Copyright 2012, Ric Hajovsky www.EverythingCozumel.com
In the early years of World War II, many Americans feared the Germans would bring the war to the shores of the United States via submarines supplied from secret bases in Central and
South America. Although some German saboteurs did manage to make it ashore and cause some minor damage, and German U-boats sank a number of US ships within sight of US beaches, for the most part, the German U-boat operations were carried out in the north
Atlantic and there were never any bases found on the American continents that were supporting these axis submarines. That didn’t stop some people from worrying about the possible existence of such a base. One of these folks was Leicester (pronounced “Lester”)
Hemingway, the younger brother of author Ernest Hemingway.
In the summer of 1940, Leicester and a friend, Anthony Jackson, sailed their schooner, the
Blue Stream , from New York down to Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and
Costa Rica to search for these bases. During this non-governmental expedition, the two stopped in Cozumel and immediately felt that they had uncovered a huge conspiracy on the island; an organized team of Nazi sympathizers lead by some of the island’s leading citizens whose purpose was to resupply the German U-boats with diesel fuel. When Hemingway and
Jackson returned to the US, they wrote a series of newspaper articles about what they believed they found and by using inflammatory words and innuendo in the articles, convinced many readers of the article it was true.
Picked up by the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) and reprinted in newspapers across the US, the series ran from August 21 to August 27, 1940. “Nazi Fuel Bases for U-boats and Raiders set up in Caribbean,” read the headline of the first article. “Snoopers find Ideal
Nazi Base off Mexico” announced the second. “Nazi runs island 300 miles from Panama
Canal,” warned the third. “Oil stored on Cozumel Island near Yucatan believed Awaiting
German Use!” screamed the fourth. The other two articles were about more supposed Nazi bases they found in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. These articles were later combined into a larger article and published in 1940, in volume 37 of The Reader’s Digest magazine.
The pair of writers reported that the Cozumeleño, Oscar Coldwell junior, was in charge of this nefarious operation. Aged 30 and now head of Casa Coldwell after the recent death of his father (Oscar Caldwell senior) the young man was quoted as saying “Britain never did us any good and when Hitler wins he will bring order to the world.”

Whether or not young Oscar actually did say these words we’ll never know; they may have been his true sentiments, or they may have been words only attributed to him by the two writers who were determined to find German sympathizers behind every bush. For example,
Hemingway and Jackson also accused the two Cozumeleños, Mauricio and Adolfo Grau Klinger of being Nazis. These were the two Austrian fellows who operated a small hardware store on the south-east corner of the plaza from 1939 until the end of the 1980s, and whose last will and testament later set up and funded the Fundación Comunitaria Cozumel with their life savings. “Among Coldwell’s associates are two ‘Jewish refugees,’ anti-Nazi in name only, who came to Cozumel recently,” one of their articles stated, in an attempt to implicate the Grau’s in the imaginary plot.
In another of the articles the two writers reported that Oscar Coldwell owned a concrete shed north of town near the waterfront that held 300 drums of diesel. Another 200 drums were supposed to have been stored behind Casa Coldwell , on the plaza where Comercial Joaquin now stands. In a third article they said he was storing 500 drums in the waterfront shed and another 200 at Casa Coldwell .
Regardless of the actual number of drums Oscar owned, there was a perfectly good reason for him to have them: Casa Coldwell was the leading commercial establishment on the island, and as such, supplied all the gas and diesel to ships and planes calling on the port and the Cozumel airstrip. There is no evidence whatsoever that any German submarines ever called on
Cozumel.
After Leicester’s adventure cruise, he went to Europe with the US army and later in 1953 wrote his first novel about the experience, The Sound of the Trumpet , which was well received by critics. He then wrote a prize-winning biography of his brother, Ernest. However, the most memorable achievement this adventurer-writer managed to pull off was his founding of the micro-nation of the Republic of New Atlantis, on July 4, 1964. On that day, Leicester anchored a 8-foot-wide by 30-foot-long bamboo raft over a shallow reef in international waters just outside of Jamaica’s territorial limits and declared it an independent nation by taking advantage of the US Guano Islands Act of 1856.
This piece of US legislation was originally enacted so that US citizens could claim any
“unoccupied island, rock, or key,” in order to exploit guano (bird droppings) for use in the US and abroad as fertilizer. Since the act had never been repealed, Leicester used it to bolster his claim of independence. After visiting with Jamaican officials and assuring them that his new republic “would be a peaceful power and would not threaten its Caribbean neighbors,”
Leicester obtained their tacit understanding that they would not interfere with New Atlantis,

and he elected himself its first president.
The first thing he did as the republic’s new leader was to authorize a national flag and to commision the printing of five denominatons of postage stamps, which he intend to sell at a huge profit to collectors around the globe.
Unfortunatley, the Universal Postal Union, the Swiss organization in charge of administering the world’s postage stamps, refused to recognise the legitimacy of the republic, or its stamps.
The scheme flopped, and a few years later the raft was blown away in a storm and Atlantis disapeared below the waves once more.
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A New Atlantis postage stamp
The National Flag of New Atlantis