Admiral William Henry Smyth (21 January 1788 – 8 September 1865) was an English Royal Navy officer, hydrographer, astronomer and numismatist. He is noted for his involvement in the early history of a number of learned societies, for his hydrographic charts, for his astronomical work, and for a wide range of publications and translations.
Origins William Henry Smyth was the only son of Joseph Smyth (died 1788) and Georgiana Caroline Pitt Pilkington (died 1838), the daughter of John Carteret Pilkington and the granddaughter of Laetitia Pilkington and her husband Matthew Pilkington. His father, Joseph Smyth, an American Loyalist from New Jersey who served as a lieutenant in the King's Royal Regiment of New York during the Revolutionary War, was the sixth son of Benjamin Smyth (died 1769), a landowner in what is now Blairstown, and his first wife Catherina Schoonhoven (died 1750). Never having known his father, the Admiral grew up with a half-brother Augustus Earle and a half-sister Phoebe Earle. To conceal the disreputability of his parents and his probable illegitimacy, his descendants, in particular his daughter Henrietta Grace Smyth, invented an imaginary ancestry. Their claims, which were reproduced in works like Burke's Peerage, included alleged descent from the childless Captain John Smith, whose coat of arms they adopted, and a fictitious relationship with Lord Nelson. Genealogical research they had commissioned in England and the USA, suggesting that his father Joseph Smyth was in fact a forger, a perjurer and a bigamist, was suppressed.
Royal Navy
In 1802, aged 14, Smyth ran away from his poverty-stricken home to be a cabin boy aboard a merchant ship, which was subsequently commandeered by the Royal Navy; he entered as an ordinary seaman. In 1804 he was in the East India Company's ship Marquis Cornwallis, which the government chartered for an expedition against the Seychelles. In the following March, as Cornwallis the vessel was bought by the Royal Navy to be a 50-gun ship under the command of Captain Charles James Johnston, with whom Smyth remained, seeing much active service in Indian, Chinese, Australian and Pacific waters. In February 1808 he followed Johnston to Powerful, which, on returning to England, was part of the force in the expedition to the Scheldt, and was paid off in October 1809. He afterwards served in the 74-gun Milford on the coast of France and Spain, and was lent from her to command the Spanish gunboat Mors aut Gloria at the defence of Cadiz from September 1810 to April 1811. In July 1811 he joined Rodney off Toulon, and through 1812 served on the coast of Spain. On 25 March 1813 (aged 25) he was promoted to lieutenant and appointed to the Sicilian flotilla, in which he combined service against the French from Naples with a good deal of unofficial hydrographic surveying and antiquarian research. For his services in defending Sicily, he was subsequently awarded the Order of Saint Ferdinand and of Merit by King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, and received permission from the Prince Regent to wear it.
On 18 September 1815 (aged 27) he was promoted to Commander and in command of the brig Scylla continued surveying the coast of Sicily, the adjacent coasts of Italy, and the opposite shores of Africa. In 1817 his survey work was put on a more formal footing by his appointment to Aid. In 1821 this vessel was renamed Adventure and later accompanied Beagle on the first voyage of the Beagle, in which Smyth's half-brother Augustus Earle was the official artist. In Aid, Smyth carried on the hydrographic survey of the Italian, Sicilian, Greek, and African coasts, and constructed a very large number of charts, used by the Royal Navy among others until the mid-20th century. As a result, he became known as "Mediterranean Smyth". His hydrographic operations in the Adriatic, in collaboration with the Austrian and Neapolitan authorities, resulted in the Carta di Cabottaggio del Mare Adriatico, published in 1822–24. While in Sicily in 1817, he met the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in Palermo and visited his observatory; this sparked his interest in astronomy and he gave his second son (who became a noted astronomer) the name Piazzi. Smyth published some of his work in his Memoir description of the Resources, Inhabitants, and Hydrography of Sicily and its Islands (London, 1824), which was followed in 1828 by a Sketch of Sardinia. Subsequently, in 1854, he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal in recognition of his survey work in the Mediterranean. On 7 February 1824, aged 36, he was promoted to Post-Captain, and in November he paid off the Adventure. He remained on the Active List on full pay, ready for active service, but this actually was the end of his service at sea, and he turned to a life of literary and scientific pursuits. In 1846 aged 58, he retired from the Navy on half-pay, being advanced on the retired list to Rear-Admiral on 28 May 1853, then to Vice-Admiral on 17 May 1858, and finally to Admiral on 14 November 1863, aged 75.
Astronomy
Returning to England and settling at Bedford, in 1825 he fitted out a private observatory equipped with a 5.9-inch refractor telescope at his home at 6 The Crescent. He used this instrument to observe a variety of deep sky objects over the course of the 1830s, including double stars, star clusters and nebulae. He published his observations in 1844 in the Cycle of Celestial Objects, which earned him the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1845 and also the presidency of the society. The first volume of this work was on general astronomy, but the second volume became known as the Bedford Catalogue and contained his observations of 1,604 double stars and nebulae. It served as a standard reference work for many years afterward; no astronomer had previously made as extensive a catalogue of dim objects such as this. It was reprinted in 1986 with a foreword by George Lovi stating:
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
