an
arm in the Boer campaign. I met him at Key West during the Spanish war
in which he represented _The London Times_ and found him to be a solid,
well-ballasted man who knew what he was about and not at all one to
have gone treasure seeking without excellent reasons. That he was
adventurous in his unassuming way he proved by landing on the Cuban
coast near Havana in order to interview the Spanish Captain-General. A
newspaper dispatch boat ran close in shore, the skipper risking being
blown out of water by the batteries of Morro Castle, and Knight was
transferred to a tiny flat-bottomed skiff of the tonnage of a bath-tub.
Equipped with a note-book, revolver, water bottle, and a small package
of sandwiches, he said good-by in his very placid manner, and was seen
to be standing on his head in the surf a few minutes later. He
scrambled ashore, probably recalling to mind a similar style of landing
on the coast of Trinidad, and vanished in the jungle. That he ran
grave danger of being potted for an _Americano_ by the first Spanish
patrol he encountered appeared to give him no concern whatever. It was
easy to perceive that he must have been the right kind of man to lead a
treasure-hunting expedition.

Since the _Alerte_ sailed on her dashing quest in 1889, the pirates'
gold of Trinidad has figured in an adventure even more fantastic. Many
readers will doubtless remember the career of the late Baron James
Harden-Hickey who attempted to establish a kingdom of his own on the
islet of Trinidad. He belonged in another age than this and he was
laughed at rather more than he deserved. Duelist, editor,
_boulevardier_, fond of the tinsel and trappings of life, he married
the daughter of John H. Flagler of the Standard Oil Company and with
funds from this excessively commercial source created a throne, a
court, and a kingdom. He had seen the island of Trinidad from a
British merchant ship in which he went round the Horn in 1888, and the
fact that this was a derelict bit of real estate, to which no nation
thought it worth while to lay formal claim, appealed to his active
imagination.

A would-be king has difficulty in finding a stray kingdom nowadays, and
Harden-Hickey bothered his head not in the least over the problem of
populating this god-forsaken jumble of volcanic rock and ashes. Ere
long he blossomed forth most gorgeously in Paris and New York as King
James I of the Principality of Trinidad. There was a royal cabine