The Curious Kingdom of Caribbean Redonda

There are places in the Caribbean where one expects to find a beach bar, a cruise ship and a man named Trevor selling you a bracelet made from something he found behind the bar. And then there is Redonda. A tiny, spectacularly inconvenient lump of volcanic rock rising from the Caribbean between Antigua and Nevis, Redonda has almost no inhabitants, no harbor, no permanent settlement and, depending upon whom you ask, several kings. The island became a kingdom during the Victorian era largely because Matthew Shiell, an Irish-born trader living in Montserrat, decided in the nineteenth century that Redonda would make an excellent kingdom for his family. In 1865, according to the traditional account, Shiell proclaimed his infant son Matthew Phipps Shiell heir to the throne, eventually establishing the title of King Felipe I. Britain, which was busy acquiring rather more consequential pieces of the planet, apparently did not consider the matter sufficiently urgent to send the Royal Navy.

Redonda itself is considerably less accommodating than the idea of becoming a king. It is only about a mile long and rises dramatically from the sea in cliffs of volcanic rock, looking less like a tropical paradise than a fragment of some enormous Caribbean fortress that somebody forgot to finish. There are no sandy beaches on which to lie dramatically while contemplating one's royal destiny. The terrain is steep, rugged and covered in vegetation adapted to an environment where fresh water is scarce and human habitation is extremely difficult. Seabirds have historically been among the island's most important residents, and Redonda's isolated cliffs provide nesting habitat for marine birds. For centuries, however, the island was exploited for guano, the accumulated droppings of seabirds that became a valuable agricultural fertilizer. Humanity's relationship with Redonda thus followed the classic colonial formula: discover an inconvenient rock, find something profitable on it, remove as much of that something as possible, and then argue about who owns the rock.

The island's ecology has also been complicated by animals that have no particular understanding of royal protocol. Goats were introduced to Redonda and multiplied in the absence of natural predators, grazing on vegetation and contributing to erosion. Rats, similarly introduced by humans, preyed upon eggs and young birds and competed with native wildlife. In recent years, conservation efforts have focused on removing these invasive species and restoring Redonda's battered ecosystem. Eradicating goats from a cliff-covered island sounds straightforward until one remembers that goats are extraordinarily talented at living in places where humans would prefer not to die. Rats, meanwhile, have the irritating habit of being small, adaptable and everywhere. Conservationists have therefore had to treat Redonda less like a kingdom and more like an ecological emergency room, working to restore vegetation and seabird habitat on an island that has spent much of its modern history being mined, grazed and generally inconvenienced.

Then there are the kings, and here Redonda becomes wonderfully absurd. After Felipe I came his son, Matthew Phipps Shiell, who became known as King Jonathan I and later achieved fame as a writer of science fiction and fantasy. The monarchy eventually passed into the hands of literary and artistic figures rather than hereditary Caribbean aristocrats. In the twentieth century, poet John Gawsworth became King Juan I, followed by a succession of claimants whose legitimacy depended less on coronation ceremonies than on friendships, literary circles and an impressive willingness to take the whole thing seriously. Jon Wynne-Tyson became Juan II, and after him the novelist Javier Marías became King Xavier I in 1997. When Marías died in 2022, the succession became, predictably, rather complicated, with competing interpretations of who had authority to inherit a crown that no internationally recognized government had ever particularly recognized in the first place.

This has produced one of the more entertaining monarchial disputes in modern history. Redonda has had rival kings, rival claims and rival interpretations of previous kings' intentions. Some claimants have been writers; others have been artists, publishers or admirers of the kingdom's eccentric tradition. There is even an establishment in England that has styled itself the Redonda Embassy, because apparently the logical place to maintain diplomatic relations with an uninhabited Caribbean kingdom is a British pub. The institution has embraced the island's peculiar literary and royal history, offering visitors the opportunity to encounter Redonda without undertaking the considerably more hazardous journey of actually reaching it. It is difficult to imagine a more British solution to Caribbean geography: if the island is inaccessible, simply put the embassy somewhere with beer.

Yet beneath the jokes lies something rather fascinating. Redonda demonstrates how the borders of the Caribbean were not always created through grand imperial conferences or military campaigns. Sometimes they emerged from eccentric personal claims, colonial ambiguity and the peculiar freedoms available during the Victorian age. The island's kings never commanded armies, collected meaningful taxes or exercised conventional sovereign power. Their kingdom survived primarily as a literary and cultural invention, an elaborate game played by people who understood that monarchy could be both ridiculous and strangely beautiful. Redonda became a kind of floating footnote to Caribbean history, demonstrating that nations and kingdoms can exist in the imagination long after the practical machinery of government has disappeared.

Today, Redonda is best understood not as an independent country but as an uninhabited territory of Antigua and Barbuda. There is no functioning Redondan government administering the island, no permanent population and no internationally recognized sovereign monarchy. Antigua and Barbuda exercises sovereignty over the territory, while the various royal claims continue as a curious cultural legacy rather than a serious political reality. Access remains difficult, and the island's future is increasingly tied to conservation rather than coronations. Perhaps that is fitting. After centuries of kings, miners, goats, rats, poets and constitutional arguments, Redonda has finally acquired the one thing it probably needed all along: the chance to be left alone. In the Caribbean, where nearly every attractive piece of land has been developed, packaged, branded and sold back to travelers as paradise, an uninhabited volcanic kingdom slowly being reclaimed by seabirds and vegetation is almost revolutionary. Redonda may have lost its practical kings, but it has retained something rarer—a splendidly impractical story.