Manx naval officer who steered the Victory into action at Trafalgar, born 1771 and died 1829.

He was the son of a farmer in the south of the Island. He first came to notice at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, when Admiral Duncan appointed him to act as lieutenant, an appointment confirmed after the victory.

At Copenhagen in 1801 he was in a frigate of light enough draught to get close under the batteries, where the fire was so heavy that every officer senior to him was killed and he was left in command. Nelson came aboard and asked who was in charge below. Quilliam answered that he was, and to the further question of how he was getting on replied with the single word middlin, without pausing in the work. Nelson, taken with the coolness and the independence of it, found an early opportunity to bring him onto his own ship as first lieutenant.

At Trafalgar the Victory lost her mizzen topmast and had her wheel shot to pieces some five hundred yards off the Bucentaure, and she had to be steered from the gun room, Quilliam and the master Thomas Atkinson relieving each other at the tiller. A document at Trinity House offers a reason why an officer of his rank was at the helm at all: he had the damaged steering gear repaired to a plan of his own, and, not being sure how it would answer, took the tiller himself.

He came home to the Island by degrees. Elected to the House of Keys in 1807, at sea again the next year, he did not resign his seat until 1810. He commanded in the Spencer in 1808 and later the Crescent, serving in her until after the peace of 1815, then retired to the White House at Kirk Michael. He was re-elected to the Keys in 1817 and took a conspicuous part in the Tynwald Court's inquiry into the herring fishery in 1827. He is buried in Kirk Arbory churchyard, where the inscription records that by the example of Duncan and Nelson he learned to conquer, and by his own merit he rose to command.