See shop. All rights reserved. The Government is not responsible for external links and Forum activity. Sign In. Principality of Sealand. The Government is not responsible for external links and Forum activity. Sign In. Finally, he hoisted the boat itself and left it suspended in the air. Michael Bates escorted me from the chaotic deck into the kitchen that served as the Sealandic seat of government.
He put on a kettle of tea so we could talk. I watched his face closely for any sign that it was safe for me to laugh. None came. Before arriving, I had done some reading about the rich and fanciful history of aquatic micronations. Typically, these projects were inspired by the view that government was a kind of kryptonite that weakened entrepreneurialism. They were often called seasteads, after the homesteads of the American West. Many tried and failed. In , a wealthy American libertarian named Werner Stiefel attempted to create a floating micronation called Operation Atlantis in international waters near the Bahamas.
He bought a large boat and sent it to his would-be territory. It soon sank in a hurricane. In the early s, a Las Vegas real-estate magnate named Michael Oliver sent barges loaded with sand from Australia to a set of shallow reefs near the island of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean, declaring his creation the Republic of Minerva.
At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave, and solar energy to provide power—but building renewable-energy systems that could survive the weather and the corrosive seawater is difficult and costly. Communication options remain limited: Satellite-based connections were prohibitively expensive, as was laying a fiber-optic cable or relying on point-to-point lasers or microwaves that tethered the offshore installation to land.
Traveling to and from seasteads was challenging. Waves and storms could be especially disruptive. Who would subsidize basic services, the ones usually provided by the tax-funded government that seasteading libertarians sought to escape? Keeping the lights on and protecting against piracy would be expensive. In , these visionaries united around a nonprofit organization called the Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize—winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government.
Thiel also pledged to invest in a start-up venture called Blueseed. Its purpose was to solve a thorny problem affecting many Silicon Valley companies: how to attract engineers and entrepreneurs who lacked American work permits or visas. Blueseed planned to anchor a floating residential barge in international waters off the coast of Northern California. Never getting beyond the drawing-board phase, Blueseed failed to raise the money necessary to sustain itself.
Roy used gasoline bombs to repel him and several of his men. Later coup attempts on Sealand came from turncoat investors. As we sipped our tea, Michael recounted two examples. In , Roy was approached by a consortium of German and Dutch lawyers and diamond merchants, who said they wanted to build a casino on the platform. Invited to Austria in to discuss the proposition, Roy flew to Salzburg, leaving Sealand in the care of Michael, then in his 20s.
Upon his arrival in Austria, Roy was greeted warmly by five men who set up a meeting for later that week. When no one showed at the second meeting, Roy grew suspicious and began phoning fishing captains who worked near Sealand, which had no telephone or radio capabilities of its own. When one of these skippers told Roy that he had seen a large helicopter landing at Sealand, he scrambled back to England to discover that a coup had taken place. At around 11 a.
Michael aggressively waved him off. But within moments, several men had rappelled down a rope dangling from the helicopter and were standing on the platform.
Michael quickly recognized the thick accent and deep voice of one of the men standing before him: It was a voice he had previously overheard on the phone with his father, making plans to meet in Austria. Showing Michael a forged telegram, the men told him that his father had given them permission to come to Sealand as part of their business negotiations.
Michael was skeptical, but figured he had no choice but to host the men. So the group headed inside to talk. When Michael turned his back to pour one of them a whiskey, the men slipped out the door, locked him in the room, and tied a cord around the external handle.
Years later, declassified British records and other documents that came to light after the release of the Panama Papers in made it clear that the puppeteer who had orchestrated the putsch was likely a German diamond dealer named Alexander Gottfried Achenbach, who had approached the Bates family in the early s with the idea of greatly expanding the principality.
His plan involved building a casino, a square lined with trees, a duty-free shop, a bank, a post office, a hotel, a restaurant, and apartments, all of which would be adjacent but attached to the Sealand platform. He filed a petition to renounce his German citizenship, demanding he instead be recognized as a citizen of Sealand. Local authorities in Aachen, Germany, where he made the petition, refused his request.
Sealand , or the Principality of Sealand, is a micronation located in the North Sea about 7. Data recorded in shows that the area has a population of just 27 people. Sealand is often referred to as the smallest country in the world. However, it has not been officially recognized by any sovereign state.
0コメント