This angler bought a Nova Scotia Island to fish for tuna—and wound up declaring war on the USSR

How many times have you sat around a campfire with friends, dreaming about buying a fishing camp together? Suppose you took the idea even further and decided to buy an entire island instead? That’s exactly what Russell Arundel did off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1949, but he didn’t stop there. He turned the island into his own fishing nation, complete with a navy, army, currency, trade policy and even a declaration of independence.

Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1902, Arundel began his professional life as a journalist and publisher. He then worked as a secretary to a U.S. senator, and next as a Capital Hill lobbyist, networking and schmoozing with the who’s who of Washington, D.C.’s political elite. Before long, he was being invited to the White House to play poker with heads of state and titans of industry. Then in 1943, he founded and became president of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co. of Long Island, New York, and made a fortune distributing Pepsi.

Arundel was an avid sportsman, with an interest in fox hunting and steeplechase horse racing. He also had a passion for conservation, and in the 1950s, he sponsored a worldwide survey of rare mammals, considered one of the first of its kind to focus attention on endangered species around the globe.

“Above it all, my dad was a champion of the out-of-doors and nature in all its moods,” his daughter, Jocelyn Arundel Sladen, once said in an interview. Perhaps his greatest outdoor passion, though, was angling, with a particular fondness for bluefin tuna—the catalyst that led to the creation of his very own micronation, the Principality of Outer Baldonia, and a heated conflict with the former Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.