History of lighthouses with demands, and to the loss of a number of ships, most notably the Dutch merchant ship Vreede in 1800 with the loss of 380 lives. After the reforms of the Lighthouse Act 1836, owners still managed to collect large dues, of which the largest were for the Smalls Lighthouse which collected £23,000 in 1852 and Trinity House was forced to spend over £1m in buying back leases, including £444,000 for the Skerries Lighthouse. The modern era of lighthouses began at the turn of the 18th century, as lighthouse construction boomed in lockstep with burgeoning levels of transatlantic commerce. Advances
History of lighthouses in Canada Pointe-au-Pere near Rimouski, Quebec. At the latter ranks with Point Amour Lighthouse as Canada's second-tallest lighthouse. Some lighthouses from the early 1900s were of traditional 8-sided timber construction, such as at "Point Riche" near Port au Choix, Newfoundland, Henry Island in Cape Breton (NS), at La Martre, Quebec (site of a museum) on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Lonely Island in Lake Huron, or at Pachena Point on Vancouver Island, site of the terrible 1906 shipwreck of the SS Valencia. However, the vast majority of post-1910 lighthouses replicated the octagonal pattern using the new ferro-concrete construction technique. Examples are Peggy's