This sceptred isle: the fantasy realm of Redonda

There is an island in the Caribbean so small that it doesn’t appear on many world maps. Its name is Redonda; one of its kings, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, died two months ago. It’s an unforgiving place, uninhabited and windswept, basically a large rock a mile long and about a third of a mile wide. But birds like it, particularly a species called the booby, whose calls sound like a person crying out: ‘Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!’

The island is the subject of the Canadian writer Michael Hingston’s often excellent Try Not to Be Strange. I can see booksellers scratching their heads over where to shelve it. Part memoir, part travelogue, it’s also a beer-soaked history of pub-going in mid-20th-century Soho, and an exhaustive record of a made up and deeply eccentric monarchy.

Redonda now belongs to Antigua and Barbuda, but in 1880 when it was nobody’s in particular, a delegation set sail from nearby Montserrat to carry out an unlikely mission: the coronation of a 15-year-old boy. The ceremony was dreamed up by a local ship-owner, Matthew Shiell, who believed he was the long-lost descendant of Irish kings, so felt that his son should rule Redonda as a form of compensation. Matthew Jr recalled the coronation decades later as ‘a day of carousal’, in which a local bishop anointed him King Felipe I. Five years later, he emigrated to London, where the young head of state reinvented himself as M.P. Shiel, a science-fiction author and prolific pen-for-hire.

The monarchy might have died with Shiel had he not befriended the poet John Gawsworth and decided to appoint him heir. They sealed the deal the way you would: by slicing open their wrists with a penknife and mixing their blood.