Falkiner — Illustrations of Commercial Histori/ of Dublin. 135 



I. — Okigin of the Ballast Office and Pokt and Docks Boakd. 



Projects for the improvement of the harhour of Dublin and the 

 better regulation of the shijjping of the port appear to have been 

 frequent in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Tlie fear 

 lest the audacity of the Dutch and the defenceless condition of the 

 envirous should expose the capital to attack had led, in 1673, to 

 Sir Bernard de Gomme's well-known " Survey of the city of Dublin 

 and part of the harboiu- below Eingsend ; " and although this survey 

 was undertaken from ptirely military considerations, it naturally drew 

 the attention of mercantile people to the deficiencies of the port from a 

 commercial standpoint. The control of the port was vested at this 

 period in the Corporation of Dublin, to whom it had belonged from 

 the time of King John, when a royal charter had endowed the 

 citizens^ with so much of tlie river and estuary of the Lifley as ran 

 within the city franchises.'^ The Corporation does not appear to have 

 paid close attention to that part of its responsibilities which concerned 

 the harbour ; but in the year following De Gomme's visit their 

 attention was called to the matter by the visit of Andrew Yarranton, 

 an expert on harbour improvement.^ Yarranton, " acquainting the 

 Lord Mayor with his thoughts as to the making a very good harbour 

 at Eingsend," was " importuned to bestow some time in a survey and 

 discovery thereof," and devoted three weeks to this task. But though 

 the survey was made, no steps were taken by the Corporation, and the 

 first step towards providing a proper machinery for the control of the 

 port was left to private enterprise. In 1676 one Thomas Howard 

 petitioned the Irish Privy Council for a patent for the provision 

 of a Ballast Office in all the ports of Ireland. Howard's proposal 

 stirred the city fathers to activity. Protesting against the petition, 

 so far as it related to Dublin, as an encroachment on their civic rights, 

 they appointed a committee to consider the erection of a Ballast Office, 

 "the profits whereof is intended for the King's Hospital," and prayed 

 the Lord Lieutenant that no patent should pass to Howard. The 

 protest of the Corporation was efi'ective, and Howard, though he had 



1 Gilbert's Historical and Municipal Documents of Ireland, 1172-1320. 



- The Mayor of Dublin anciently exercised, as Admiral of the Port of Dublin, 

 a jurisdiction which appears to have extended from Skerries to Arklow, and the 

 city was entitled to the customs of all niercliandise within those limits (Haliday's 

 Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin, pages 139 and 246). 



^ Haliday's Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin, p. 242. 



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