Fish South, Spirits North

George Moore’s letter books reveal a trading network that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Mediterranean. Manx pilchards went south to Naples and Venice — Moore recorded a ninety per cent profit on one shipment to Venice, evidence of just how lucrative the running trade could be. Brandy came north from Barcelona, Moore’s main spirits source on the Mediterranean. Gibraltar was a waypoint on the route — fish, spirits, and manufactured goods all passing through.

This was not smuggling in the sense the British Treasury wanted people to believe. These were legitimate trading operations, legal under Manx law, conducted by merchants who kept meticulous records and paid their Manx duties. The crime, from the British perspective, was that the duties were too low.

Holland, France & the North

Holland and Amsterdam supplied tea and spirits, while Rotterdam appears repeatedly in Moore’s customs records as the origin of traded goods. France was the source of the brandy and wine that customs officers on both sides of the Irish Sea spent decades trying to intercept. Dunkirk supplied tobacco leaf for the island’s tobacco manufactories, and Conquet in Brittany was the origin of brandy and wine shipments documented in the archive.

Bergen in Norway features in Moore’s records too — the port where he re-registered the Peggy under a Danish flag, exploiting neutral status during wartime. Spain was a trading partner referenced in the smuggling and commerce documents throughout.

Jersey & Guernsey

The Channel Islands — Jersey and Guernsey — shared comparable legal structures with the Isle of Man. All three were Crown dependencies with their own legislatures, their own legal systems, and similarly complicated relationships with the English Crown. They appear in the records as points of comparison — what happened to Mann after 1765 did not happen to the Channel Islands, and the question of why not is one of the threads running through the Revestment story.

All European Places

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