In the official preparations at London, during the following autumn, for the conclusion of a treaty of defensive alliance between Great Britain and , Turkey, the British government resolved to confer a ministerial character upon the naval officer destined to the difficult task of association with Turkish fleets and armies; and he was accordingly included in the special full-power, despatched to the British minister then residing at Constantinople, as joint plenipotentiary. The officer so selected was Sir W. Sidney Smith, then recently appointed to the command of le Tigre, an 80-gun ship, in which he sailed from Portsmouth on the 29th Oct. in the same year[1].
On the 11th of the preceding month, the new political system of the Porte was completely developed by a general measure of reprisal against the persons and property of the French throughout the Turkish dominions, and by the fulmination of a manifesto, couched in terms of extraordinary energy, against the Parisian government. During the interval between the defeat of the French fleet in Aboukir Bay[2], and the arrival of Sir W. Sidney Smith on the Syrian coast, General Buonaparte had achieved the entire conquest of Egypt; introduced a colonial organization into that extraordinary country, with his peculiar talent and promptitude in administration; and was preparing to conduct his army into the contiguous provinces of the east, thereby threatening at one and the same time the subjugation of the rest of the Turkish possessions in that quarter, and the overthrow of the British establishments in India; to counteract which design called for the greatest exertion on the part of the confederated powers. With this community of interests, preparations were made in Syria under the direction of Dgezzar Pasha, who was to be supported by an army that was to traverse Asia Minor; the employment of which force in an attack on the frontier of
- ↑ Sir W. S. Smith’s brother was at that time the English Envoy to the Ottoman Porte.
- ↑ See p. 180.
likeness. The extraordinary thinness of the figure may be accounted for, as the effect of two years confinement, during which he was overwhelmed with every indignity that oppression could lay upon the subject of its power.
