Upon the Dutch fleet appearing off Fowey and becoming aware of this, a doubly-manned frigate was detached from the main body, which remained cruising off the harbour mouth, with the mission of entering the haven and destroying the English ships. There were, however, two forts, one on either side of the entrance, and as soon as the Dutch ship “came within cannon shot of those forts she fired her guns upon the two blockhouses with great rage and violence, and these made a quick return of the like compliment. In fine, the fight continued for about two hours’ time, in which were spent some thousands of cannon shot on both sides, to the great hurt of the Dutch ship in plank, rigging, sails, and men, chiefly because the wind slacked or turned so adverse that she could not pass quick enough between the two forts up the river.” In the end the attempt to destroy the fleet had to be abandoned, although one cannot quite comprehend why a general bombardment was not undertaken of “Fowey’s little castles,” to the credit of which and to Fowey gunners the repulse of the Dutch was due. Never again, so far as we have been able to discover, did the Fowey forts play so gallant a part in defence of England and of English ships. Possibly they were made ready to do so when the shadow of Napoleonic invasion rested so heavily on the towns and seaports of our southern coasts. Who can tell? But we have found no record of even the fringe of the fighting, which made the Channel an almost ceaseless naval battleground during the long French War, having touched the town of Fowey itself. The coming and going of privateers alone, and the enterprises of the daring smugglers who made the town notorious in the annals of contraband trade may be said to have kept the place in touch with the stirring events of the last years of the eighteenth and early ones of the nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Couch, in his _History of Polperro_, has something to say concerning the bold smugglers of Fowey. And his account of one of many lawless incidents gives one a very vivid idea of the state of things which existed in the district towards the close of the eighteenth century. “On one occasion,” he writes, “intelligence had been received at Fowey that a ‘run of goods’ had been effected at Polperro during the previous night, and several men of a cutter’s crew were accordingly sent as scouts to get all the information they could. At Landaviddy they met with a farm labourer, who, it was suspected, had been engaged in this particular transaction; they tried to extract information from him by stratagem, but finding that he was not to be entrapped they tried the opposite plan, and threatened him with immediate impressment into the king’s service if he did not tell them where the goods were hidden. They succeeded in frightening him, and he informed them that a large number of kegs were hidden in a certain cellar above Yellow Rock, which he promised to point out by placing a chalk mark on the door.