[Appendix A(71) 1792 Report of Commissioners of Inquiry]

N° 71.

REPORT of the CROWN OFFICERS in the Isle of Man.

To the Honourable Richard Dawson, Esquire, His Majesty's Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man.

27th April 1780.

Sir
In observance of the order of the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of his Majesty's Treasury, signified by their Secretary Mr, Robinson to his Excellency Colonel Smith, transmited by him to your Honour, and communicated to us in your letter of the 8th instant, we have taken into consideration the draft of a bill to explain and amend an act of the fifth year of His present Majesty, for carrying into execution a contract made between the Treasury and the Duke and Duchess of Atholl, and also the Attorney and Solicitor General's Report to their Lordships

As far as the bill before us is meant to clear the said act (commonly called the Vesting Act) of ambiguity, and to ascertain the manerial rights thereby reserved to the Duke and Duchess of Atholl, so far its object is unquettionably just and reasonable, But it professes not to stop here, and we humbly conceive it goes in fact a great deal further: it creates new rights; it arms manerial officers with unrecedented powers; and in many respects tends to introduce into this land a new mode of civil government.

Fol. 7

After reciting "that the sovereignty, ports, and commerce of the isle, were no otherwise required to be revested in the Crown, than as they interfered with the Royal Revenue, in that and the rest of the King's dominions, &c,." in the first enacting clause it sets off with securing to the Duke of Atholl, his heirs and affigns, "all manner of Wrecks of the Sea whatsoever, within the seas adjacent to the Isle of Man, without regard to the different denominations of Flotsam, Jetsam, and Ligan, or any other name whatsoever ; and also all Derelict Lands, and the Tang or Sea Weed thereof, and also all Treasure Trove, add all manner of Boon Services, of what nature or kind soever, without any diminution or restriction for or on account of Military Service due to His Majesty, his heirs or successors, or his or their Officers in the said island."

Before we proceed to observe upon this or other clauses in the bill, we beg leave to refer your Honour to the act herein-before mentioned, by which it appears to us that the sovereignty of the island is, in the most explicit terms, restored to the Crown, and consequently, that all rights whatsoever, incident to the sovereignty (if not by that act expressly reserved to the late Duke and Duchess of Atholl) are restored with it.

If this be the true construction of that act, then the principle affirmed in the preceding recital, and which seems to be made the ground-work of the bill, will, we apprehend, be found inadmissible.

It is so well known that what is called Flotsam, Jetsam, and Ligan, does not pass under the general denomination of Wreck, that the omission of these words in the clause of reservation, in the Vesting Act, cannot be presumed to have been owing to an oversight in the late Duke or his Agents ; on the contrary supposed that the insertion of them was, for good reasons, objected to on the part of the Crown ; and having been under consideration at the time of passing ...

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