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Island in the Stream
. . . Your Dream
“Ineffectual,”
“inept,” “ineffectual,” “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 Leister 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 that 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
had a national flag sewn by Doris. It
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
4th Infantry, Winston Churchill, Herbert Humphrey, and Lyndon B.
Johnson. A letter sent from President Johnson
addressed to Leister Hemingway, Acting President, and Republic of New Atlantis
in which Johnson thanked Hemingway for some New Atlantis first-issue stamps. Since it from the president and went through
the United States postal system, it inadvertently gave the fledgling republic
approbation.
Had it not been
for storms that 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 bamboo island was that it might 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.
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