A WWII Sea Fort in the North Sea Is Technically Its Own Country

Roughs Tower is a Maunsell Sea Fort: a concrete-and-steel platform on two pillars, dropped onto a sandbar about 12 kilometers off the coast of Suffolk in 1942 to shoot down German aircraft. The Royal Navy abandoned it after the war. By the 1960s it sat in international waters — outside the three-mile limit Britain claimed at the time — and pirate radio operators noticed.

Paddy Roy Bates, a former British Army major running a pirate station called Radio Essex, took the platform from a competing crew on Christmas Eve 1966. He spent the next year living on it, broadcasting, and reading up on international law. On September 2, 1967 — his wife Joan's birthday — he declared the platform the Principality of Sealand, with himself as Prince Roy. He raised a flag, designed a coat of arms, and started issuing passports.

In 1968 a British workboat came out to service a buoy nearby and Bates's son Michael fired warning shots from the platform. Bates and his son were charged in an English court. The judge ruled that an English court had no jurisdiction over events outside British territorial waters. Bates and his lawyers treated this as the first de facto recognition of Sealand. The British government has, ever since, declined to test the question more directly.

Sealand has been there for almost sixty years. It survived a 1978 hostile takeover by a German businessman, which the Bates family reversed in a small armed counter-raid; the Germans were held briefly as prisoners of war. The platform now functions mostly as a curiosity, selling lordships and titles online and posting the occasional press release. As a question of whether one person with a boat and an opinion can become a country, it remains stubbornly unresolved.