Last winter, when Jeremiah Heaton’s daughter Emily asked him if she could be a real princess, the doting father didn’t have the heart to refuse. Even though he didn’t want to raise her hopes or make any false promises, he found himself agreeing to the outlandish request of a six-year-old.
“Over the winter, Emily and I were playing, and she has a fixation on princesses,” he said. “She asked me, in all seriousness, if she’d be a real princess someday. And I said she would.”
So Jeremiah spent hours scouring the internet for a suitable piece of unclaimed territory. He focused his search on the Latin term ‘terra nullius’, which means ‘land belonging to no one’. After several months of searching, he has now managed to locate an 800-square mile desert in Africa, thousands of miles away from his home in Abingdon, Virginia.
