Admiral William Sydney Smith. Fate was pleased to dispose of so that the glory of the first winner of Napoleon, in those years still General Bonaparte, fell to his lot. The life of Sydney Smith was more abrupt than the plot of any adventure novel, which, however, is not surprising for that heroic era. He was a worthy heir to the fame of the corsairs, and at another time he would certainly have competed with Francis Drake himself.
Among his commanders were prominent naval commanders, including Nelson and his associate Collingwood, as well as Admirals Hood, Rodney and Barham, whose names were and still are many ships of the British navy. Smith, one might say, was also lucky with opponents: among them were not only the French and the Spaniards, but also the Russian admirals S. Greig and P. Chichagov, better known as the loser of the Berezina. But Napoleon, of course, occupies a special place among them.
At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, Smith's entrepreneurial spirit and courage, his readiness to tackle the most impracticable tasks were never appreciated. And yet it was he, at that time an ordinary commodore of the Mediterranean squadron, who managed to inflict the first serious defeat on the future ruler of Europe. The naval commander, who took over the protection of the seaside fortress, at this time and in this place turned out to be more successful than the best commander of France.
Sydney Smith, a native of London, the son of a captain of the royal guard, was five years older than Napoleon. Among his ancestors and relatives there were many naval officers, and young Sidney Smith, whom everyone considered too lively and impudent, began his career at the age of 13 as a cabin boy on a ship that went to war in North America. There, 13 states demanded independence from the British crown. Smith fought in a 44-gun brig, which managed to capture one of the American frigates. Taking part in a whole series of battles, Smith already in 1780 passed the exam for lieutenant, and at the age of 18 he took command of the sloop "Fury".
The young officer managed to live in France, visited the North Africa with an inspection mission, and in 1789 received a six-month leave from the Admiralty in order to go to Sweden and Russia. He did not get to Russia, but accepted the offer to serve in the Swedish navy, forgetting that he had undertaken the obligation not to be hired by anyone. The request to withdraw this obligation was refused in London, but he returned to Karlskrona, agreeing to serve King Gustav III as a volunteer.
At this time, active operations were unfolding in the Gulf of Finland, where Smith, under the command of the Duke of Südermanland, distinguished himself when he brought almost a hundred small ships blocked by the Russians out of the Vyborg Bay. He also took part in the ineffectual battle at the Krasnaya Gorka Fort of Kronstadt. His service became known to the Swedes, but many of those who knew Smith fought on the other side. After the armistice, Smith returned to London, where in May 1792, at the request of the Swedish monarch, King George III awarded him the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Sword. Smith's enemies now knew about the "Swedish knight", besides, shortly before the award, six British naval officers were killed fighting for Russia with the Turks.
Meanwhile, Smith's younger brother, John Spencer, was assigned to the embassy in Istanbul. In 1792, Sydney Smith was sent to the Turkish Sultan Selim III, and he not only visited his brother, but also examined the fortifications of the Turks on the shores of the Mediterranean and even the Black Sea. When France declared war on Britain in February 1793, Sydney Smith recruited about forty recalled British sailors at Smyrna. He rebuilt the sunken ship at his own expense and went to Toulon, where his first meeting with Bonaparte, then an unknown officer of the Revolution, awaited him.
On the roadstead of Toulon there was a fleet under the command of Lord Hood, who, together with the Spanish and Neapolitan allies, tried to support the anti-Jacobin party. In mid-December, Bonaparte organized the famous bombing of forts and navies, which forced the Allies to withdraw their troops. Smith volunteered to destroy those ships of the French fleet - thirty-two line and fourteen frigates - which could not be withdrawn, they were in the inner harbor, next to the naval arsenal. The arsenal itself was to be blown up.
However, only thirteen of these ships were burned, including ten of the line. Thanks to the heroism of the galley exiles, who were not afraid of the fire, eighteen ships of the line and four frigates went to the Republicans. The arsenal was not too damaged. Napoleon, in his essay on the siege of Toulon, considered it necessary to write that "this officer performed his duty very poorly, and the republic should be grateful to him for those very valuable items that have been preserved in the arsenal."
In England, many were outraged by Smith's actions, claiming that he had missed a unique opportunity to weaken French naval forces. But this Admiral Hood believed that he, forced to act without preparation, did everything he could, and even wanted to achieve Smith's promotion. The Admiralty accepted Lord Hood's arguments and appointed Smith in command of the new 38-gun frigate Diamond in the North Sea.
In December 1794, Earl Spencer, who knew Smith well, became the first Lord of the Admiralty, and he begged him for a new appointment. With a flotilla of small vessels, he organized a blockade at the estuaries of northern France. Until the spring of 1796, Smith led it very successfully, but in April of this year the French managed to cut off his flagship, which could not bypass the rocky shoals near Brest. They took Smith prisoner. There is also a slightly different version of events that led Captain Smith to Temple Prison, according to which he simply fell under the millstones of terror.
Once in prison, Sydney Smith, not without reason, expected that he would be exchanged for an officer of the same rank. However, he was suspected of espionage, and Smith remained in custody for almost two years. One of Smith's cellmates, a certain Tromelin, connected him with the royalist Colonel Louis-Edmond Picard de Felippo, who was also near Toulon in 1793. In February 1798, when orders were received to transfer Smith to another prison, de Felippo and Tromelin organized his escape. De Felippo and several accomplices, disguised as gendarmes, presented the director of the prison with a fake directive from the Directory to hand over the prisoner to them. Via Rouen and Honfleur, in a rented boat, which was already intercepted in the strait by the royal frigate Argo, Smith and de Felipo reached Britain.
Smith's French comrade even received the rank of colonel in the English army, and he himself became a commodore and went to the East. At this time, Bonaparte's expedition was already leaving for Egypt from Toulon. Sydney Smith was given command of the 80-gun battleship Tiger, and along with his brother became the plenipotentiary representative of the British crown in Constantinople. Formally, its chief was Admiral Saint Vincent, but in reality in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, Rear Admiral Nelson was in charge, who defeated the French squadron of Brues at Aboukir.
Sydney Smith entered into correspondence with Nelson, unknowingly encroaching on his power by the fact that he was forced to combine the role of a naval flagship with a diplomatic mission. In Constantinople, Smith had a hand in the reconciliation of Russia with Turkey, he was even made a member of the Sultan's divan, and the commander of the Turkish naval and military forces on the island of Rhodes. Commodore Smith, never distinguished by low self-esteem, tried to attract part of the Russian squadron of Admiral F. F. Ushakov to operations off the coast of Syria, but he reasonably believed that his ships were more needed in the Adriatic and the Ionian Islands.
Ushakov had no intention of dividing his forces for the sake of the British and remarked about Smith's demands:
The admiral wrote that Smith is strong enough and does not need reinforcement, and noted with some irony:
In the spring of 1799, when Bonaparte was leading his army to the walls of Acre, which the French from the time of the Crusaders called Saint-Jean d'Acr, under the command of Commodore Sidney Smith there were already two battleships "Tiger" and "Theseus". When Smith received news that Bonaparte had stormed Jaffa, he immediately dispatched one of his ships to the port of Acre. With the beginning of the siege, Smith sent 800 English sailors to help the 4,000th garrison of Acre. The French siege weapons captured by his ships were also useful in defending the citadel.
One of Smith's main assistants was his old friend engineer de Felippo, who made a completely modern fortification out of a dilapidated fortress. Then Acre received reinforcements from Rhodes and eventually withstood no less than 12 attacks by the French, in the repulse of which Smith personally participated many times. In the end, Bonaparte had to lift the siege on 20 May.
Defending Acre did not make Smith famous, moreover, then few people imagined what the future awaited his French rival. Nevertheless, the Commodore was thanked by both houses of the British Parliament, and he was awarded a pension of £ 1,000. There were awards from the Sultan and even from the Russian emperor.
When Bonaparte's army moved back to Egypt, Sydney Smith sailed from Acre to Rhodes. He was listed as the nominal commander of the Turkish forces that landed at Cape Abukir. In a sense, it can be considered that by the defeat of the Turkish landing army, Bonaparte paid off with Smith for Saint-Jean d'Acr. However, it was on the flagship of Sydney Smith, the Tigre, that the French officer, who was negotiating the exchange of prisoners, received news from Europe, which hastened Bonaparte's departure to France.
After that, Smith negotiated a peace convention with Bonaparte's successor General Kleber, who also defeated the second Turkish landing in Egypt. Smith decided on a three-month truce, and then on the convention in El-Arish, which actually saved the results of the Egyptian expedition for France. The Egyptian army, which lost Commander Kleber and was reduced to over 17 thousand people, after another series of clashes with the Turks, managed to evacuate with weapons and most of the rich booty.
Practical Englishmen for the El-Arish convention subjected Sidney Smith to a real obstruction, and he had to wait for admiral's ranks for a very long time. The tarnished reputation did not interfere, however, with the popularity of the impetuous officer, who was soon elected to parliament. But already in 1803, having lost the next election, Smith led the flotilla of small ships blocking the Flemish coast. He was promoted to colonel of the Marine Corps and even fired Congreve missiles at French landing craft trained in the Bois de Boulogne, however, to no avail.
The First Lord of the Admiralty Barham even noticed on this occasion that
However, it was after Dover that Sydney Smith was finally promoted to rear admiral, and sent to the coast of Naples. He fought the French at Gaeta and the island of Capri, and the king of Naples and both Sicilies Ferdinand even appointed him governor of Calabria. The enterprising Smith actively supplied and intensified guerrilla warfare in the mountains, but the commander on land, General Moore, did not support Smith, who continued to irritate his commanders.
Sydney Smith managed to visit Constantinople, and after becoming an adviser to the Portuguese king in Lisbon, he helped to evacuate the august family and the remnants of the Portuguese fleet to Rio de Janeiro. There he did not lose his presence of mind and energy, and organized an unsuccessful attack by the Portuguese against the Spaniards in Buenos Aires. In August 1809, Smith was recalled to London for a reprimand, but … was promoted. On July 31, 1810, William Sidney Smith became Vice Admiral.
Following the advice of one of the Lords of the Admiralty to "beware of heroes", Smith was kept out of big business. He was appointed deputy to Sir Edward Pellew in the Mediterranean and was mainly engaged in the blockade of Toulon. There he was replaced only in July 1814, when Napoleon was already on Elba.
Fate brought Sydney Smith back to his old adversary, or rather, he himself sought and found this meeting. At Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was in command of the British, and Rear Admiral Sydney Smith from Brussels was organizing the evacuation of the wounded from the battlefield. Wellington was pleased to appoint him as his representative in the Admiralty. Sydney Smith no longer fought, but still managed to get the rank of admiral in 1821. Oddly enough, he spent the last years of his life in Paris, where he died on May 26, 1840. The first winner of Bonaparte rested in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, better known here as the burial place of the heroes of the Paris Commune.
Contemporaries noted the eccentric nature of Sydney Smith, recognizing his energy, intelligence, rich imagination and courage. At the same time, he was a rare individualist, completely insensitive to others, for which he suffered more than once. Judging by the writings of Napoleon, the overland defeat from the sailor firmly hooked him, it is not for nothing that he does not skimp on caustic remarks about Sydney Smith, even when he gives him his due.
… Commodore Sir Sydney Smith tried to go into all the details of land operations, although he did not understand them, and in general he could do little in this area, and started the naval affairs that he knew, although he could do everything in this area. If the British squadron had not arrived in the Gulf of Saint-Jean d'Acre, this city would have been taken before April 1, since on March 19 twelve tartans with a siege park would have arrived in Haifa, and these heavy guns in 24 hours would have razed the fortifications of Saint -Jean d'Acre. By capturing or scattering these twelve tartans, the English Commodore consequently saved Jezzar Pasha. His help and advice regarding the defense of the fortress did not matter much.
