But although smuggling loomed so large in the lives and occupations of Polperro folk during the later years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century it by no means formed the sum total of their seagoing activities. The Polperro privateers were quite as famous in their way as the smugglers. As was perfectly natural the stern training which was necessary to fit men for the hazardous calling of smugglers, the resource, good seamanship, weather lore, courage, and daring proved equally of service when they were brought face to face with the enemies of their country, whether between the decks of a frigate or line-of-battle ship to which they had been drafted as a punishment for some smuggling exploit, or aboard the swift-sailing Polperro luggers turned for the nonce into free lances as privateers. There were quite a number of stories of privateering days current amongst the older folk a couple of decades ago. One or two are worth quotation, as they come from the lips of active participants or descendants of those who took part in the exploits narrated. There was the case of the _Eagle_, “a heavily armed lugger of some 135 tons, which, finding itself becalmed some sixty miles south-east of Land’s End one August morning in the year 1809, was somewhat dismayed to discover a frigate, of undeniably French cut, coming up with the wind, and accompanied by what appeared to be a large _chasse-marée_, or privateer, probably hailing from the port of Brest.... The _Eagle_ was perforce compelled to await the coming of the enemy, who, when about three and a half miles off, ‘broke out’ the tricolour. Fortunately the wind preceded the frigate’s coming by some two miles or more, and although the privateer had advanced to within a mile or so of the English boat, through sailing a shorter course and closer to the wind than the frigate, and began to open fire, the _Eagle_ was able to trim sails and head for Penzance.”