“Independent of Helbre Swash two other channels for ships passing to sea unite at that position; one, the original Hoylake, still sufficiently navigable at high water; the other, the passage by Wild Road and Chester Bar, greatly superior in safety and permanency to that of the Formby Channel; for in all the successive charts little or no change seems to have taken place on that bar, which continues to have nine feet at low water, with a rise of thirty. The great extent of ebb-tide from the Dee (being quite as extensive an estuary as that of the Mersey) must always keep one or other of those channels or all of them open, so that ships may sail from Helbre in almost every wind; and if necessary to beat out, a vessel starting from Helbre with the first of the ebb down the Swash will be at the floating light and clear of the banks before another from Liverpool can get round the Rock Perch.
“To persons at all acquainted with the navigation to Liverpool it must be quite unnecessary to point out the benefit of this proposed arrangement, which, while it preserves all the advantages of communicating with the Mersey, and the extensive inland navigations connected therewith, affords a new passage to and from the sea, by means of the Dee, by which both the distance and dangers of an intricate navigation will be wholly avoided.
“An important advantage obtained by this plan is, that the proposed entrance at Helbre is within the jurisdiction of the port of Chester, of which it is recorded as a creek in Sir Matthew Hale’s Treatise _De portibus maris_; and business done there or upon its waters, even as far as Wallasey Pool, being within the port of Chester, will have to pay the dues at that port; and unless ships and goods lock into the Mersey they are exempted from the dues of Liverpool. The facility of construction is so great that a moderate charge for dues will be a sufficient remuneration for the capital required. The ground on either side of the canal is singularly suitable to be appropriated to any kind of establishment connected with shipping, and there can be no doubt that it will be so employed even by private speculation; but in so extensive a scheme as we propose it will be advisable for the promoters of the measure at once to establish a set of docks and warehouses of the most perfect description, as has been done in all the docks which have been constructed in and adjacent to London, and we have accordingly designed a set of such warehouses and yards as part of the plan.