When Your Brother is a Famous Writer

Murder on Hood Canal

Gothic and Historic

Tacoma WA. Murder

Island in the Stream . . . Your Dream

“Ineffectual,” “inept,”  “a constant failure,” these are just a few ways Ernest Hemingway described his brother, Leicester.  So being the less-brilliant, younger brother of a world-renown author, what could Leicester do to become famous in his own right?  Well, he could work

hard and become president of a foreign country—a country that he created on a platform in the Caribbean Sea off the island of Jamaica, a wacky pursuit and therefore sure to inspire others.  

     On July 4, 1964, Leicester Hemingway introduced the world to New Atlantis

            It’s hard to know how serious Leicester was about his enterprise, but perhaps very serious.   He not only waited until three years after his famous brother’s death before launching the kingdom, he also used his own money to create it, money that came from the proceeds of his book, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway.

            Approximately six miles off Jamaica’s coast, in international waters, Leicester found a place where the ocean floor, normally about 1,000 feet below sea level, was only fifty feet down. “Anything we build there is legally called ‘an artificial island,’” Leicester said.

First he put down a foundation made of used steel, iron, and bamboo cables weighted down with a ship’s anchor, a railroad axle, and steel wheels, an old Ford motor block, and other scrap metal.  To this he attached an eight-by-thirty foot bamboo log platform.  He claimed half of the structure for New Atlantis and half for the United States government, based on the U. S. Guano Island Act of 1856.  In the 1850s, guano (bird poop) was a valuable fertilizer, and Western nations were busy claiming unoccupied areas having guano deposits.  The act authorized United States citizens to take possession on behalf of the government of   “any unoccupied island, rock or key on which deposits were found.”

            New Atlantis’s first citizens were Leicester Hemingway, his wife, Doris, and their daughters Anne, aged seven, and Hilary, aged three.  Eventually, the citizenship grew to seven with Leicester as president.  In an ironic but classy touch, a British subject named Lady Pamela Bird, who held dual citizenship, became vice president.  Thus, New Atlantis had its own Lady Bird.

As president, Leicester drew up a constitution based on that of the United States but with one line taken from the Swiss constitution which prohibited gambling.  A constitutional provision let honorary citizens be elected president with no oath of office required. 

Leicester created an official currency comprised of a fish hook, carob bean, shark’s tooth, and other items.  He called it the New Atlantis scruple.  “The scruple was chosen as a unit of currency,” he explained, “because the more scruples a man has, the less inclined he is to be antisocial.”

His raft island national flag, sewn by Doris,  was a blue square with a gold triangle in the middle and a blue circle in the middle of that.  She made at least four flags because storms and thieves frequently left the flagpole empty.  And finally, Leicester issued five different denominations of postage stamps.  They honored the provisional government of the Dominican Republic, the United States 4^th Infantry, Winston Churchill, Herbert Humphrey, and Lyndon B. Johnson.  President Johnson sent Leicester a letter addressed to Leicester Hemingway, Acting President, and Republic of New Atlantis thanking his fellow president for some New Atlantis first-issue stamps.  Since it came from the president and went through the United States postal system, it inadvertently gave the fledgling republic approbation.

Had it not been for storms which repeatedly took out the platform, Leicester would have enlarged it to 100 yards wide and half-a mile long.  His future plans included a lighthouse, a shortwave radio station, a customs house, and, of course, a post office.  In the end, he quit rebuilding and turned all the country’s documentation over to the University of Texas at Austin.

            The purpose of New Atlantis was never clear.  Leicester explained, once, that it was to house the headquarters of the International Marine Research Society, an organization he founded.  The society’s mission was to raise funds for marine research, and to build a scientifically-valuable aquarium in Jamaica.  A possible side benefit of the raft island was that it could possibly help protect the Jamaican fishing industry.  But then Leicester also said he founded New Atlantis mostly to have fun and “make dough”—presumably from the stamps.

            After the demise of New Atlantis, Leicester tried to found another island nation—Tierra del Mar.  This time, four State Department officials explained to him, in no uncertain terms, that “attempts at creating this (new) island would be viewed by the United States government as a highly undesirable development, adverse to our national interest, particularly as it might encourage an archipelagic claim,” i.e. serve as a springboard for annexation of one of the nearby Bahaman Islands.

            Private islands and platform island nations have a long history.  When George H. W. Bush was president, his friend, Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, bought North Dumpling Island.  Kamen referred to it as the Kingdom of North Dumpling and to himself as Lord Dumpling.  North Dumpling is a two-acre “pirate island” in Fisher’s Island Sound off the coasts of both New York and Connecticut.    It had a lighthouse and a replica of Stonehenge.  Kamen created his own constitution, flag, national anthem, and navy (a single amphibious vehicle).  Its currency was in increments of Pi.  Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream served as joint Ministers of Ice Cream.  When Kamen was refused permission to build a wind turbine, he joked that though he had signed a non-aggression pact with President Bush, he would secede from the Union.  At some point, however, he installed a Bergey 10KW turbine on an 80-foot, self-supporting tower that he stacked in place using a gin-pole and winch system.

            While North Dumpling is a real island, it has nothing on Spiral Island, a “floating artificial island first built in a lagoon near Puerto Aventuras in southern Mexico.”

            In 1998, British expatriate Reishe Sowa moved to the area along the Caribbean coast and began picking up empty, discarded plastic bottles, left-over pieces of wood from construction sites, and bags of leaves.  The 250,000 bottles he gathered and filled with sand became the flotation for a bamboo and plywood base on which he built a two-story house, complete with a solar oven and self-composting toilet.  Mangrove trees and other tropical vegetation he planted on it gave the platform a real island feel and appearance.  Sowa’s pets—eight cats and one dog as of January 2006—gave it a homey feel.

            Of course what Sowa built technically isn’t an island.  “Not even the president is allowed his own island in Mexico,” he said.  “I have an eco space creating ship.  I can move it, after all.”

            Nature could also move it.  After a 2005 hurricane took Spiral Island out, Sowa rebuilt what is now a tourist attraction near Cancun.

            It’s not hard to have a quasi-island either on land or water.  The International Marine Floating Structures company has been building floating homes for twenty-five years.  They have contractors throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, and Central America.  Or for actual terra firma, consider someplace rural, such as Nevada’s The Republic of Molossia.  It’s been around for over thirty years old.

SOURCES: 

This started from a pre-Google article in Smithsonian magazine.  Google micro nations and it’s all there.