By 1779, Major Paul Crebbin was reporting that the militia had collapsed entirely. Without the Lord's administration to maintain it, without equipment or funding, the militia decayed as surely as the harbours and the prison and the court buildings. The men who had served as the island's defenders for centuries were left without arms, without training, without any structure to organise them. By 1801, the men of Mann were reduced to pikes. An island in the Irish Sea, sitting across the shipping lanes between Britain, Ireland, and France, defended by men with pikes — while the same island's fishermen were being pressed into the Royal Navy to crew the ships that defended the Empire.