In the mean time, Captain Smyth had been appointed to the command of the Aid sloop, and she was fitted and sent out to receive his pendant. In that ship we find him proceeding on the important service of fixing astronomically a new series of latitudes and longitudes for all the harbours, headlands, and islands, of the Mediterranean sea. These were known to be singularly erroneous: and he had already amassed considerable materials and data for such an object. About this time, a proposal was submitted to the British Government, for a ship to be sent to the Adriatic, to complete the grand survey of its shores, which had been commenced by the command of Napoleon Buonaparte. Captain Smyth being also appointed to this service, proceeded to execute it, having first embarked on board the Aid a party of Austrian and Neapolitan staff-officers, and taken the Imperial sloop of war Velox, Captain Poelthl, under his orders. By making the utmost use of the means at his disposal, the operations were satisfactorily terminated in less than two years, notwithstanding a dreadful plague was raging along the Albanian shores: – the result of the united labours of himself and his associates have been published at the Imperial Geographical Institute of Milan.
It is a singular historical fact, that Captain Smyth, in a visit to the fortified convent of Stagnewitz, on Monte Negro, so early as the summer of 1818, had the whole plan of the Greek revolution, which broke out in the year 1820, revealed to him; and of which he duly informed the British Government, through Sir Thomas Maitland, then Governor of Malta. He was also one of the party who accompanied Sir Thomas to the court of Ali Pasha, the famous and ferocious Vizier of Albania, to treat respecting the cession of Parga.
We next find Captain Smyth co-operating with Sir Frederick Adam, Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian islands, in suppressing a dangerous insurrection amongst the inhabitants of Santa Maura, and receiving his public acknowledgment for maintaining a rigorous blockade of that island, and helping him to disarm the population of several Greek villages. This was a service of which Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas
