All Hail Sealand

I was about 10 years old when I declared the independence of my bedroom. On a blank page ripped from my school notebook, I meticulously traced the room’s floor plan. From National Geographic’s maps, I borrowed the colored edge and dotted line that mark international borders. The threshold of my room now marked the entrance to my own separate kingdom (or republic; I hadn’t quite figured that out yet).

Because countries need capitals, I drew a star in a circle at a location on the map that seemed appropriate — near the headboard of the bed, where my pillow usually lay. I forget the capital’s name, but I remember the name of my imaginary country. It came from a real place in my school atlas, one that sounded exotic, and looked sufficiently distant never to be bothered by my appropriation of its name: Vanuatu [1].

Word got out among my peers, and soon enough the revolution was spreading. Schoolmates and cousins liberated their own living quarters, adding a faux-diplomatic layer to the fervently held belief that their parents had no business in their room. All over the school district, kids were drawing borders and devising flags. And swearing allegiance to Vanuatu. For a brief while, I basked in the glory of kingship, the radiance of empire. I can tell you: It’s good to be the king.

Alas, like any revolutionary wave, the Prepubescent Spring soon crested, then started collapsing in on itself. As the central government dithered between monarchy and republicanism [2], it became clear the center could not hold. One after another, Vanuatu’s far-flung provinces rejected the authority of the Imperial Bedroom, in turn declaring their own independence as republics, grand-duchies and empires (I even seem to recall a renegade emirate).

Your typical micronation [3] starts like this. It appropriates the regalia of independent statehood — a flag, borders, a potentate, the power to legislate — as an affirmation of pre-adolescent individuality. The ease with which the Vanuatan virus spread convinces me that micronationalism is a relatively common phenomenon, especially among boys in their early teens. But puberty soon provides plenty of other distractions, just as most micronations are re-absorbed by their unsuspecting host nations. Vanuatu (mine, not the Pacific-island state), succumbing to factionalism, disappeared off the map.

Some micronations, though, persist into adulthood. The accidental birth of a nation becomes a permanent experiment. As their teenage kings get on in life, they devise increasingly elaborate backstories, bizarre by-laws and resplendent uniforms. In others, micronationalism is a latent urge that lies dormant for many years. The knack for surreal statecraft resurfaces much later, as artistic expression, or a snub to impersonal authorities, or both.

The Principality of Sealand is a textbook example. Literally. Open any book or Web page on micronations, and you’re likely to see its unmistakable silhouette: a two-legged marine platform. Sealand is one of the first, arguably one of the most successful, and possibly the best-known example of modern micronationalism. It’s also one of the most intriguing experiments in state-creation in history.

Start with its geography, as it were: Sealand was founded on an abandoned World War II sea fort six miles off the coast from Felixstowe, in the southern English county of Suffolk. The installation, officially known as Her Majesty’s Fort Roughs [4], is one of the half dozen so-called Maunsell Forts [5], built during World War II to provide antiaircraft defense and abandoned by the British Army in the 1950s. Predictably, the hulks of concrete and steel left to rust in the busy waterways just off the English coast were accidents waiting to happen. In the deadliest one, the Norwegian ship Baalbek collided with Nore Army Fort, in the Thames estuary between the Isle of Sheppey and Southend-on-Sea, killing four people and destroying two of the fort’s towers.

The mid-1960s saw the re-occupation of some forts, this time by pirates rather than privates. Not cutlass-and-peg-leg pirates; these were of the broadcasting variety (though some swashbuckling was involved). One of the more colorful radio pirates was Screaming Lord Sutch [6], who established Radio Sutch in Shivering Sands Army Fort, a collection of outlandish huts on stilts also in the Thames estuary. “Britain’s First Teenage Radio Station” was quickly rebranded Radio City by its new manager, Reginald Calvert. Other pirate stations were set up at the Red Sands Army Fort and the Sunk Head Navy Fort, all competing with the more established, ship-based pirate stations, most notably Radio Caroline.

These heady radio days were hardly halcyon. The pirates took to the sea to operate on or beyond the fringes of the law. Arguments were settled by violence. Mr. Calvert was killed in a dispute over, among other things, radio crystals. In 1965, a group of feral DJs under the command of Roy Bates ejected a rival crew from Knock John Navy Fort; it then became the base for Radio Essex, the first pirate to broadcast around the clock. The next year, a conviction for illegal broadcasting forced Mr. Bates to abandon Knock John, which was located within the three-mile radius of British territorial waters, to Fort Roughs, which was just outside.

In response, the Marine Broadcasting Act of 1967 made it illegal for pirate radios, even those outside territorial waters, to employ British citizens. Mr. Bates promptly declared independence, probably hoping to circumvent the strictures of the act. Henceforth, he would be Prince Roy [7], ruler of the Principality of Sealand.

Mr. Bates never got around to resurrecting his radio station. The accident of statehood turned into his core business. On the Web site, noble titles are for sale (“Lord, Lady, Baroness — from £29.99”) [8]. Until 1997 it even issued passports (Mr. Bates suspended the practice because of widespread fraud). Over the years, Sealand’s supposed sovereignty has attracted the interests of some who seek sanctuary from the law, from gambling operators to, more recently, WikiLeaks, which was examining whether to move its servers to the principality.

The very idea of micronationalism might seem supremely self-involved, yet these clandestine statelets crave nothing more than recognition by the outside world, however fleetingly accorded — much like children seeking parental attention, positive if possible, negative if necessary.

A first example of such oblique recognition resulted from the First Battle for Sealand, waged not long after Mr. Bates took over the fort. A team from Radio Caroline claimed the platform was theirs. Mr. Bates and his crew fought off the Carolinians with bombs and gunshots. Later, Roy’s son Michael fired warning shots at a Royal Navy vessel, which had strayed into Sealand’s “territorial waters.” A British court threw out subsequent weapons charges against father and son Bates, as the events had occurred outside its jurisdiction. This, according to Prince Roy, constituted de facto recognition of Sealand’s independence.

Pretty thin ice to skate on, but the principality scored a big victory on the diplomatic front in 1978 — if only after the traumatic Second Battle of Sealand [9]. In that year, the princely platform was invaded and occupied by Alexander Achenbach, a German businessman, and some of his associates. Previously, Mr. Achenbach had ingratiated himself with Prince Roy by proposing to turn Sealand into a luxury hotel-casino, in turn receiving not only citizenship of Sealand, but also the prime ministership for life.

What followed was thus technically not an invasion, but a coup [10]. With Prince Roy and Princess Joan away on business, Mr. Achenbach Trojan-horsed his invasion team into Sealand, taking Michael Bates hostage. Prince Roy — a former major in the British Army — quickly turned the tables, retaking his principality in a helicopter raid and holding Mr. Achenbach’s lawyer, Gernot Pütz, and his hired goons captive. While the others were quickly released, Mr. Pütz was held for treason and sentenced to life on the platform [11]. Britain stuck to its previous position — outside our territorial waters, nothing to do with us — so Germany sent a diplomat from its London embassy to Sealand to secure the release of its citizen. Which Prince Roy granted with pleasure: the trade-off, as he saw it, was that the German diplomatic mission to his windswept platform off the Suffolk coast constituted recognition of Sealand’s independence by Germany. Again, only de facto, but you take what you can get.

Sealand’s next great challenge came in 1987, when Britain extended its territorial waters from 3 to 12 nautical miles. The three-mile zone had been a generally accepted part of international maritime law since at least the early 18th century. Sometimes referred to as the “cannon-shot rule,” it extended territorial sovereignty out to sea for a distance deemed equal to the range of a well-shot cannonball [12]. This also served Prince Roy just fine: conveniently, Sealand’s three-mile radius stays just clear of Britain’s.

But in 1982, the United Nations Law of the Sea treaty officiated what most countries already practiced: a 12-mile zone of territorial waters. Britain applied the treaty in 1987, swallowing up the whole of Sealand in the process. While the principality could no longer claim it had British law on its side, it could still protest what it saw as a unilateral extension of British territorial waters by the only means at its disposal: extending its own territorial waters from 3 to 12 nautical miles.

The treaty stipulates that where nautical claims overlap, the border should be a line equidistant from both countries’ baseline. But where’s the fun in that? Maritime mild-manneredness be damned, Sealand’s claim surrounds the ancient fort in full circle. Including, while we’re at it, some of the nicest bits of Suffolk. The town centers of Felixstowe and Harwich fall entirely within the Sealand circle, which touches the southern outskirts of Ipswich.

To my knowledge, this has not yet led to any actual border disputes or other territorial unpleasantness on the mainland. But apparently, shots were fired on the vessel Golden Eye after it entered Sealand’s extended exclusion zone in 1990. No attempts by either side have been made to impose the ultimate consequence of both claims: eradication of the Bates family’s illegal usurpation of Fort Roughs, or annexation of the Sealand Circle by its island base.

Should the British Navy reclaim possession of Sealand, it won’t find Prince Roy and Princess Joan, who are enjoying their retirement in Spain. It is even quite unlikely that they’ll find Prince Michael, prince regent and acting head of state since 1999, who prefers the terra firma of Essex. The platform is usually maintained by a single caretaker (who had to be airlifted out to Ipswich after a fire in 2006). Prince Michael has also been represented by his son Prince Royal James, making Sealand one of the handful examples of microstates that have established viable dynasties. Even if their territories have not expanded very much beyond the Imperial Bedrooms of yore.

Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.

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[1] Formerly known as the New Hebrides, this island group in the Pacific Ocean was a condominium of France and Britain until independence in 1980. Sorry for borrowing your name, Vanuatu!

[2] A bit like France in the 19th century. I didn’t quite see the parallel to the politics of my bedroom at that time.

[3] A micronation can be defined as a claim of sovereignty over a tiny patch of territory by an individual or a small group, unrecognized (and generally unnoticed) by the “grown-up” nations. In keeping with the “splittist” tendencies of micronationalism, there are several overlapping directories of micronational projects, but not a single, comprehensive one. A charming introduction is “Micronations — The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations.”

[4] Designed by and named for Guy Maunsell, these forts were built in the North and Irish Seas to defend British ports from German airborne attack and mine-laying. Maunsell later pioneered the technique of pre-stressed concrete in bridges, used for the first time on a large scale for the Hammersmith Flyover in London.

[5] Also known as Rough Sands, after the sandbar into which the construction was sunk.

[6] David Edward Sutch, the self-styled Screaming Lord Sutch, Third Earl of Harrow, was a rock musician who later became known as the founder and leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, and its candidate in innumerable by-elections. On election night, the outrageously dressed Sutch was the standard-bearer of the lunatic fringe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E0d2zcFcVI]. His political activism may have been a case of life (in this case politics) imitating art (in this instance, a 1970 Monty Python sketch).

[7] And his wife, Princess Joan of Sealand. Unlike him, she had previous experience in crown-wearing: as Joan Ellinor Boardman, she had won the title of Miss England 1960.

[8] Also for sale: stamps, key rings, T-shirts and similar paraphernalia in any tourist gift shop the world over.

[9] The American shoegaze band Airiel named their first studio album “The Battle of Sealand.” While it is unclear which battle it is referring to, it is probably the second, more spectacular one. Again showing how grateful micronations can be for any degree of attention, the principality accorded lordships to the band members for naming their album after it. Airiel was slated to become the first rock band to perform on the platform — which would have been a nice tribute to its pirate radio heritage — but the deal fell through.

[10] The term coup is short for coup d’état, as in: (violent) takeover of the state. The term’s first use goes back to the coup d’État of 18 Brumaire, which saw Napoleon seize power from the Directoire in 1799, albeit under the guise of a consulship shared with two others (18 Brumaire of Year VIII on the revolutionary calendar, which was in use in France from 1792 until 1806, corresponds to November 9, 1799). The correspondent German term is Putsch. English lacks a similarly short, descriptive term, some say, for want of coups in English history. “Doin’ a Cromwell” comes closest, I suppose. For a fictional treatment, see “A Very British Coup” (the 1982 novel or the 1988 TV adaptation).

[11] With a total territory of 6,000 square feet, conditions easily become cramped on Sealand. The platform houses a helicopter pad; a “palace” with two bedrooms, one bathroom, kitchen and living room; slightly smaller servants’ quarters; a chapel; a parliament office (a.k.a. the recreation room); and a small government office.

[12] According to the rule “Potestatem terrae finiri, ubi finitur armorum vis” (“the power of the state extends to where its weaponry reaches”). Another explanation: the three-mile zone simply equals a common nautical unit of measurement, the sea league, which equals three nautical miles.