Creating A New nation
Vast and sometimes brutal, the high seas are also a place of aspiration, reinvention and an escape from rules. This is why the oceans have long been a magnet for libertarians hoping to flee governments, taxes and other people by creating their own sovereign micronations in international waters.
Text: Ian Urbina, Maya Martin, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan, and Austin Brush – Editors at The Outlaw Ocean Project.
The Saya de Malha Bank has been especially attractive for such ambitions. Covered with sea grass and interspersed with small coral reefs, the Bank is a vast, barely submerged plateau in the Indian Ocean that lies between Mauritius and Seychelles, hundreds of miles beyond the jurisdictional reach of any nation’s laws.
Autopia
On March 9, 1997, an architect named Wolf Hilbertz and a marine biologist named Thomas Goreau sailed to the Bank. Launching from Victoria, the capital of Seychelles, they sailed for three days before reaching their destination. With solar panels, metal scaffolding, and cornerstones, they began constructing their vision for a sovereign micronation that they planned to call Autopia (the place that builds itself).“Having about the size of Belgium,” Hilbertz would tell the Celestopea Times in 2004, “most of Saya lies in international waters, ‘in the high seas,’ legally speaking, governed only by the U.N. Law of the Sea.” The 1997 trip by Hilbertz lasted only a week and was primarily exploratory.
Housing is planned
In 2002, the two men returned to the Bank in three sailboats with a team of architects, cartographers and marine biologists from several countries to continue building. They intended to erect their dwellings on top of existing coral, reinforcing steel scaffolding using a patented process that Hilbertz had developed called Biorock, a substance formed by the electro-accumulation of materials dissolved in seawater. This involved sinking steel frames into the shallow waters then putting them under a weak direct electrical current, which, little by little, caused limestone to be deposited on the steel poles and at their base, creating an ideal habitat for corals and other shellfish and marine animals
Problems are piling up
In just six days, rushing because a cyclone was headed their way, the team built a steel structure five by five by two meters high. The structure, located at 9o12′ south latitude and 61o21′ east longitude, was anchored in the seabed. A small battery provided it with a steady charge. In later interviews, Hilbertz, who was a professor at the University of Houston, said he hoped to create building materials with a lower carbon footprint and create a self-sufficient settlement in the sea “that belongs to the residents who live and work there, a living laboratory in which new environmental technologies are developed.” His plans ultimately stalled for lack of funds.
New visions
Two decades later, a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi began promoting a new vision for a micronation in the Saya de Malha Bank—one based on a massive barge that would float far from the reach of extradition and police. “Because the Saya de Malha is not far from the equator, cyclones are born there but they are not so terrible,” Landi said in an interview in The Legend of Landi, a yet-unreleased documentary film by Oswald Horowitz.
A gifted computer programmer, avid skydiver, and motorcycle racer, Landi had been a man on the lam for roughly a decade. Accused of fraud after his company, Eutelia, declared bankruptcy in 2010, Landi and some of his executives were tried and convicted in Italy. Landi was sentenced in absentia to 14 years, which led him to relocate to Dubai where, according to a New York Times profile, he dabbled in crypto, hid money in Switzerland, skated around extradition treaties. While living comfortably in Dubai, he registered companies in bespoke tax-free zones, and eventually procured diplomatic credentials from Liberia, the profile explained.
One country, one barge
As he prepared this plan for moving to the Saya de Malha Bank, Landi purchased an initial 800-ton deck barge that he named Aisland. Anchoring it roughly 30 miles off the coast of Dubai, he lived on the vessel with three sailors, a cook and five cats. Aisland’s deck was fitted with six blue shipping containers bolted in place – living quarters, equipped with solar-powered air-conditioners and a desalination system.
Landi stayed there for over a year as he raised money to buy another barge twice as large as the Aisland. He even hired an architect named Peter de Vries to help design plans for the re-fit of the new barge so that it could sail to the Saya de Malha Bank and survive there. Landi hoped to eventually expand his Saya de Mahla project to create a floating city consisting of about twenty barges, which would, by 2028, house thousands of permanent residents in luxury villas and apartments. Since the area has been known to entice pirates and other sea marauders, Landi also planned to mount a Gatling gun on the Aisland. “That’s one of these guns that fires 1,000 rounds a minute — very heavy-duty stuff,” Peter de Vries said in an interview with the Times. “I actually got the specs for the gun.”
The dream of a separate state
Hilbertz and Landi aren’t the only ones to imagine creating sovereign states on the high seas. The movement has a colorful history. The founders of these micronations—including, in the 2000s, some dot-com tycoons—were usually men of means, steeped in Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes. Conceptualized as self-sufficient, self-governing, sea-bound communities, these waterborne cities were to be part libertarian utopia, part billionaire’s playground. Fittingly, in more recent years they have been called seasteads, after the homesteads of the American West.
In 2008, several seasteading visionaries coalesced around a non-profit organization called The Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and the grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government. The institute’s primary benefactor was Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal, who put over $1.25 million into the organization and related projects. Where Elon Musk has promoted a vision of fleeing earthly encumberments by colonizing Mars, these libertarians had similar aspirations for the high seas.
Tonga expels the occupiers
Long before the Seasteading Institute, the interest in offshore micronations spurred dozens of daring and often ill-fated schemes. In the early 1970s, 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 to be the Republic of Minerva. Within months, Tonga sent troops to the site to enforce its 12-mile offshore territorial claim, expelling the Minervan occupants and removing their flag, which displayed a single torch on a blue background. In 1982, a group of Americans led by Morris C. “Bud” Davis tried to occupy the reefs. Within weeks, they too were forced off by Tongan troops.
Other projects met a similar fate. In 1968, 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 presumptive territory. It sank soon thereafter in a hurricane. Another wealthy libertarian, Norman Nixon, raised about $400,000 to create a floating city called the Freedom Ship, a 4,500-foot vessel about four times the length of the Queen Mary 2. The ship was never built.
Part of the reason these projects failed to get off the drawing board was that the ocean is a far less inviting place than architectural renderings tend to suggest. At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave, and solar energy, but building renewable-energy systems that can survive the weather and corrosive seawater is difficult and costly.
The tragic end
On February 2, 2024, Landi and his crew tragically learned that lesson the hard way when the Aisland was slammed by a rogue wave, which breached the hull, breaking the barge in two. Landi and the two seafarers died, while two others survived by clinging onto pieces of wood until a passing vessel rescued them the next day. According to Italian news reports, Landi put out a call for help, but it didn’t come in time. His body was found several days later, when it washed up on the beach about 40 miles up the coastline from Dubai.
Cover Photo: First barge. In 2022, Samuele Landi bought an initial 800-ton deck barge that he named Aisland and anchored roughly 30 miles off the coast of Dubai, where he lived with three sailors, a cook and five cats.
Credit: The Legend of Landi by Oswald Horowitz / The Outlaw Ocean Project
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