The High Seas: A Haven for Micronations

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.

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 among the largest submerged ocean plateaus in the world—less than 33 feet deep in some areas. Near the equator, the water temperature at the Saya de Malha varies from 23°C to 28°C, depending on the season. Waves are broken in the shallower areas. But the biggest allure is that the bank is hundreds of miles beyond the jurisdictional reach of any nation’s laws.

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 the Seychelles, the voyage took 3 days. 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, most of Saya lies in international waters, ‘in the high seas’ legally speaking, governed only by the U.N. Law of the Sea,” Hilbertz told Celestopea Times in 2004.

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 these steel poles under a weak direct electrical current. Little by little, limestone is deposited on the steel poles and at their base, creating an ideal habitat for corals and other shellfish and marine animals.

Rushing because a cyclone was headed their way in a matter of days, the team built in six days a steel structure five by five by two meters high. The structure, located specifically at 9°12′ south latitude and 61°21′ east longitude, was anchored in the seabed and a small battery provided 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.

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. He planned to park a massive barge near the seagrass patch 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 a yet-unreleased documentary film by Oswald Horowitz called “The Legend of Landi.” 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 its executives were tried and convicted in Italy. Landi was sentenced in absentia to 14 years, which led him to relocate to Dubai where he dabbled in crypto, hid money in Switzerland, and skated around extradition treaties. While living comfortably in Dubai, he registered companies in bespoke tax-free zones, and eventually procured diplomatic credentials from Liberia, according to a New York Times profile of him.

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 Malha 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 movement to create sovereign states on the high seas has a colorful history. Typically such projects have been imbued with the view that government was a kind of kryptonite that weakened entrepreneurialism. Many held a highly optimistic outlook on technology and its potential to solve human problems. The founders of these micronations—in the 2000s quite a few dot-com tycoons—were usually men of means, steeped in Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes. Conceptualized as self-sufficient, self-governing, sea-bound communities, the vision for these waterborne cities was part libertarian utopia, part billionaire’s playground. Fittingly, they have been called, in more recent years, seasteads, after the homesteads of the American West.

In 2008, these 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 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.

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 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—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.

On February 2, 2024, Landi and his crew tragically learned this hard lesson. The Aisland was slammed by a rogue wave, which breached the hull, breaking the barge in two. Two members of Landi’s crew survived by clinging onto pieces of wood until a passing vessel rescued them the next day. Landi and the two remaining seafarers died. 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.

Ian Urbina is the director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington D.C. that produces investigative stories about human rights, environment and labor concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water.

Reporting and writing was contributed additionally by Outlaw Ocean Project staff, including Maya Martin, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan, and Austin Brush.