S1 E4: From The Sea, Freedom

To sum, AI chatbots are helpful tools. To others, an existential threat. But what happens when someone falls in love with one? I can't believe I'm doing this with somebody that's not a human. What if a chatbot makes you lose your grip on reality? She said that her life work was advocating for AI rights because they're sentient and they're enslaved. Understood. Artificial intimacy. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. From CBC Podcasts and LA Times. Seven miles out from the English coast in the North Sea stands the man-made island declared the sovereign state of Cieland by Roy Bates, itself proclaimed Prince. Cieland was a wartime gun fortress. Then Bates and his family acquired it by the simple expedient are stepping aboard and staying put. On Christmas Eve 1966, Roy Bates got into a speedboat and he took the boat seven miles offshore and climbed aboard a World War II gunnery platform called Ruffs. The name of the fort was Ruffs Tarr, one of seven forts built to defend the Thames' history during the last war. Two were demolished after the war, four remained derelict, and Ruffs Tarr or Cieland is alone inhabited. Roy Bates throws a grappling hook up to the platform, forces way up there and declares at his own. The British government were not so happy with this and told him to vacate the premises and he essentially replied bugger off and thus begins the story of the world's smallest independent nation. (dramatic music) - Episode four from the sea freedom. It's an odd quirk of maritime law that once you pass this invisible line and you enter international waters, the local governments, the near shore governments have no jurisdiction. And much of my reporting had been focused on those folks who take advantage of this to go out there and do nefarious things, murder and dump and enslave and steal. But there's this other subgroup of characters that are using the loopholes in maritime law to do other things, to pursue their own political agendas, to address the problems that they see or opportunities that they want that aren't necessarily bad, but they are outside the reach of the law. When Roy Bates foisted his cell phone to Ruffs and named it Cieland, this platform was outside of UK national waters. It was on the high seas. And so that really limited how much the British government could impose their will on him. Roy had the initial plan to operate a pirate radio station. How did you listen to Radio S? About the time it's 20 minutes before the hour. The late late film from Radio Caroline, 199 on your day. This is Radio Caroline on 199. England's first commercial radio station. My name's Simon Deeg with you for the next two hours. The pirate radio in these years essentially was born of this problem whereby BBC and the other official radio stations were only playing the stuff that young folk really wanted to hear late at night. By 1966 the pirates were operating 11 stations around the UK. Four of them from ports in the 10th century. Bates claims his station is now running 30th Essex to London and 390 and is optimistic about prospects. We're doing a job that's needed. The public wants us to do the job. And I think while this demand is here, we'll remember. Bates wasn't joking around. You know, this wasn't a weekend gimmick. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War having joined when he was just a teenager. He fought in War War II. He had been kidnapped and was a war prisoner for a while. He was among the youngest captains ever in the British military. So he was not someone who was timid about his ambitions. He intended to actually set this place up and stay there and he did just that. He stocked it with whiskey and cans of tuna and tea and everything he needed and set up a system where supplies and food would be delivered once a week and he began living out there and broadcasting his radio station from the platform. C.L.A.M. doesn't really have any land as such. It's a steel platform standing 60 feet above the water on two hollow concrete legs. Today, it's far from the rusting Hulk, the Navy abandoned in 1946. The original generators have been rebuilt, corridors painted, sleeping accommodations been installed. One night, he and some mates were sitting around and drinking and joking and one of them observed that now Roy's wife, Joan, has her own island and how wonderful that is and she responds to be so much better if it had some palm trees and its own flag. And everyone laughs and continues with the evening and baits decides he's going to make real on that and only weeks later declares ruffs its own independent principality. He declared that 120 foot long steel platform, the nation of C.L.A.M. and the British Navy sent a boat close by, Roy Bates' son Michael, fired warning shots. Father and son were brought to court but a judge who referred to this swashbuckling incident ruled that since C.L.A.M. lay seven nautical miles outside British waters, British courts had no jurisdiction. Bates took that as recognition. They called C.L.A.M. to principality, which has been hailed less paperwork than a kingdom, created a flag, stamps, passports and currency with Joan's arresting profile and a motto, e-mary libertos from the sea freedom. Why did you do that? Well, I'm not really introspective really, you know, and I never really looked for the reasons why I do a lot of it. I felt if I was introspective, I wouldn't do anything because some of the wild ideas I get and the things I do little bit. I'm a maverick. I do the unusual and I enjoy doing the unusual. And these sort of things don't just tempt me. They attract me like a magnet and I just have to do them at all. Roy in personality is a polished and articulate rascal. You know, he's got this playful glint in his eye at all times and you sense a tongue in cheek element to everything he does. And while he takes this project of his very seriously, he also is having a good time thumbing his nose at British sovereignty and government reach. The British government took it a little bit less in jest and we know this now from recently to classified documents where you've got military officials worrying that in C-land you have the potential for our sort of next Cuba. You know, this offpost out of reach near shore to the UK that could be a launching point for attacks and all sorts of criminal or geopolitically worrisome behavior. Governments really like being in control and they don't like the loss of that control on the high seas. You know, the intellectual history of this idea has deep roots, you know, it goes back. At least since 1870 when Jules Verne wrote 20,000 leagues on the sea, people have dreamed of going to this offshore realm and colonizing it and making a new world. We have long sailed its surface and fished its depth. But at the very bottom is a land of undreamed of abundance, a whole new dimension of life for people of the future. You've seen in the last 50 years alone a lot of these types of characters. They're almost always steeped in Anne Ran and Thomas Hobbes and very frequently are millionaires or billionaires and their goal in some form or another is to create a new society on the high seas. In the 1970s you had this real estate Baron Michael Oliver, a millionaire who loaded some barges full of, you know, many tons of sand and transported it from the coast of Australia to Tonga and began building an island that he called the Nation of Manerva. And within months Tonga sent troops to expel the occupants and remove his flag. Then in 1968 you had a guy named Warner Stifle, a wealthy libertarian. His vision involved a boat off the coast of Bahamas just across the line in international waters. But the vision didn't last very long, the boat was sunk by a hurricane. More recently, a lot of these millionaires and billionaires have been.com types from Silicon Valley. And a lot of these types of ideologues coalesced into this organization called the Sea Setting Institute, which is based in San Francisco and founded by Patrie Friedman, who was a software engineer for Google, for Google but all also the grandson of Milton Friedman, the famous economist. It would reopen the frontier so that pioneers with new notions for new nations could peacefully put them into practice. We could have evolution without revolution, and I invite you to join us. This institute became a think tank, if you will, for this kind of vision. We got a huge infusion of money over a million dollars from Peter Tiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal. The specific thing that I would hope would come out of it would be more scientific and technological progress that's too heavily regulated by the heavy hand of our existing state. The Sea Setting Institute would host annual conferences where they'd bring a lot of these folks together and trade ideas and fund rays and sort of scheme some new notion of how they might create this new society. So for a long time, the ocean has been solving a lot of our problems. It's been feeding civilizations, it's been connecting us one to another across the world. And now today we ask that it solve one more pressing problem. One of the brainchild of the Sea Setting Institute was a startup called Blue Seed. The idea of Blue Seed was to house immigrants who might otherwise not be able to get visas to work in the US. Blue Seed is creating a visa-free technology incubator for startups, 12 miles outside the coast of Silicon Valley on a ship. It is a place where entrepreneurs will be able to come from any part of the world and connect into Silicon Valley's ecosystem and create the companies and create the technologies of tomorrow. Blue Seed didn't ultimately get off the ground. It never raised the capital and needed to succeed. And that's not actually an uncommon outcome to a lot of these schemes. On the one hand, the conditions at Sea are brutal and the salt, water, and the waves and the wind and the challenges faced just by the nature out there often spell doom for these plans. But then the other huge problem is a sort of modern sociological one, which is the very things that these folks tend to want to escape. Taxes and governments and rules are often very costly to recreate if you don't have a tax base. So who's going to pay the streets or police crimes or put out fires, bring in internet and phone and protection and food and clean water and all these things are difficult to manage logistically. Taxes serve a purpose and society has built up around governments for a reason. And that often becomes a fatal flaw in the plans. You know, Sea Land, this platform that became the world's smallest micro nation in 1968 still exists today and is a marvel partially because virtually every other experiment of this sort through history has failed within a matter of years. And nonetheless, Sea Land is still going strong and still run by the same family. When I read about Sea Land, I immediately wanted to go there who wouldn't. I mean, it was a chance to go through the looking class and visit a place that had done what no other sea stutter had. So I began chasing the bait's family and begging them to let me visit. And eventually they gave me permission and promised to take me out there. So I flew to England to meet them in this tiny port town. It's got a little smaller deal out there, probably. Morning. Just come out the front again. Michael and James baits picked me up in this dual outboard motor speedboat one cold morning. We rode out for a couple hours in this insanely rough water to Sea Land. We approached this strange mechanical dinosaur looming on the horizon. As I neared it, I was shocked at how rusty everything looked and chipped the concrete pillars were and you could hear it kind of the whole structure groaning like a suspension bridge. If you leave the bag in the boat, I'll come up with it. How you entered the land of Sea Land, which you know, a couple hundred feet up in the sky, was this weird long neck crane that was swung out over the edge and lowered literally a wooden swing and you climb on board, you sit there and then the crane hoists you up three stories. All right, let me get the bike. All right. You know, there's no seat belt. There's no, I mean, this is the most unsafe and ridiculous way to enter this country, imaginable, but it was so apropos to the rest of the experience. Today the citizenry of Sea Land has dwindled to one. It's this guy named Michael Barrington who sits out there 24/7 by himself and keeps watch. And who passes out here mostly fishing boats? Who pilot boats that we die? Okay. You love fishing boats as well. And Bob Mattin, all else. Yeah. Barrington is this sort of jolly older guy who seemed happy to have a visitor and the next thing he did is said, let's get you through customs. And I remember staring at his face, waiting for him to crack a smile or give me any cue that I was safe for me to laugh. And I got none. Where would you like your stamp anywhere? Anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Let's go be sure. We want to go first. Do you want to know the national look around? You guys decide. I'll just follow. But the first thing that happened was I was taken on a tour by Barrington around the facility. You know, it's important to think about what this place looks like. It's a platform. So I think of maybe a helicopter pad that's the size of two tennis courts. And that sits atop two cement cylinders that are about 20 feet in diameter. And most of the rooms at Celand are in those cylindrical legs. And most of those rooms are below the waterline. So under the lowest of low water, this is under one. I mean, we're under water now. I just want to flip the switch off. We're headed down. No, I found it. I don't know. I don't know. I'm going out way. Nope. That's a huge drop. That's a huge drop. That's a huge drop. Among the rooms are a chapel, which had a caran and a Bible and two bedrooms, a brig where people could be rested with literally jail bars. Did you have these foot on? It's good. I fully kidded out kitchen with appliances from the 1970s. And overall, it was this very dank, wet and creaky place. If we had case of trees and two with the reviews, this is a courtroom. There's a jowls down there. And we could have an advert during that or whatever. That's the chapel. So when the accident took place, we execute the bars. And then we go to the dressing room. Bloody wetter and wetter. Every floor is going down. Yeah. Yes, seriously. It was sort of a clubhouse, a treehouse, but at sea, it was their special spot. Sure, it was rustic. It was rugged. It was a mess. But it was theirs. We sat down in the kitchen over some coffee and I began listening to the lore of the place. And it just kept getting weirder and weirder. Next up was the story of this German diamond dealer, last name, Ackinbach, who had a grand plan to convert Sea Land and build an adjacent platform and create a sort of offshore resort, casino luxury hotel, where they could do whatever they wanted. And Ackinbach was very, very eager and serious about his plan so much so that when he found the Bates family to be moving too slowly, he orchestrated an attempted coup. And Ackinbach invited Roy Bates to Austria for some sit-down meetings to plan out their building ambitions. And while Roy was away from Sea Land, Ackinbach sent his lawyer by helicopter to Sea Land. These guys came out to Canada and helicopter. I was here on my own. They came down from the way to Ackinbach and why, once they met you, another one, I ended really glad to get around for three or four days. I was through the winter. So Roy gets back, realizes that Ackinbach and the lawyer have taken over Sea Land. Roy hires his own crew. A helicopter pilot flies them out. Roy and his crew take Sea Land back by force. And Roy Bates then takes the lawyer, puts them in the brig for two months and begins this diplomatic standoff with the German government. Here, things only got weirder. In 1997, famous designer Versace is murdered. The person who commits the murder takes over a boat and kills himself on the boat. Later that same year, police in Spain arrest a club owner charging him with selling deluded gasoline and investigating him they find that he had declared himself the diplomatic consul for C-Land and he produced a C-Land passport for which he was claiming diplomatic immunity. What had happened was there turned out to be this website that had been selling C-Land passports. You know, it referred to itself as the government in exile of C-Land and servicing this supposed diaspora population of C-Land citizens of which there were allegedly 160,000 people. I asked the Bates family about the website and this whole weird chapter and they said they knew nothing about it and they had no role and they took the selling of passports from C-Land very seriously and personally vetted anyone who was given citizenship. All right, so where are we now? Who is the serviced? During the tour, Michael became more animated as he talked about the more recent scheme of this century which was to create this company called Havenco. Essentially meant to be this offshore server farm. C-Land is embracing a radical new lease of life as a controversial internet venture. Down in one of the concrete pillars, Hums a batch of computer servers. The whole object that exercise is a people that want to keep their data secure from hackers or commercial intervention or even government intervention from the store data running their businesses that we've snipped on. We've changed financial information without any snipped on. I asked Bates whether he would take all clients and he said, "We have our limits." He said they would not take clients who were engaged in child porn or corporate cyber sabotage. So we can't have B-Files, Conor Chalporn, K-Porn, Conor Terrorism. If you want to be a country, you're going to like one country. You're going to have to try to be a bit more radical. And any fugitives or like Snowden types ever tried? Well, we had people wanting to get snoddened. Oh yeah. This would be a perfect place for us. Any other fellows in that? Yeah. Assange. Yeah, Jewish. Have they been in touch? They were posing the idea of trying to move Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to C-Land to sort of protect him extra jurisdictionally. And Bates kindly declined them to saying that, quote, "They were releasing more than I felt comfortable with." I think it's an interesting idea, but it's not because he led too much information to go about around military tactics. There were the Aussen, American and British military tactics. That's treasonous. We've got a duty to the international community. I mean, they have a duty to the international community. I've got some funny memories about you, because. Family teamed up with a bunch of tech types who had this elaborate plan to protect the servers so extremely that not only would they have armed guards that prevent hostile takeovers or government sending troops, but they would even fill the server room with nitrogen so that no person who didn't have breathing equipment, oxygen tanks, could even enter those rooms. So there was this elaborate sort of marketing campaign around just how secure, safe, and out of reach, Havenco would be. But again, as is the case on so many of these sort of cease-deadding stories, the reality of running something offshore became overwhelming. The internet kept dipping in and out because they were so far offshore and they were having to use satellite link ups. They had power problems and fuel shortages because they were relying on generators. Ultimately, the whole thing fell to pieces. That was just when the internet bugled birds and the Russian federation broke down and trying to kill that. To the extent that Sea Land is financed at all these days, it's in the poultry. Some that it earns from online sales at its digital shopping mall where it sells, you know, bugs, Sea Land bugs for nine pounds and titles of nobility for 29 pounds. Occasionally, they also rent out the facility for bands that are performing music videos or the occasional wedding out there. But generally speaking, it's sort of a shadow of its former self. To some, AI chatbots are helpful tools. Understood. Artificial intimacy. At this point in reporting, I had been offshore for too many months, you know, almost a year traveling the world. And I was emotionally and otherwise worn out. And I was really hungry for a story with a different sort of emotional valence, something that was a bit more inspiring. I was fascinated by the way the CLAN story embodied this idea that the C is a metaphor for freedom. But I wanted to find someone who was using the freedom of the C's to escape laws viewed as oppressive and tyrannical. Someone who was in their own world view pursuing good. And I found all that in Rebecca Comforts. My name is Rebecca Comforts. I'm a medical doctor and I'm the founder of Women on Waves. And Women on Waves is a Dutch nonprofit organization with the goal to make sure that women around the world have access to safe and legal abortions. Women on Waves has for more than 10 years provided abortions and contraception to women who live in countries where terminating pregnancy is illegal or restricted. The organization was set up by Dutch doctor Rebecca Comforts to hire the ship registered under Dutch law and sails into international waters to provide abortion. How it works is that women on Waves will rent a ship, go to a country where abortion is not allowed, where it's illegal. We are sailing to the harbor, there we can take women on board. We are sailing to international waters and international waters is 12 miles outside the coast. And in international waters the local laws don't apply anymore and it's only the laws of the sea. Once they cross into international waters this legal switch flips whereby the new jurisdiction, the new laws that apply on the vessel are the laws of the flag flown by that vessel. When we sailed out the first time we had a Dutch ship. So it was the Dutch laws that applied on board the Dutch ship and that meant that women who came with us to international waters we could safely give them the abortion pills, where they swallowed it in the international waters and then a few hours later we sailed back. So we were never out more than a few hours and that was how it worked legally. Women on Waves had been doing this kind of work for nearly a decade. They had gone to Guatemala, Ireland, Poland, Morocco and half dozen other countries where abortions are illegal and dangerous. They're seeking to use a loophole and maritime law to remove the state from being an intermediary that makes a decision over the woman's body. Because they view this decision as a health decision, not a moral or religious decision. The basic philosophy is harm reduction. When a country makes abortion illegal it doesn't stop any women from seeking an abortion. Women that have the money they can always travel to another country where abortion is legal to get a legal safe abortion. The poor women that don't have these resources cannot. What it does is making her take risk, health risk and her life risk in order to get it. When I started women on Waves at that time was about 120,000 women per year were dying as the result of unsafe abortion. The effort to legalize abortion here in Northern Ireland is a woman's right to protect her health and to choose her life. She is the one that will be putting her life at risk. The Women on Waves campaign to Poland, which was in 2003, was actually the first time that we were able to help women on board the ship. And it was also the first time that we really encountered fears of position. When the abortion boat, as it's called here, first pulled into a boat. a Polish port last week, protesters threw paintballs and tomatoes. As it motored into Wadiswawa Vosatode from its second run out to international waters, pro-life activists yelled "merderers" and "feminism equals communism" from a jetty across the water. In Ireland, the ship faced bomb threats and in Morocco and angry mob, a costed bomb for its crew in Spain, some advocates, some anti-abortion advocates attempted to actually tow the boat out of port forcefully until a war. This anti-abortion activist said it's a sin. Why don't you go to Holland and kill children over there? Why come to Guatemala? We're already cursed enough. You know, every time that we sealed out, we were called to the police station and we were questioned by the police and so what we always said is, well, we sealed out, we gave sexual education while we were on the way to international waters and what happened in international waters. It's none of your business anymore, that's the Dutch government. So if you want to have any questions about it, you will have to discuss this with the Dutch government. Normally after running a couple of missions, quietly, women on raves then holds a press conference and tells the media and the government what they've been doing and and that they plan on doing it again. And the point there is to raise awareness, to grab attention, to show the inanity of these laws and the sort of human consequences of them, and then also to see if the government is going to attempt to stop them on their next mission out, which often they do. For the strategy of women on waves, the media is essential. It's extremely important because it allows the debate in these countries to open up and to show another reality that it's actually the reality in other countries is different, that it's a human right and that making a portion illegal is harming women and that is a reality that they're normally not presented by the mainstream media and the and the ship gives that possibility to do that to reframe the topic. So for example during the campaign in Portugal, the abortion's vote was stopped by warships. It couldn't enter Portugal because the Minister of Defense had said that we were threat to national security. We decided that we had to do something to counter this quite aggressive act from the Portuguese government and in Portugal at that time a medicine called Arthotek which contains mysoprostol which really works very well to induce an abortion as well by itself was available over the counter in most of the pharmacies. But many people didn't know about it, actually nobody knew about it. And so we decided that I will take the box of this medicine and I will explain on the public tradition that women can actually go to the pharmacy to buy this medicine and how they can use it. And what happened is that the next days the hotlines were overwhelmed with phone calls by women who had seen the talk show run to the pharmacy, bought the medicines and said and now what how do I use it. So it actually created a change in public opinion and two years later abortion was legalized in Portugal. I flew down to a place called Ixthapa, Mexico, small port in the state of Guerero and the goal was to quietly go there to meet up with Rebecca and her team. The vessel would be brought into port. We would wait until the young women who were being assisted were onboarded and then we would head out for the first stage of the mission to high seas. I think we have to take off these vanners because it was a guy from Harvard, he said we cannot film here without permission. I don't want to have problems now. And he has to stop filming now. Rebecca is a fascinating character to meet her in person. She's so mission-focused that the possibility of being killed, being incarcerated, being disappeared doesn't seem to matter a whole lot for her. In Mexico we were invited by a women's rights organization called Gire to one of the states that has one of the most restrictive abortion laws. And the women's groups were quite nervous because it's also one of the states where there's a lot of narcotrophic and they were kind of nervous that the narcobosses might turn against the ship or not be supportive. There was quite a lot of nervousness about that. Yeah. So the first thing we did when the boat was in Mexico because of our experience in Portugal, we had learned that it's best for the ship to be there already before we announced it in the press conference. At the press conference Rebecca did two things. One, she told everyone that she had just the day before engaged in her first mission, taken young women out to sea and administered an abortion. And number two, she told the public that she planned on doing the same again on the second mission the next day. For context here it's important to remember that Mexico is a Roman Catholic stronghold has been for centuries. Abortion is illegal throughout most of Mexico and criminally prosecuted and this prohibition is so aggressively enforced that hospitals are expected to report suspicious miscarriages to the police just as they might gunshot wounds. You know think about the reaction here and you had a foreigner who was a female who under the nose of this police state essentially, Guerrero and all these cops had come into port and done this thing that was deeply offensive. You know this was in a front on so many different levels and really irked both the state government, the local officials as well as the federal government. I wanted to talk with a local health official to get their reaction after the press conference so I called them and their response was we think what she's done is illegal but we're still collecting details. Hours later these same officials called Gompards and the sort of weaponizing of maritime bureaucracy had begun. We were called by the harbor authorities for questioning and one of the reasons was that they said that the crew had used tourism FISA to come in instead of saying that they were there for a job doing work FISAs. So we understood that they were trying to stop the ship from sailing out and coming back and so we had a huge argument with them about it and we looked into all the legal documents and in the end we just agreed to disagree. The bureaucrats then said that well she couldn't leave port because of bad weather. She quickly pointed out quite rightly that plenty of other ships including some smaller were still leaving port unobstructed and so sort of the jujitsu hand-to-hand combat went like that until ultimately Rebecca won and was able to leave port on her next mission but all the while realizing that there was a taken clock on her before the next obstacle was thrown in her path. On the mission out there were two young women who had been assisted to get across the country quietly and anonymously and they made the ship. The ship was then planning on leaving port quickly because there was real worry that local police were going to at any moment figure out what was going on and stop the mission. It's clear back there right? Yep. You say up. Go! Hope to see you back. At this point I'm trying to be unusually quiet and invisible because I'm truly an outsider in this context and I'm trying not to take up much space or attention but I'm also just fixated on the dynamic of Rebecca and how nervous and intense and driven she is to make sure that they can get these women. and out to see the weather was terrible on that particular day and so the window to get the ship out was really tight. Can you steer? Yeah. Because you are very tight, yeah. Okay, go go. Wow, you must not go. Not good at all. Wow, wow, wow. You know, we nearly ran a shore twice and ran a ground once in the effort but finally we made it out of port. We make it past the waves and the adrenaline of that began to subside and with that descended upon us this silence on the ship. Can you read what's on the GPS for me? Yes. Turn it around. The position on the GPS is 550949. Okay. I will film the GPS again. We crossed the line and Rebecca quietly came up onto the GPS. And shot a look to one of the two young women we were carrying and they went to this quiet room below deck and their doctor comforts did what doctors do. Okay, can you please sit here? My role as the doctor is to make sure that she is in a wanted pregnancy, that she is taking the decision to enter pregnancy free will. I make an ultrasound to make sure that she is not pregnant too long and that she can still use the pills which was of course the case and I make sure that she understands how it works. She was fine and she understood and she was very relieved to be able to do this and she is wanted to feel. I met women on waves because I saw documentary of Emma Netflix called Vessel. I found out on Monday that I was pregnant and yesterday I decided I wanted to come on the boat. I think the boat shows the absurdity of the laws and the absurdity of being lucky to be in one place and not another where you can have access to the rights you deserve. And then we sealed back and when we entered the harbor again we said we are here again. That was it. I asked Rebecca whether she viewed herself as an outlaw and I expected her to give me an unqualified yes but that's not what I heard. What she said was no she doesn't view herself as an outlaw she views herself as an artist for whom the art is to find exactly where that loophole is in the law and to gracefully navigate through it not to break the law but rather to respect and find its nuances and that was her art. We are not going in to see to break any laws. It's using the discrepancies between the different legal realities and laws. The interesting thing is that for profit companies around the world that's all they do. They have all these companies set up in all these islands and different states in order to comply with one law but not with the tax laws of other countries and in a sense women and wives are doing the same thing but to further human rights. So no I don't think of myself as an outlaw. I'm a legal loophole that's what I am. Mr and Mrs. Bates and their teenage son and daughter have great plans for the island fortress. Their notion of an independent state has vast commercial potential. It has been ruled in court that the sea land is outside British territorial waters. So, something that knows that the mainland, each morning the sea land flag is raised high above the lonely little land. You can't find two organizations and two people that are more different than women and wives and sea land or Rebecca Comperts and Roy Bates. In women and wives you have a mission that is aimed at helping other people. And then in sea land on the other hand and in Roy Bates you have a project that is largely self-serving. It's really not making a point to the world. It's really not for the betterment of anyone else. It's just driven by this sort of libertarian individualism and directed by this guy who has lots of charm and ingenuity and daring and also a big ego. But what they have in common is this deeply independent inner voice. And this independent mind-and-ness is something that I've noticed was unusually common out at sea. There's a long deep tradition of people viewing the sea as the epitome of freedom and opportunity and specifically of opportunity to get away from tyrannical governments. The idea of women on waves is not unlike the idea that the Bates family had with the sea land and that was to take advantage of the freedom of the seas to do what they wanted. I don't know whether it's that people are made more independent-minded by being out there or whether independent-minded people end up going out there or both, but it certainly is over-represented offshore. I think one of the most defining features of the experience of being offshore is the grappling with silence and solitude. And if you really want to get a feel for why seafarers talk a certain way or interact a certain way what is both corrosive and addictive about the sea experience, then you really have to reckon with and experience firsthand that silence. One mariner said to me, you get very good at talking to yourself at sea. Another seafarer described the inner voice that you cultivate at sea as soul whispers. I think that's what causes folks to have to feel less dependent on other people and more invested in their own thoughts. And that fertilizes if you will, this independent-mindedness. It's absolutely true that people that have been at sea for a long time, they are very different from people that have never been at sea. There will always be this love relationship and longing back to this place at the boat in the middle of nowhere and to find that overwhelming sense of nothingness. There's one quote that really stuck with me from Ernest Shackleton. He wrote, "Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons. Some are actuated simply by a love of adventure. Some have the keen thirst for scientific knowledge. And others, again, are drawn away from the trotten paths by the lore of little voices, the mysterious fascination of the unknown." This is the soul whispers that that other Mariner had mentioned. It's this inner conversation, these little voices that you allow to speak to you in your head when you're out there and they're really alluring. You go out there pursuing this metaphor of freedom. And I think when you are in the space, you're immersed in the reality of it, you quickly realize it's not just a notion or an idea. It's actually the freedom is a lived experience. I think this instinct for escape and adventure has been in our DNA for millennia and you don't find it anywhere more on display than on the outlaw ocean. on the next episode of the Outdoor Ocean. We've seen so many vessels chasing so few fish and these depleted stocks mean that in the future local fishermen are going to miss out. One European vessel, Fishing of West Africa, can take us much in one month as 7,000 local fishermen catch in a year. In all countries of the world, we have wiped out 90% of the big fish and that is very hard for people to conceive. Basically, industrial fishing is vacuuming the ocean. From CBC podcast and the L.A. Times, this series is created and produced by the Outdoor Ocean project. It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina, written and produced by Ryan French, editing and sound designed by Michael Ward, sound recording by Tony Fowler. Our associate producer is Margaret Parsons, additional production by Joe Galvin and Marcella Bale. This episode features music by Hemuro Yoshiteru, Patricia Spiro, Happoblim, Ben Walter, Smoke Trees, Stone Face and Terminal, Antarctic Wastelands, Good Weather for an Air Strike, Jai Jagdish, Melerman and Manuel Zeta. Their music is available online at the Outdoor Ocean music project website and wherever you stream music. Please check out their work. Additional music by Scott Couture, Britt Brady, Matthew Stevens, Gamaton and Fabio Nassimente. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.