Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from My Holidays
Apropos of the Isle of Man - what has it to do with the Northern Commission? Thereby hangs atale. Light - houses, as is very reasonable, are supported from the proceeds of statutory dues payable by the ships which are presumed to benefit by them - outgoing foreign vessels paying the dues on starting, and vessels entering port paying on arrival - the whole managed in a neat way by the olficers of customs. In old times - say fifty years ago - the Isle of Man had its own system of lights, which were so bad as to be complained of by the Liverpool traders; and it became obvious that these lights should pass under the authority of one of the three Boards of the United Kingdom - the Trinity House of England, the Ballast Board of Ireland, or the Northern Lights of Scotland. The method adopted for settling the question was exceedingly rational; it was to ask what each Board would take to light the Isle of Man, and adopt that which was cheapest. The Trinity offered to maintain the lights for twopence per ton on all vessels that passed while the Northern Commission declared its readiness to accept the very small sum of a farthing per ton. This was in 1815, since which time the Isle of Man, in the matter of light-houses, has been connected with Scotland. The farthing per ton was a shrewd conception. So large is the number of vessels passing the Isle of Man, that this forms the best-paying branch of revenue of the Northern Lights. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
