A brief history of breakaway island republics.
Never mind buying a private island. For more than a century, utopians (okay, libertarians), pranksters, modern-day pirates, real-life Don Quixotes, and even otherwise sane people have tried setting up self-governing island republics. The draw is simple: as the website “Start Your Own Island Country” puts it, islands “appeal to people’s sense of dominion, and their borders are clear. One just might get away from it all, and start something new.”
Let’s be clear. Virtually of all these experiments have failed. But they’ve made sparks—little, fluorescent sparks. And their histories, however short, are bizarre, glorious… and often, sinister.
Autonomous Republic of Anjouan
This rocky island in the Indian Ocean gained independence from France in the 1970s and joined the state of Comoros. It then went under the revolutionary leadership of a Maoist who legalized pot and put teenagers in charge of government agencies. No word if these two actions were related. Anjouan split from the Comorros Islands in the early 2000s and became a haven for what may have been the shadiest of all the world’s shady island bank havens. For a while, a friend of Kim Il-Sung ran its offshore industry, and there were reports of North Korean money laundering at that time. Anjouan was re-conquered by the Comorros in the late 2000s in a bloody battle. It remains a shady bank haven.
New Atlantic
Using proceeds from book sales, the writer Leicester Hemingway, brother of Ernest, formed his micro-nation on a barge off Jamaica. He was overthrown by a tropical storm.
Principality of Trinidad
This uninhabited island in the South Atlantic was claimed in the 1890s by James Harden-Hickey, who crowned himself Prince James I of Trinidad and promptly became an international laughingstock. He originally planned a military dictatorship, but couldn’t find people to rule. The British seized the island in 1895 to serve as a telegraph relay station. In retaliation, Hickey asked the industrialist Henry Flagler for funds to launch a counter-invasion of Britain from Ireland. No funds were forthcoming, and Hickey tragically killed himself after publishing a book on suicide.
Republic of Morac-Songhrati-Meads
Declared by a British naval captain in the 1870s, this republic encompassed the Spratly Islands, better known today as the fulcrum of a huge territorial dispute between China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Mead’s son formed a rival entity, the Kingdom of Humanity, in 1914. The rival factions occupied the islands until they were driven out by Japanese troops in WWII. The Kingdom of Humanity’s governing council drowned in a shipwreck in 1972, except for the son, who survived and unsuccessfully sued the United States for “unfair competition.”
Principality of Outer Baldonia
Claimed by a Pepsi-Cola bottling king, this island off Nova Scotia attracted little attention until a publication in Stalinist Russia singled out its founding charter, which guaranteed the rights to “applause, vanity, drink, gamble and silence.” The Soviet publication called the charter dehumanizing, savage, and imperialist, missed the fact that the Principality of Outer Baldonia was effectively an inside joke between the bottling king and his friends, who liked to fish there.
Dominion of Melchizedek & New Utopia
Both islands were Internet scams. The Dominion of Melchizedek laid claim to parts of the Marshall Islands, forcing the government there to issue a denunciation. It even managed to win recognition from the Central African Republic. To be clear, the Dominion of Melchizedek did not exist. Neither did New Utopia, whose leader solicited investments to build a concrete island in the Caribbean and ended up sanctioned by the SEC.
Sealand
One of the most famous breakaway micro-nations, and perhaps the most successful: an abandoned platform off England that was taken over by pirate-radio operators who later feuded amongst each other. A British court ruled that it was not in any country’s jurisdiction, granting it de facto independence. Today there are plans to operate it as a hyper-secure computing center away from prying governments.
The Phoenix Group
This wasn’t an island republic, but rather, a libertarian cabal led by a Las Vegas real-estate tycoon with visions of a tax-free utopia. First, the group tried to build an island by dumping sand on a submerged reef in the South Pacific, forming the Republic of Minerva. When the Tongan king put a stop to it, knocking down the Minervan flag and claiming the nascent sandbar for himself, the Phoenix Group funded a breakaway movement in the Bahamas, even recruiting a notorious CIA asset and arms dealer to run propaganda operations. When that didn’t work, the group returned to the South Pacific and befriended both a polygamist and a leader of a cargo cult agitating for independence from Vanuatu. An international commando force crushed those independence fronts.
The Phoenix Group included the most notable libertarians of the 1970s, including Ayn Rand’s former lover and one of the party’s presidential candidates. In a nutshell, it was Lost’s Dharma Initiative meets Atlas Shrugged’s Galt’s Gulch meets Dr. No. Today, its spiritual successor is the Seasteading Project, the brainchild of Milton Friedman’s grandson. With backing from Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire, the seasteaders plan to convert oil-rigs into floating libertarian utopias—think Bioshock, but above water.
This article appears in issue 5, the Islands Issue. Download here.
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