Two years after its founding, the Republic of New Atlantis was devastated by a tropical storm. What remained of the micronation was then ransacked by local fishermen.
It was, of course, not much to begin with, measuring eight feet by 20 feet, cobbled together with bamboo, steel, stones and a series of iron pipes. Docked 12 nautical miles off the west coast of Jamaica, “it amounted to a bamboo raft, anchored by a railroad axle and an old Ford engine block,” according to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.
“There’s no law that says you can’t start your own country,” Leicester Hemingway said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1964, the year of New Atlantis’s founding.
Sixteen years his junior, Leicester would later become the spitting image of older brother, Ernest, whom he referred to as “Duke.” He, too, was an adventurer, fisherman and writer. His 1953 debut novel, The Sound of the Trumpet was a semi-autobiographical work based on his experience in World World II. It was met with what The New York Times would later describe as “slight praise.” At the time of its publication, the paper noted slyly, “Leicester Hemingway belongs to the first younger generation shaped by the books of Ernest Hemingway.”
In 1962, the younger Hemingway’s simply titled, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway was published some eight month’s after the titular author’s death. Funds from what the publisher would describe as “the only biography Ernest knew about” were exclusively used in the creation of New Atlantis.
Hemingway cited the Guano Islands Act in claims of sovereignty over the raft docked beyond the three-mile border of Jamaica’s territorial waters. The 1856 law (which remains on the books to this day) allows U.S. citizens to take possession of unclaimed islands sporting deposits of seabird manure, which at the time, was a highly sought after ingredient for fertilizer and gunpowder. It reads in part,
Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.
The law allowed the United States to make some of its earliest major expansions beyond its contiguous borders. Invoking it, Hemingway claimed half the raft for the United States and the other half for himself.
Composed on Hemingway’s typewriter, the new nation’s founding document consisted of the American Constitution, with every instance of that country replaced by the New Atlantis name. His wife, Doris, sewed a flag — or, rather, three, as the first two were reportedly stolen by fishermen. It featured an orange triangle with a hole in the center, set against a navy blue background. New Atlantis also had its own currency, the “scruple,” so named because of Hemingway’s belief that the wealthy should have many. The money was constructed from altered beach objects, including a shark’s tooth and a carob bean with a hole drilled in the center.
New Atlantis was home to six founding citizens: Hemingway himself, wife Doris, their three- and six-year-old daughters, personal assistant Julia Cellini and D.C.-based PR professional, Edward K. Moss, who both worked for the Defense Production Administration of the Department of Commerce and had “longstanding connections” to organized crime, according to later CIA documents. Citizenship papers were issued for the inhabitants, and in 1965, the first presidential election was held.
Hemingway won.
He promised to be a benevolent leader, telling a Kingston paper, that New Atlantis would be a “peaceful power and pose no threat to Jamaica.” Bucking the tendencies of fellow presidents, the promise was ultimately kept.
The island nation had grander purposes than Hemingway’s simple political ambitions. New Atlantis was also created to become the home of the International Marine Research Society. The planned sale of the nation’s coins and stamps would go to fund oceanic research and the building of an aquarium in nearby Jamaica. Hemingway also penned the New Atlantis Cookery Book, though that ultimately never made it beyond a handwritten manuscript.
Hemingway spent the final years of his life publishing a fishing newsletter titled, The Bimini Out Islands News. He died in Miami Beach in 1982, by self-inflicted wounds from a borrowed handgun. In his final years, he battled depression, exacerbated by multiple surgeries. Even in death, he couldn’t escape the shadow of Ernest, who famously —along with their father — died by the same means. This fact became a centerpiece of virtually every obituary.
In spite of it all, the younger Hemingway clearly admired his older brother, to whom he bore a striking resemblance when he grew out a white beard toward the end of his life. In the prologue to My Brother, Ernest Hemingway (a book dedicated to Doris), he begins, “In the early years after I was born he changed my diapers with amusement and called me ‘the bipehouse.’ Later he changed my nickname to ‘the Baron.’ He taught me even more than my father did about shooting, fishing and fighting.”
Sources:
New York Times Obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/15/obituaries/leicester-hemingway-writer-and-ernest-s-brother-is-suicide.html
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center: https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00327
When America turned to gangsters to oust Castro: https://www.salon.com/test2/2013/07/21/when_america_turned_to_gangsters_to_oust_castro_partner/
Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, Owen Robinson, Lesley Wylie
The Guano Islands Act of 1856: https://americanhistory.si.edu/norie-atlas/guano-islands-act
My Brother, Ernest Hemingway by Leicester Hemingway