Uncover - S26 E4: From The Sea, Freedom | "The Outlaw Ocean"

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

The sea has always been a metaphor for freedom – an escape from governments, laws and other people. This episode takes us off the coast of England to Sealand. A rogue “micronation” meant to embody this very freedom, which was founded on an abandoned British anti-aircraft platform in 1967. “From the Sea, Freedom” explores the world of libertarian-minded endeavors at sea, where renegades and mavericks of all sorts seek to escape the laws of land-bound nation-states. The reporting also visits the high seas near Mexico to meet other characters who leverage the freedom and a legal gray area found offshore. We travel with Rebecca Gomperts, the founder of Women on Waves, a group that provides abortion access for women who live in countries where it is restricted. Secretly carrying several Mexican women beyond national waters, Rebecca uses a loophole in maritime law to legally administer pills that will end their pregnancies. Guest Interview: Rebecca Gomperts, founder of "Women on Waves"To hear all episodes of The Outlaw Ocean now, visit here.For transcripts of this series, please visit here.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Seven miles out from the English coast in the North Sea stands the man-made island declared the sovereign state of Sealand by Roy Bates, its self-proclaimed prince. Sealand was a wartime gun fortress. Then Bates and his family acquired it by the simple expedient of 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 Tower,

one of seven forts built to defend the Thames estuary during the last war. Two were demolished after the war, four remain derelict, and Ruff's Tower, or Sealand, is alone inhabited. Roy Bates throws a grappling hook up to the platform, foists his way up there, and declares it 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. Episode 4, 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 himself onto roughs and named it Sealand, 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. Now that you're listening to Radio S, by the time it's 20 minutes before the hour... This is the Late Late Show from Radio Caroline, 199 on your dial.

This is Radio Caroline on 199, England's first commercial radio station. My name's Simon Deag with you for the next two hours. 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 forts in the Thames estuary. Bates claims his station is now running third in 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 remain in it. 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 World 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. 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. Sealand doesn't really have any land as such. It's a steel platform standing 60 foot above the water on two hollow concrete lakes.

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 observes that now Roy's wife, Joan, has her own island and how wonderful that is, and she responds, it'd be so much better if it had some palm trees and its own flag. And everyone laughs and continues with the evening,

and Bates decides he's going to make real on that, and only weeks later declares Ruffs its own independent principality. Declared the 120-foot-long steel platform the nation of Sealand. When 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 Sealand lay seven nautical miles outside British waters, British courts had no jurisdiction. Bates took that as recognition. They called Sealand a principality, which entailed less paperwork than a kingdom, created a flag, stamps, passports, and currency with Joan's arresting profile and a motto, E. Mary Libertas, from the sea, freedom.

Why did you do it? Well, I'm not very introspective, really, you know, and I never really look for the reasons why I do a lot of... I suppose if I was introspective, I wouldn't do anything, because some of the wild ideas I get and the things I do, they're a little bit... I suppose 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, that's all. don't just tempt me, they attract me like a magnet, and I just have to do them, that's 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 declassified documents where you've got military officials worrying that in Sealand you have the potential for a sort of next Cuba, you know, this off-post, 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 Under 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 depths, 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 Ayn Rand 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 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 Minerva. And within months, Tonga sent troops to expel the occupants and remove his flag. Then in 1968, you had a guy named Warner Stifel, 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 dot-com types from Silicon Valley. And a lot of these types of ideologues coalesced into this organization called the Seasetting Institute, which is based in San Francisco and founded by Patry Friedman, who was a software engineer for Google, but also the grandson of Milton Friedman, the famous economist.

but 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. It got a huge infusion of money, over a million dollars, from Peter Thiel, 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 Seasteading Institute would host annual conferences where they'd bring a lot of these

folks together and trade ideas and fundraise 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 brainchilds of the Seasteading Institute was a startup called Blue Seed. And the idea of Blue Seed was to house immigrants who might otherwise not be able to get visas to work in the U.S. 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 Sea didn't ultimately get off the ground. It never raised the capital it 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 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, right? So who's going to pave 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. You know, taxes serve a purpose, and society has built up around governments for a reason,

and that often becomes the fatal flaw in the plans. You know, Sealand, this platform that became the world's smallest micronation 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, Sealand is still going strong and still run by the same family. When I read about Sealand, I immediately wanted to go there. Who wouldn't? I mean, it was a chance to go through the looking glass and visit a place that had done what no other seasteader had.

And so I began chasing the Bates 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. That's good, they've got a smaller steelhead coat, brother. Morning! If you could just come up the front, if you can. That's good, they've got smaller steelhead co-pubbers. Morning! If you could just come up the front if you can.

Michael and James Bates picked me up in this dual outboard motor speedboat one cold morning and we rowed 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 Sealand, which is a couple hundred feet up in the sky, was this weird long-necked crane that swung out over the edge and lowered literally a wooden swing and you you climb on board you sit there and then the crane

hoists you up three stories good job yep all right all right you know there's no seat belt there, 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 Sealand 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 or who? Pilot boats every day. Okay. You've got fishing boats as well.

Apart from that, not a lot 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 it was safe for me to laugh and I got none Yeah. There you go. Thank you. This could be short. We're going to go first. You want to have a nice little look around? You guys decide. I'll just follow.

The first thing that happened was I was taken on a tour by Barrington around the facility. And, you know, it's important to think about what this place looks like. It's a platform. So 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 Sealand are in those cylindrical legs and most of those rooms are below the waterline. So on the lowest of low waters this is under water.

I mean we're under water now. Oh is that right? We're headed down. Yeah. Off on. No, not that. Don't go that way. Nope.

That's a sheer drop. Among the rooms are a chapel, which had a Koran and a Bible, and two bedrooms, a brig where people could be rested with literally jail bars. Did you have these put on? That's great.

Fully kitted out kitchen, replete with appliances from the 1970s. And overall, it just was this very dank, wet and creaky place. If we had a case of treason to deal with, we would use this as a courtroom because the jail's down there and then we could have Abacur in there

or whatever, that's the chapel. So when we execute the bastard, he could even do that. Bloody weirder and weirder every floor he's got in there. Yeah, yeah, seriously. It was sort of a clubhouse, a tree house, but at sea it was their special spot. Sure, it was rustic, you know, 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. First up was the story of this German diamond dealer, last name Achenbach, who had a grand plan to convert Sealand and build an adjacent platform and create a sort of offshore resort, casino, luxury hotel where they could do whatever they wanted. And Achenbach 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. Achenbach invited Roy Bates to Austria for some sit-down meetings to plan out their building ambitions.

And while Roy was away from Sealand, Achenbach sent his lawyer by helicopter to Sealand. These guys came out in a K-Lamb helicopter. I was here on my own. They came down from the wind truck and waved them away. One thing led to another. I ended up being locked in a room for three or four days with no food or water. So Roy gets back, realizes that Achenbach and the lawyer have taken over Sealand. Roy hires his own crew. A helicopter pilot flies them out. Roy and his crew take Sealand back by force. And Roy Bates then takes the lawyer,

puts him in the brig for two months, and begins this diplomatic standoff with the German government. From here, things only got weirder. You know, in 1997, famous designer Versace is murdered. The person who commits the murder takes over a boat and kills himself on the boat. When the police show up to that boat, they find hundreds of Sealand passports. Later that same year, police in Spain arrest a club owner charging him with selling diluted gasoline.

And in investigating him, they find that he had declared himself the diplomatic consul for Sealand. And he produced a Sealand passport for which he was claiming diplomatic immunity. And what had happened was there turned out to be this website that had been selling Sealand passports. It referred to itself as the government in exile of Sealand and servicing this supposed diaspora population of Sealand 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 Sealand very seriously and personally vetted anyone

who was given citizenship. Alright, so where are we now? Were these the servers? Yes. 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. Sealand 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 of the exercise is people that want to keep their data secure from hackers or commercial intervention or even government intervention can store data, run their businesses without being snipped on, exchange financial information without being snubbed on. You know, I asked Bates whether he would take all clients, and he said, quote, we have our limits. He said they would not take clients who were engaged in child porn or corporate cyber sabotage. I said, well, you can't have B-files. You can't have child porn, kiddie porn.

Right, right. You can't have terrorism. Right. If you want child porn, kiddie porn, kind of terrorism. If you want to be a country, you've got to act like a country, and acting like a country, having a bit of morality. And any fugitives or Snowden types ever tried this? Well, people wanted to get Snowden out. I was just thinking, this would be a perfect place for... And the other fellows, you know.

Yeah, Assange. Yeah, Julian Assange. Have they been in touch? Yeah, yeah. They were posing the idea of trying to move Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to Sealand to sort of protect him extra-jurisdictionally, and Bates kindly declined them too,

saying that, quote, they were releasing more than I felt comfortable with. Originally I thought it was a cool idea, but it's not because he let too much information go about our own military tactics and everything else, more than I felt comfortable with. The Bates 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 would 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, you know, 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 seasteading stories, the reality of running something offshore became overwhelming. You know, 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 bubble burst and the Russian Federation broke down and kind of killed that. To the extent that Sealand is financed at all these days, it's a paltry sum that it earns from online sales at its digital shopping mall where it sells mugs, Sealand mugs 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. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs.

We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Sealand story embodied this idea that the sea is a metaphor for freedom. But I wanted to find someone who was using the freedom of the seas to escape laws viewed as oppressive and tyrannical. Someone who was in their own worldview pursuing good. And I found all that in Rebecca Gompertz. My name is Rebecca Gompertz. I'm a medical doctor and I'm the founder of Women on Waves. And Women on Waves is a Dutch non-profit 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 Gompertz, who hires a 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 sail into the harbour. There we can take women on board. We're 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 a half dozen other countries where abortions are illegal and dangerous. They're seeking to use 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, it's making her take risk, health risk and her life risk in order to get it. risk, health risk and her life risks in order to get it. When I started Women on Waves, at that time was about 120,000 women per year were dying as a result of unsafe abortion. The effort to legalize abortion here in Northern Ireland, it's 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 fierce opposition. Watch out, there, there. They can't go on the back. We have to go back and we don't want them to jump on. We don't want them to predict on the ship. Come on, give me the rope. When the abortion boat, as it's called here, first pulled into a Polish port last week, protesters threw paintballs and tomatoes. As it motored into Władysławowo Saturday from its second run out to international waters, pro-life activists yelled, murderers and feminism equals communism from a jetty across the water. Watch out! Where's the security? Get those guys!

In Ireland, the ship faced bomb threats, and in Morocco, an angry mob accosted Gompertz's crew. In Spain, some advocates, some anti-abortion advocates, attempted to actually tow the boat out of port forcefully until Gompertz cut their rope. So the reaction is quite fierce. The boat's arrival about 100 kilometers south of Guatemala's capital provoked anger among several Christian organisations.

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 sailed out, we were called to the police station and we were questioned by the police. We were called to the police station and we were questioned by the police. And so what we always said is, well, we sailed 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.

any questions about it, you will have to discuss this with the Dutch government. Normally, after running a couple of missions quietly, Women on Waves then holds a press conference and tells the media and the government what they've been doing 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 abortion illegal is harming women. And that is a reality that they're normally not presented by the mainstream media. And the ship gives that possibility to do that, to reframe the topic.

So, for example, during the campaign in Portugal, the abortion vote was stopped by warships. It couldn't enter Portugal because the Minister of Defence had said that we were a threat to national security. This is Portuguese warship, warship. We are the force. that we were a 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 Arthrotec, which contains mycoprostol, 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 television 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. What does capacity look like? You can both go. Okay. We'll do small. Okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

I flew down to a place called Ixtapa, Mexico,'s small port in the state of Guerrero. 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'd have to take off these banners because there was a guy from the harbor. He said we cannot film here without permission. I don't want to have problems now. And he has to stop filming now. Okay.

Rebecca is a fascinating character to meet her in person. Rebecca is a fascinating character to meet her in person. 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 narco traffic and they were kind of nervous that the narco bosses 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 an affront 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 later these same officials called Gompertz 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 a tourism visa to come in, instead of saying that they were there for a job doing work visas. 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. 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 ticking clock on her before the next obstacle

was thrown in her path. We're going now. You can go now. Can we go? Yes. Okay. I'm going to go up to the front and push it off. Roll out. On the mission out, there were two young women who had been assisted to get across the country and quietly and anonymously, and they made it to 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? Yeah. Viene, viene. Peace out. Peace out. Bye. Bye.

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 out to sea. 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 were not good. Not good at all. No. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, we nearly ran ashore twice and ran aground 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 5500, 949. Okay. I will film the GPS again. We crossed the line and Rebecca quietly came up onto deck and shot a look to one of the two young women we were carrying and they went to this quiet room below deck and there Dr. Gompertz did what doctors do. Can you please sit here? Okay, can I ask you something? what doctors do. My role as the doctor is to make sure that she has an unwanted pregnancy, that she's

taking the decision to end the pregnancy free will. I make an ultrasound to make sure that she's 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 yeah, she swallowed the pill.

I met women on waves because I saw a documentary of them on Netflix called Veso. 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 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 sailed back and when we entered the harbor again we said we are here again. And that was it. I asked Rebecca whether she viewed herself as an outlaw, and I expect 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 into sea 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 on Waves is 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 Sealand is outside British territorial waters. So, thumbing a nose at the mainland, each morning the Sealand flag is raised high above the lonely little land. You can't find two organizations and two people that are more different than Women on Waves and Sealand or Rebecca Gompertz and Roy Bates.

I mean, in Women on Waves, you have a mission that is aimed at helping other people. And then in Sealand, on the other hand, and in Roy Bates, you have a project that is largely self-serving. You know, 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-mindedness is something that I noticed was unusually common out at sea. 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 Sealand, 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 overrepresented 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 know, 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 trodden 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. Thank you. On the next episode of The Outlaw 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 off West Africa

can take as 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 Podcasts and the LA Times, this series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project. It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina.

Written and produced by Ryan French. Editing and sound design by Michael Ward. Sound recording by Tony Fowler. Our associate producer is Margaret Parsons. Additional production by Joe Galvin and Marcela Bele. This episode features music by Himuro Yoshiteru, Patricia Spiro, Apple Blim, Ben Walter, Smoke Trees, Stone Face and Terminal, Antarctic Wastelands, Good Weather for an Airstrike, Jai Jagdish, Mellorman, and Manuel Zito.

Airstrike, Jai Jagdish, Mellorman, and Manuel Zito. Their music is available online at the Outlaw Ocean Music Project website and wherever you stream music. Please check out their work. Additional music by Scott Coatsworth, Britt Brady, Matthew Stevens,

Gamma Tone, and Fabio Nascimento.