James Harden-Hickey, an American born in San Francisco in 1854, was one of the flamboyant charlatans who perpetrated outrageous hoaxes on innocent, if gullible, stamp printers.
In 1893, during a voyage through the south Atlantic, Harden-Hickey landed on a small rock seven hundred miles from the Brazilian coast.
The Principality of Trinidad
The next that was heard of him, he was in New York having changed his name and status to Prince James I of the Principality of Trinidad. In New York, he called on an unsuspecting printer and ordered a series of stamps for his “realm”.
Prince James made much of his grandiose plans for cultural “national” development which obviously impressed the printer. What he did not realize, though, was that the design for the Principality’s stamps had been filched from a legal, issue, the ten-cents of North Borneo of 1894.
The printer’s knowledge of geography was as poor as his aqaintance with philately since he obviously did not know, either, that the Principality of Trinidad was only two miles wide. Also unknown to him was the fact that the birds who lived there were its only inhabitants,
The End of Prince James
The truth was revealed by chance, in 1895, when the British government commandeered the rock as a telegraph cable-relay station. Harden-Hickey had no option but to surrender and subsequently became so depressed that in 1898, he committed suicide by taking an overdose of morphine.
The hapless printer was left with a seven-denomination set of stamps which may have had some curiosity value but were essentially useless. The set comprised a five-centimes black-green, 25-centimes black-blue, 50-centimes black-orange, 75-centimes black-lilac, one franc black-vermilion and five-franc black-grey. The printer destroyed most of them, but a few specimens still turn up from time to time.
A similar hoax had been attempted ten years previously, in 1888, when Marie-Charles David de Mayréna, a suspected embezzler was on the run from the French police. The fugitive arrived in the Dutch East Indies - presentday Indonesia - and moved on to Vietnam, where he married the daughter of the chief of the Sedang tribe.
The King of Sedang
That done, Mayréna declared himself King Marie I of Sedang and later turned up at Government House in British-ruled Hong Kong, where he dined with the governor. While in Hong Kong, he charmed officials and women and attracted huge amounts of credit.
Moving on to Paris, Marie I ordered a series of seven stamps inscribed “DEH SEDANG” , a half-math bistre, one-math violet, two-math green, four-math orange, one mouk blue, half-dollar yellow and one-dollar crimson. The currency was, of course, imaginary, but it appeared that there were ten centimes to the math, ten maths to the mouk and five mouks to the dollar.
King Marie gave himself away. His extravagance reached such a pitch that his creditors grew uneasy and the fraud was exposed when the King departed hurriedly for the East.
Unlike the stamps of Prince James, King Marie’s were put on the market by the printers, who added a false postmark to make them look authentic. The occasional specimen which comes to light usually bears this ‘postmark, which is circular and inscribed DEH-SEDANG-PELEI-AGNA.
Stamps of No Currency
Even more fanciful, though, were the Amoy-Hong Kong-Ningpo-Chapgai hoax issues. Although the stamps were inscribed three (blue), five (red) and ten (yellow), no actual currency was shown. Pictorially, the stamps were thoroughly inartistic, featuring an eagle with outstretched wings and a banner in its mouth, a Chinaman with a fan, a ship, a pagoda and some Chinese characters, all crowded on with no attention paid to symmetry.
At one time, they were thought to be local stamps, which could look very rough, but more probably the stamps from this hodgepodge of territories represented an early attempt to milk collectors by producing a novelty.
A Belgian Publisher Pulls a Stamp Hoax
Not all bogus stamps, however, were issued by adventurers or eccentrics. The illustrious Jean-Baptiste Moens, a much respected Belgian philatelic dealer and publisher once invented an imaginary country called Moresnet, which was supposed to lie between Belgium and Germany. Moens even designed and printed a stamp for it.
Other Belgian dealers had long been irritating Moens by copying exclusive items from his magazine Le Timbre-Poste without acknowledgment, and Moens decided to teach them a lesson.
He wrote himself a letter, appropriately dated April 1, 1867, describing the new stamp. He printed the letter and the design in Le Timbre-Poste and as he had intended, other dealers copied the information. There were red faces all round when Moens revealed the ruse in the magazine’s next issue.
Sources
- Surhone, Lambert M, Timpledon, Miriam T., and Mrseken, Susan F: .Philatelic Fakes and Forgeries: Postage Stamps, Philately, Karabagh, Photolithography, Penny Black, Jean- Baptiste Moens, List of Famous Stamp Forgers by Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, and Susan F. Marseken (Mauritius: Betascript Publishing, 2010) ISBN-10: 6130473443/ISBN-13: 978-6130473440
- Tyler, Varro E: Focus on Forgeries: A Guide to Forgeries of Common Stamps by Varro E. Tyler (Sidney, Ohio: Linns Stamp News, 1993) ISBN-10: 0940403552/ISBN-13: 978-0940403550
- The Imperial Collection - The Kingdom of the Sedang
Brenda Ralph Lewis - My interest in history dates from childhood. I am presently the author of 120 books and hundreds of articles, all on historical ...
