The History of North America podcast is a sweeping historical saga of the United States,

Canada, and Mexico from their deep origins to our present epoch.

Join me, Mark Vinet, on this exciting, fascinating epic journey through time, focusing on the compelling,

wonderful, and tragic stories of North America's inhabitants, heroes, villains, leaders,

environment, and geography.

I invite you to come along for the ride.

History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.

It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explain how and why we got here.

Welcome to the History and Plug podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange,

and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.

I'm your host, Scott Rank.

In the Age of Discovery, conkeys to doors would go to the New World, claim new lands in the name of Spain, or France, or England,

but a lot of times they had aspirations of becoming governors and become sovereign monarchs.

A lot of spirit didn't die out the age of discovery.

In 1967, a retired army major and a self-made millionaire named Patti Roy Bates, named himself the ruler of the Principality of Sealand,

where he and his family seized an unUC fort in order to broadcast pirate radio, and from this base they defended their tiny family from UK government officials and our mercenaries.

Roy and his family engaged with diplomats, they entertained purveyors of pirate radio on TV, and even stopped an attempted coup attempt, where his son was taken hostage.

After 50 years, the self-proclaimed independent nation still stands, it has its own constitution, its own national flag, and anthem, currency, and passports.

They may be able to do so because they technically exist in international waters, or they did when Sealand was founded.

So Sealand is a very interesting, curious story, and it's financially solvent today because it sells off royal titles to people, so if you want to become a baron of Sealand, you can.

But it's not just a quirky story, it also looks to the future, where libertarian billionaires want to have self-sustained floating islands, where they can operate international waters and eventually create their own constitutions and their own laws and tinker and experiment with democracy in the 21st century.

So Sealand is about the ancient story of how people try to claim their own lands and set up their own sovereign nations, but also a story for the future, and all sorts of interesting things in between.

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