On 21 October 1805, the combined fleets of France and Spain met the Royal Navy off Cape Trafalgar. Manx sailors were there — because the herring fleet had trained them, because the Irish Sea had hardened them, because the press gangs had taken them or because, impoverished with no work at home, they had volunteered for the only employer hiring. They carried Manx names — Quilliam, Cawle, Bainbridge, Christian, Crow — and served on Nelson's ships alongside men who had never heard of Tynwald Hill. The battle that would be remembered as the greatest moment in British naval history was fought, in part, by men from an island whose own parliament had been silenced and whose harbours had been left to rot.