prince of Trinidad, and die by his own hand, was born in San Francisco on December 8, 1854. The flavor of San Francisco life in the 1850s was still affected by the Gold Rush of 1849. The enforcement of rough justice through committees of vigilance and lynch mobs was merely one of many indications that the city by the bay was not yet housebroken. Accordingly, Hickey’s French-born mother took her son to Paris.
They arrived amidst the glittering reign of Napoleon III. If one believes Richard Harding Davis, “When Harden-Hickey was a boy, Paris was never so carelessly gay, so brilliant, never so overcharged with life, color, and adventure.” Davis, one of the most glamorous reporters of the early 20th century, was also one of the most wildly overrate; yet there is something to what he says here. Within a generation, France had seen two revolutions, two kings, and a republic. Now she was an empire again, under the rule of a Bonaparte. Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon I, had seized power in 1852. He transformed Paris with his massive public works and bewitched the public with theatrical display and gorgeous ceremonies. The Second Empire sparkled with flamboyance, imagination and a kind of passionate worldliness.
Harden-Hickey spent little of his childhood and adolescence in Paris. The Jesuits taught him at Namur, Belgium; he studied law at the University of Leipzig. Yet his politics, tastes, point of view, and appearance were molded by Napoleon III and the Second Empire. At nineteen he passed the examinations to enter Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, from which he graduated with honors in 1875. His father died shortly before his graduation.
Having inherited a small income and mastered French, and enjoying the reputation of a master swordsman (like Scaramouche, he could pick the buttons off one’s waistcoat with a foil), Harden-Hickey foreswore the profession of arms for Parisian literary life. In 1878, he married the Countess de Saint-Pery; they had a son and a daughter.
He published eleven novels between 1876 and 1880. Irving Wallace, in his essay on Harden-Hickey (collected in The Square Pegs), calls the plots naive, the characters stereotypical, and the language flat. One novel is obviously borrowed from Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, another from Don Quixote; all are bluntly monarchist and antidemocratic. Harden-Hickey’s polemics were more successful: his vehement defense of the church won him ennoblement as a Baron of the Holy Roman Empire.
The political upheaval after the fall of Napoleon III in 1870 subsided into the regime we call the Third Republic. Much as a tempest in shallow waters stirs up sludge, so the transition raised up a new set of corrupt politicos whose embezzlements and bribery led to a seemingly unending succession of scandals. With the concomitant abolition of press censorship, France saw an explosion in the number of newspapers being published. Most were edited in the spirit of Villemessant, founder of Le Figaro, who observed, “If a story doesn’t cause a duel or a lawsuit, it isn’t any good.”
The royalists, who wanted to restore the kings of France, unleashed their own media blitz by financing newspapers. They wanted a Parisian illustrated weekly, something like London’s Punch. Harden-Hickey’s swordsmanship and polemical skills made him its perfect editor.
On November 10, 1878, Harden-Hickey first published Triboulet, named for a jester of King Louis XII. The cover illustration showed the jester beating Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, and various politicians with a war club. The writing was as vigorous as the artwork. Within weeks, Triboulet had a paid circulation of 25,000. Within the year its business manager had been imprisoned, its staff had collectively served some six months in jail, and the paper had been fined 3000 francs. Within two years, it had become a daily. Harden-Hickey was sued forty-two times for libel and fought at least twelve duels, believing that his opponents should meet him either “upon the editorial page, or in the Bois de Boulogne.” The fun lasted until 1887, when the royalists’ money gave out.
He had changed. He divorced his wife, largely renounced Catholicism and flirted with theosophy and Buddhism. He began a journey around the world, spent nearly a year in India learning Sanskrit, studying the Buddha’s teachings, and even—he claimed—traveling to Tibet. Along the way, he made a short stop in the South Atlantic. Some 700 miles from the Brazilian coast, his ship hove to off to the deserted island of Trinidad.
“Trinidad is about five miles long and three miles wide,” Davis wrote, “but a spot upon the ocean. On most maps it is not even a spot.” Its residents were birds, turtles and land crabs. Harden-Hickey went ashore, explored the island and claimed it in his own name.
He was not the first to land there. An Englishman named Halley had made his way there in 1698. Two years later some Brazilian Portuguese settlers built stone huts, the ruins of which survived into Harden-Hickey’s time. A 1775 book claimed that one Alexander Dalrymple had taken possession of the island in the name of the King of England in 1700. Nonetheless, mariners landing in 1803 and 1822 found no inhabitants save “cormorants, petrels, gannets, man-of-war birds, and turtles weighing from five hundred to seven hundred pounds.” This gave Harden-Hickey’s claim color under international law: the English never settled the island; the Portuguese abandoned it. Trinidad was there for the taking.
Harden-Hickey returned to Paris in 1890, where he met Anne Flagler, daughter of John H. Flagler, an American financier. On St. Patrick’s Day 1891, he married her at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. For the next two years, he lived quietly with the Flaglers in New York. At some point during this period, he traveled to Mexico, where he purchased at least one ranch with money from his father-in-law. Apparently, Flagler would support his son-in-law quite generously without permitting him the control of any sizable sum of money. This restraint galled Harden-Hickey, who seems never to have considered earning his own living.
On Sunday, Nov. 5, 1893, the New York Tribune gave him front-page publicity with an exclusive story on his scheme to transform Trinidad into an independent country. Harden-Hickey argued that “…the inland plateaus are rich with luxuriant vegetation… The surrounding seas swarm with fish… Dolphins, rock-cod, pigfish, and blackfish may be caught as quickly as they can be hauled out…the exportation of guano alone should make my little country prosperous…”
Harden-Hickey’s announcement did not precipitate a world crisis. In January 1894, when he proclaimed himself James I, Prince of Trinidad, some nations even recognized him. One reporter interviewed his father-in-law, who seemed surprisingly tolerant of the adventure. He said, “My son-in-law is a very determined man… Had he consulted me about this, I would have been glad to have aided him with money or advice… But my son-in-law means to carry on this Trinidad scheme, and he will.”
The Prince announced that Trinidad would be a military dictatorship. Its flag would be a yellow triangle on a red ground. He began selling bonds for 1000 francs or $200, announcing that anyone purchasing ten of them was entitled to a free passage to the island. In San Francisco, he purchased a schooner to transport colonists and ferry supplies and mail between Trinidad and Brazil. He hired an agent to negotiate the construction of docks, wharves and houses. He also contracted for Chinese coolies to constitute an instant proletariat. On December 8, 1893, he instituted the Order of Trinidad, an order of chivalry in four classes to reward distinction in literature, the arts, and the sciences. He then commissioned a firm of jewelers to make a golden crown and issued a set of multicolored postage stamps.
An old friend from Paris, the Count de la Boissiere, became his secretary of state for foreign affairs. After working out of the Flagler residence at 18 W. 52nd Street, he opened a chancellery at 217 W. 36th Street. It was a room in a brownstone just west of 7th Avenue. Davis would visit it in the summer of 1894. Children were playing on the stoop with dolls. A vendor was peddling vegetables in the street. On the front door was a piece of paper bearing a handwritten note: “Chancellerie de la Principaute de Trinidad.”
In July 1895, the British government, then constructing a submarine cable to Brazil, landed troops and took possession of Trinidad as a cable station, based on Halley’s discovery in 1698. The Brazilians asserted a claim based upon the Portuguese occupation of 1700. Diplomatic representations were made; a mob at Bahia stoned the British consulate. No one remembered Harden-Hickey.
The Count de la Boissiere opened fire. His protest to Secretary of State Richard Olney pointed out that Harden-Hickey had notified the powers that he had taken possession of the uninhabited island of Trinidad in 1893. None of the powers had objected or opposed him. He asked the United States government to recognize the Principality of Trinidad and guarantee its neutrality.
August is the silly season, when no real news happens. In that long-ago summer of 1895—decades before electric fans or air conditioning—Olney may have been feeling the heat. He gave copies of the protest to the press corps for their amusement. The New York papers, much to the Count’s horror, ran stories poking fun at Prince James and at himself, his chancellery, his broken English, the formal manners so at odds with his squalid surroundings, and even his clothes.
It was around this time that Davis, then writing for The Evening Sun, called at the chancellery. On the wall he saw a notice of “Sailings to Trinidad.” It listed two: March 1 and October 1. The Count’s desk was piled with copies of proclamations, postage stamps, bonds and, in pasteboard boxes, gold and red enameled crosses of the Order of Trinidad. Davis found the Count “courteous, gentle, and…distinguished,” and gave Harden-Hickey a straight treatment. The other newspaper that treated Harden-Hickey with compassion was, odd though it may seem to us today, The New York Times. Reporter Henri Pene du Bois (grandfather of children’s author William Pene du Bois) and managing editor Henry Cary felt that Harden-Hickey and the Count were both in earnest and that their only fault was having a dream and the imagination to strive for it. One day, a pasteboard box appeared on the desk of each man: the Prince had awarded them the Order of Trinidad.
During the next two years, Harden-Hickey spiraled into depression. Without his island, he had nothing; furthermore, much of the world laughed at him for having tried to make his dream come true. No one, not even those who loved him, ever suggested that he had much of a sense of humor. And clearly, no one ever persuaded him to just go and get a job.
In 1897, Harden-Hickey completed plans for an invasion of England from Ireland. He asked Flagler to finance it. His father-in-law, perhaps not unreasonably, declined. Harden-Hickey never spoke with him again. He had drifted from his wife, too. While he had been in San Francisco hiring coolies and buying schooners, she had been in Paris; when she went to San Francisco, Harden-Hickey vanished to his Mexican ranch. Moreover, as Davis primly observes, Harden-Hickey “was greatly admired by pretty women.”
In early 1898, Harden-Hickey’s attempts to raise money by selling his Mexican land fell through. On February 2, 1898 he registered at the Pierson Hotel in El Paso, Texas, where he remained a week. According to Wallace, he was overheard to say that he was waiting for money from friends. He went up to his room at 7:30 p.m. on February 9. The following noon, the maids found him on the bed, a half-emptied morphine bottle on the nightstand. A letter to his wife was pinned to a chair. In his trunk was the crown of Trinidad.
New York Press, December 11, 2003