The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History
Linda Colley
This edition does not include illustrations.From the author of ‘Britons’, the story of the exceptional life of the intrepid Elizabeth Marsh – an extraordinary woman of her time who was caught up in trade, imperialism, war, exploration, migration, growing maritime reach, and new ideas.This is a book about a world in a life. An individual lost to history, Elizabeth Marsh (1735-85) travelled farther, and was more intimately affected by developments across the globe, than the vast majority of men. Conceived in Jamaica and possibly mixed-race, she was the first woman to publish in English on Morocco, and the first to carry out extensive overland explorations in eastern and southern India, journeying in each case in close companionship with an unmarried man. She spent time in some of the world's biggest ports and naval bases, Portsmouth, Menorca, Gibraltar, London, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta and the Cape. She was damaged by the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War; and linked through her own migrations with voyages of circumnavigation, and as victim and owner, she was involved in three different systems of slavery.But hers is a broadly revealing, not simply an exceptional, life. Marsh's links to the Royal Navy, the East India Company, empire and international trade made these experiences possible. To this extent, her career illumines shifting patterns of British and Western power and overseas aggression. The swift onset of globalization occurring in her lifetime also ensured that her progress, relationships and beliefs were repeatedly shaped and deflected by people and events beyond Europe. While imperial players like Edmund Burke and Eyre Coote form a part of her story, so do African slave sailors, skilled Indian weavers and astronomers, ubiquitous Sephardi Jewish traders, and the great Moroccan Sultan, Sidi Muhammad, who schemed to entrap her.Many modern biographies remain constrained by a national framework, while global histories are generally impersonal. By contrast, in this dazzling and original book, Linda Colley moves repeatedly and questioningly between vast geo-political transformations and the intricate detail of individual lives. This is a global biography for our globalizing times.
LINDA COLLEY
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become a Part of World History
DEDICATION (#ulink_179ede63-10c8-58f7-bba8-4c5a2d060f55)
Jan Colley’s book
CONTENTS
Cover (#u7046799f-6314-54ca-b0c1-d815bb1a1647)
Title Page (#u666996ec-d43f-519c-8f82-3252b0a8113e)
Dedication (#u5c09dfbb-2d6d-5b44-b91e-4177bc9132cd)
Map (#u428565c6-4524-5729-9c67-929e94c90cd1)
Conventions (#uc329269b-27c2-5393-9eeb-0124ef548ce8)
Introduction (#ude7b35b1-6ce0-56f2-b93f-fc7defcbef86)
1: Out of The Caribbean (#u3927c2de-c4ed-53d9-90ee-1383631480e5)
2: Taken to Africa, Encountering Islam (#ue344ffd8-ec7b-50cb-8fea-be7e5214be75)
3: Trading from London, Looking to America (#litres_trial_promo)
4: Writing and Migrating (#litres_trial_promo)
5: An Asiatic Progress (#litres_trial_promo)
6: World War and Family Revolutions (#litres_trial_promo)
Ending – and Continuing (#litres_trial_promo)
Family Trees (#litres_trial_promo)
Manuscript Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
MAP (#ulink_70362966-eae6-51ad-b918-9961bc4d65da)
The world – as Elizabeth Marsh and her extended family experienced it
CONVENTIONS (#ulink_d38d0ade-d814-5cc8-a15f-56dbd653caca)
Place names have changed radically since Elizabeth Marsh’s lifetime, especially in regions of the world that have previously been colonized or fought over by contending states. Many names remain contested. In this book, I generally use the names that are most current today: hence Dhaka and Menorca, rather than Dacca and Minorca. Some now-discarded place names possess so much historical resonance, however, that I have judged it inappropriate to update them. Thus I refer to Calcutta in these pages, not Kolkata.
For the transliteration of Arabic terms and phrases, I have drawn on the Encyclopaedia of Islam and on the advice of expert friends. Making sense of the mangled Anglo-Indian terminology employed in Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian Journal has been made easier by the University of Chicago’s online version of Hobson-Jobson.
In order to convey the fluctuating fortunes of the main characters in this book, I provide estimates at times of what they were worth in terms of today’s purchasing power. I have drawn these estimates from the ‘How much is that?’ site on EH.net.
Before 1752, the British followed the Julian calendar and dated the beginning of the New Year from 25 March, not 1 January. Thus the captain’s log of the Kingston, the ship on which Milbourne Marsh set out from Portsmouth for Jamaica, has it readying for sail in early 1731. But in terms of the modern Gregorian calendar, it was early in 1732 that the Kingston was got ready; and I have used the modern-style year throughout the text and endnotes. When quoting from original manuscripts in the text, I have modernized spelling, extended abbreviations, and altered punctuation whenever the sense has seemed to demand it. Books cited in the endnotes are published in London unless otherwise stated. I describe at the beginning of the notes the other conventions I employ in the course of them.
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_3af78e32-fa51-5239-b923-0f38ef33c8a6)
‘I search for Eliza every where: I discover, I discern some of her
features … But what is become of her who united them all?’
ABBÉ RAYNAL
THIS IS A BIOGRAPHY that crosses boundaries, and it tells three connected stories. The first is the career of a remarkable but barely known woman, Elizabeth Marsh, who lived from 1735 to 1785, and who travelled farther and more dangerously by sea and in four continents than any female contemporary for whom records survive. The second story is concerned with members of her extended family, her parents, uncle, brothers, husband, children, multiple cousins and other, more distant, kin. Because of the nature of their occupations, their migrations and their ideas, these people played vital roles in fostering Elizabeth Marsh’s own conspicuous mobility. They also helped to connect her, in both constructive and traumatic ways, with some of the most transformative forces of her age. For this is not just an account of an individual and a family: it is also, and thirdly, a global story. Elizabeth Marsh’s existence coincided with a distinctive and markedly violent phase of world history, in which connections between continents and oceans broadened and altered in multiple ways. These changes in the global landscape repeatedly shaped and distorted Elizabeth Marsh’s personal progress. So this book charts a world in a life and a life in the world. It is also an argument for re-casting and re-evaluating biography as a way of deepening our understanding of the global past.
Her Life
Elizabeth Marsh’s life is at once startlingly atypical and widely revealing, strange and representative. She was conceived in Jamaica, and may have been of mixed racial parentage. Her voyage in utero across the Atlantic from Kingston to England was the first of many oceanic journeys on her part, and inaugurated a life that was shaped as much by water as dry land, and that even on shore was spent in a succession of cosmopolitan ports and riverside cities. As a child, Elizabeth Marsh moved between Portsmouth and Chatham and the lower decks of Royal Navy warships at sail. Migrating with her family to the Mediterranean in 1755, she lived first in Menorca, and then – after a French invasion drove them out – in Gibraltar. Taken to Morocco in 1756 by force, but also as a consequence of her own actions, she was one of the first nominal Europeans to have a sustained personal encounter with its then acting Sultan, Sidi Muhammad, penetrating to the heart of his palace complex at Marrakech, and barely escaping sexual enslavement. The under-educated daughter of a shipwright, she subsequently became the first woman to write and publish on the Maghreb in English.
Elizabeth Marsh spent the late 1750s, and early and mid ’60s, comparatively becalmed in London by marriage and childbirth, but watching her husband engage in trade with Western and Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, mainland North America and the Caribbean, and parts of South America and Asia. She also plotted with him to emigrate to Florida. Instead, bankruptcy drove him to flee to India; and in 1771 Elizabeth Marsh would join him there, sailing to the subcontinent by way of visits to Rio de Janeiro and the Cape, on the only ship then to have circumnavigated the world twice over. She did not stay in their new house at Dhaka for long, however. After dispatching her young son briefly to Persia, and her daughter back to England, Marsh set out by sea for Madras in December 1774.
She would devote much of the next eighteen months to visiting and exploring settlements, towns and temples in eastern and southern India, composing in the process one of the strangest and most emotive accounts of an overland journey in the subcontinent to be written at this time by anyone, male or female. Her closest companion on this Asiatic progress was an unmarried man; and although Elizabeth Marsh rejoined her husband in Dhaka in mid-1776, it was again not for long. From late 1777 to mid-1780 she was once more on the move, sailing first from Calcutta to England, and then, after more than a year’s intrigue, and a further twelve thousand miles at least in sea distance, returning to the subcontinent. She embarked on these last circuitous voyages in defiance of French and Spanish warships and privateers that were now fighting in support of the new-minted United States, and because some of the long-distance repercussions of the American Revolutionary War were undermining her husband’s business and existence in Asia, and threatening her children and herself.
As this suggests, while Elizabeth Marsh can seem an almost impossibly picaresque figure, viewing her thus would miss what was most arresting about her life, and all that lay behind it. To an almost eerie degree, Marsh was repeatedly caught fast in geographically wide-ranging events and pressures. This was true even of what should have been her intimate rites of passage. The circumstances of her birth (like the meeting and marriage of her parents), the nature of her upbringing, the sabotage of her first engagement, the making of her marriage, and the stages of its unravelling, her response to the advent of middle age, and the manner in which her two children were eventually provided for – all of these, and not just her travels and her writings, were influenced by transcontinental developments. For Elizabeth Marsh, there was scarcely ever a secure divide between her personal life on the one hand, and the wider world and its accelerating changes on the other. This was the nature of her ordeal. The degree to which she was exposed to it throughout the half-century of her existence was due in large part to circumstances beyond her control. It was due to the occupations of her male relations, and to the fact that she herself was a dependent woman without paid employment, and therefore vulnerable. It was due to her own, and her extended family’s, connections with Britain and its tentacular, contested empire. And, crucially, it was due to the global circumstances of her times. But the intensity and relentlessness of Elizabeth Marsh’s ordeal were also a product of the sort of person she was and of the choices she made.
Her Family
Elizabeth Marsh’s father, his father and grandfather, and multiple cousins, were shipbuilders, mariners, and makers of charts and maps. Through these men, she was linked all her life to the Royal Navy, one of the few organizations at this time possessed of something genuinely approaching global reach, and to the sea: ‘the great high road of communication to the different nations of the world’, as Adam Smith styled it.
(#litres_trial_promo) Marsh’s uncle and younger brother were administrators and assemblers of information on behalf of the British state, men employing pen and paper in order to manage distance. Her husband, James Crisp, was a merchant, engaged in both legal and illicit long-distance trade. His dealings encompassed ports and manufacturing centres in the world’s two largest maritime empires, those of Spain and Britain, and some of the commodities most in international demand: salt, sugar, cotton textiles, fish and tea. And he was associated with the British East India Company, the most important transnational trading corporation in existence, as subsequently were Marsh’s son, her son-in-law, yet more ‘cousins’, and ultimately her half-Indian grandson.
Her husband was also involved in colonial land speculation and migration schemes, as was she. Her elder brother and still more ‘cousins’ were army officers, servicing empire and its wars; while the agency that was responsible for driving by far the largest numbers of human beings across oceans and between continents at this time, the transatlantic trade in West African slaves, may have given rise to the woman who became Elizabeth Marsh’s mother. Marsh’s husband certainly was implicated in this slave trade, though it was two other systems of slavery and slave-taking, in Northern Africa and in Asia, in which she herself became directly involved, both as an intended victim and as an owner.
By way of her extended family, then, Elizabeth Marsh was brought into contact with some of the main forces of global change of her time: enhanced maritime reach, transoceanic and transcontinental commerce, a more deliberate mobilization of knowledge and written information in the service of the state, the quickening tempo of imperial aggression and colonization, emigration, war, slavery and the slave trade. Many millions of people were caught up in one or more of these. Elizabeth Marsh was affected and swept into movement by all of them. This owed something to her gender and uncertain status. As a woman who was usually economically dependent, she was often dragged along in the wake of various menfolk. Consequently, their occupations, and their migrations, and their exposure to other societies frequently also entangled her.
In this and other respects, the near contemporary whom Elizabeth Marsh most closely resembles is Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–97), the one-time slave of African descent who, by way of his writings and travels, made himself a ‘citizen of the world’, as well as an African and a Briton.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is telling that both Elizabeth and Olaudah were connected with the Royal Navy, with the slave trade, and with print; and they were alike too in their urge repeatedly to re-invent themselves. Their different, but essentially similar, lives also unfolded across great spaces and in a range of diverse cultural settings because of something else they had in common. Elizabeth Marsh, like Olaudah Equiano, chose to move, and was compelled to move. Avid travellers by instinct, they were each in addition forced into journeying as a result of their subordination to others: Equiano because for part of his life he was a slave, Marsh because she was a woman without independent financial resources.
It is significant, too, that these two self-made travellers and writers overlapped so closely in point of time, and that both of them were connected – though never exclusively – with Britain and its empire.
Her Worlds
Throughout Europe and in parts of the Americas – but also beyond them – the era in which Elizabeth Marsh lived, the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century, witnessed a growing awareness of the connectedness between the world’s different regions and peoples. More informed and classically educated men and women were aware of course that accelerated bursts of what would now be styled globalization had occurred in earlier periods of history. ‘Previously the doings of the world had been, as one might say, dispersed,’ the ancient Greek historian Polybius wrote in regard to the third century BC. But, as a result of the conquests of imperial Rome, he continued, ‘history has come to acquire an organic unity, and the doings of Italy and Libya [i.e. Africa] are woven together with those of Asia and Greece, and the outcome of them all tends toward one end’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Historians since have identified other such ‘global moments’: how, by the end of the thirteenth century, trade was able for a time to link merchants in parts of India and China, the Levant, the Persian Gulf, and various European ports and city states, for instance, and how Spain’s conquest of Manila in 1571 inaugurated new systems of commerce, migration and bullion-exchange between Asia, South-East Asia, the Americas and Europe.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, the rate at which different sorts of global connections evolved during and after the second quarter of the eighteenth century was perceived by observers in the West, but also outside it, as something new. ‘Everything has changed, and must change again,’ insisted Abbé Raynal in his History of the Two Indies (1770), this era’s most influential discussion and denunciation of Europe’s contacts with Asia, Africa and the Americas. Or, as Edmund Burke famously pronounced in 1777: ‘the great map of mankind is unrolled at once’. It was potentially ‘at the same instant under our view’.
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This sense that the world was becoming visibly more compact and connected was pronounced within Britain itself, and for reasons that shaped much of Elizabeth Marsh’s life. The sea was the prime vehicle and emblem of connectivity, ‘a mighty rendezvous’, as one writer expressed it in 1760; and – as she had ample cause to know – it was Britain that possessed both the most powerful navy and the biggest merchant marine. During Marsh’s lifetime, these maritime advantages allowed Britain, along with France and Russia, increasingly to explore and invade the Pacific, an ocean that occupies a third of the globe’s surface, and of which Europeans had previously possessed only limited routine acquaintance.
(#litres_trial_promo) Before, throughout, and after Marsh’s life, Britain was also involved in a succession of wars with France that expanded relentlessly in geographical scale. As a result, London was able to lay claim to the world’s largest and most widely dispersed empire. By 1775, as the German geographer Johann Christoph Gatterer remarked, Britain had become the only power to have intruded decisively, though not always securely or very deeply, into every continent of the globe.
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In addition, Britain’s ambitious commerce, the terrible volume of its slave trading, the growing overseas migration of its own peoples, and its prolific print industry and consumerism – all of which impinged on Elizabeth Marsh’s own experience – encouraged a more vivid consciousness of the world’s expanse and the range of human diversity, which extended well beyond the political class. Had she been more consistently prosperous during her residence in London in the 1760s, Elizabeth might have purchased a pocket globe, an increasingly fashionable accessory at this time, or invested in one of an array of new atlases, encyclopedias, gazettes and children’s books, all promising to unpack the ‘world in miniature’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In more senses than one, the proliferation of such artifacts suggested a more graspable world: one that might even be pocketed.
However, there was more to Elizabeth Marsh’s experiences and shifting identity than this British imperial connection; just as there was always more to the growing interrelationship between continents and peoples and oceans at this time than the exertions and ambitions of Britain and other Western powers. That Marsh was born at all was owing, indirectly, and possibly directly, to the enforced migration of millions of West Africans across the Atlantic; and that she was born in England, and not in Jamaica, was due to rebellion on the part of just some of these people. Her career was shaped throughout by the enhanced capacity on the part of British ships, soldiers and merchants to be present globally. But her life was also vitally changed by a Moroccan ruler’s schemes to construct his own world system that would link together sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Ottoman Empire and merchants in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and ultimately the United States. And if London, Barcelona and Livorno supply backdrops to her story, as centres of transcontinental trade, so also do Basra, and Boston, and Dhaka, and Manila. That Elizabeth Marsh’s life was one of continuous transition was due in part then to a succession of influences and interventions issuing from outside Europe, and to actors who saw the world from different vantage points. Her ordeal was also due to her, to the sort of person she was.
Herself
I first came across Elizabeth Marsh while writing my previous book, Captives. To begin with, I was aware only of the Mediterranean portion of her life; and it was not until I began investigating the background to this that I gradually uncovered the other geographies of her story. I learnt that a Californian library possessed an Indian travel journal in her hand, and an early manuscript version of her book on Morocco. Then I came across archives revealing her links with Jamaica and East Florida. Further searches turned up connections between her and her family and locations in Spain, Italy, the Shetlands, Central America, coastal China, New South Wales, Java, Persia, the Philippines, and more.
That this international paper chase proved possible and profitable was itself, I gradually came to realize, a further indication of some of the changes through which this woman had lived. Elizabeth Marsh was socially obscure, sometimes impoverished, and elusively mobile. In the ancient, medieval and early modern world, such individuals, especially if they were female, rarely left any extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event: a trial for murder or heresy, say, or a major rebellion, or a massacre, or a conspiracy, or a slaver’s voyage. That Elizabeth Marsh and her connections, by contrast, can be tracked in libraries and archives, not just at interludes and in times of crisis, but for most of her life, is due in part to some of the transitions that accompanied it. During her lifetime, states and empires, with their proliferating arrays of consuls, administrators, clerks, diplomats, ships’ captains, interpreters, cartographers, missionaries and spies, together with transcontinental organizations such as the East India Company, became more eager, and more able, to monitor and record the lives of ‘small’ people – even, sometimes, female people – wherever they went.
Recovering the life-parts and body-parts of Elizabeth Marsh has been rendered possible also by the explosion in global communications that is occurring now, in our own lifetimes. The coming of the worldwide web means that historians (and anyone else) can investigate manuscript and library catalogues, online documents and genealogical websites from different parts of the world to an extent that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. At present, this revolution – like so much else – is still biased in favour of the more affluent regions of the world. Even so, it is far easier than it used to be to track down a life of this sort, which repeatedly crossed over different geographical and political boundaries. The ongoing impact of this information explosion on the envisaging of history, and on the nature of biography, will only expand in the future.
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To say that Elizabeth Marsh’s life and ordeal are recoverable, and that this in itself is eloquent about closer global connections in her time and in ours, is not the same as saying that the sources about her are abundant or easily yielding. To be sure, this was a woman who was addicted to writing. Even when (perhaps particularly when) she was confined to the lower decks of a store ship on the Indian Ocean, or in a Moroccan prison, she is known to have busied herself writing letters. Neither these, nor any other letters by her survive. Nor do any personal letters by her husband or parents survive, or any that might compensate for the lack of a portrait of her, by closely detailing her appearance. The colour of Elizabeth Marsh’s eyes and hair, like her height and the timbre of her voice, and the way she moved, remains, at least at present, beyond knowing. So does how she and others perceived exactly the colour of her skin.
This absence of some of the basic information which biographers can normally take for granted is partly why I have chosen to refer to Elizabeth Marsh often by her whole name, and sometimes only by her surname. Mainly for the sake of clarity, but also because of how she lived, I also refer to her only by her unmarried name. So in these pages she is always Elizabeth Marsh, never Elizabeth Crisp. The practice of always referring to female characters in biographies by their first names can have an infantilizing effect. It also suggests a degree of cosy familiarity that – as far as this woman is concerned – would be more than usually spurious. Certain aspects of her life and mind, as of her appearance, are unlikely ever to be properly known; though the impact she was able at intervals to make on others is abundantly clear.
What has survived to convey her quality and her actions over time are a striking set of journals, scrapbooks and sagas, compiled by her and by some members of her family. There are Elizabeth Marsh’s own Moroccan and Indian writings. Her younger brother, John Marsh, produced a memoir of his career. Her uncle, George Marsh, assembled a remarkable two-hundred-page book about himself and his relations and two commonplace books, and devoted journals to the more significant episodes in his life. Ostensibly concerned with personal and family happenings, achievements and disasters, these miscellaneous chronicles can be read also as allegories of much wider changes. Even some of the maps drawn by Elizabeth Marsh’s father contain more than their obvious levels of meaning. I have drawn repeatedly on these various family texts in order to decipher this half-hidden woman’s shifting ideas, emotions and ambitions.
Attempting this is essential because, although she undoubtedly viewed certain phases of her life as an ordeal, Marsh rarely presented herself straightforwardly as a victim. It was her own actions and plans, and not just the vulnerabilities attaching to her marginal status, the occupations and mishaps of her male relations, the chronology of her life, and the country and empire to which she was formally attached, that rendered her at intervals so mobile, and exposed her so ruthlessly to events. In particular, without attending closely to these private and family writings, it would be hard to make sense of five occasions – in 1756, in 1769, in 1770–71, in 1774–76, and again after 1777 – on which, to differing degrees, Elizabeth Marsh broke away from conventional ties of family and female duty, only to become still more vividly entangled in processes and politics spanning continents and oceans.
History and Her Story
So this is a book that ranges between biography, family history, British and imperial history, and global histories in the plural. Because of the tendencies of our own times, historians have become increasingly concerned to attempt seeing the world as a whole. This has encouraged an understandable curiosity about very large-scale phenomena: the influence of shifting weather systems on world history, ecological change over time, patterns of forced and voluntary migration, the movement of capital, or commodities, or disease over continents, the transmission of ideas and print, the workings of vast overland and oceanic networks of trade, the impact of conflicting imperial systems, and so on.
(#litres_trial_promo) These, and other such grand transcontinental forces, were and are massively important. Yet they have never just been simply and inhumanly there. They have impacted on people, who have understood them (or not), and adapted to them (or not), but who have invariably interpreted them in very many different ways. Writings on world and global history (to which I stand enormously indebted) sometimes seem as aggressively impersonal as globalization can itself.
In this book, by contrast, I am concerned to explore how the lives of a group of individuals, and especially the existence of one particular unsophisticated but not unperceptive woman, were informed and tormented by changes that were viewed at the time as transnational, and transcontinental, and even as pan-global, to an unprecedented degree. I seek to tack between the individual and world histories ‘in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Writing some fifty years ago, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills suggested that at no other era had ‘so many men been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change’. The ‘earthquakes’ happening in the 1950s were due, he thought, to the collapse of old colonial empires and to the emergence of new, less blatant forms of imperialism, to the horrific implications of atomic warfare, to politicians’ surging capacity to deploy power over individual lives, to runaway modernization, and to inordinate pressure on marriage and the family. It was vital, Mills suggested, to try to understand the relationship between these ‘most impersonal and remote transformations’ and ‘the most intimate features of the human self’. Not least because those living through such earthquakes were often unable themselves to see this relationship clearly and make sense of it:
Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men [sic] do not usually know what the connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
Instead, he suggested, men and women whose fate it was to ‘cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted’ often simply felt ‘possessed by a sense of trap’.
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As far as Elizabeth Marsh is concerned, Mills’ characterization of the responses of those who live through ‘earthquakes’ of global change is both right and wrong. As will become clear, at times, and for good reason, she was indeed ‘possessed by a sense of trap’. But, like other members of her family, she tried to make sense of the changes transcending seas and continents that she and they were so markedly living through and acting out. The extent and quality of Elizabeth Marsh’s global earthquake in the mid-eighteenth century was substantially different from that perceived by Mills in the 1950s, though the flux of empire, enhanced state power, runaway military violence, modernization, and strains on the family and marriage were part of her experience too. Elizabeth Marsh’s earthquake was also very different from our own at the start of the twenty-first century. But the nature of her ordeal, her precocious and concentrated exposure to so many forces of transcontinental change, and her sense in the face of these ‘impersonal and remote transformations’ both of shock and wonder, entrapment and new opportunities, remain eloquent and recognizable. This is her story.
1 Out of the Caribbean (#ulink_67aa493f-5888-5858-8dd3-0ab1a26a02a6)
THE BEGINNING prefigured much of the rest. She came to life against the odds, in a place of rampant death, and in the midst of forces that were already transforming large stretches of the globe.
The man who became her father, Milbourne Marsh, first set foot on Jamaica on 20 July 1732, which was when his ship, the Kingston, anchored off Port Royal.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Kingston was one of a squadron of Royal Navy vessels ordered to the Caribbean that spring with instructions to deter smuggling in the region and attacks on British merchant shipping by Spanish armed coast-guards, and to suppress any slave rebellions within Jamaica itself. Since wresting it from the Spanish in 1655, retaining this island had become increasingly important to the English, and subsequently to the British state, initially because of its location and size. Ninety miles south of Cuba, Jamaica was ideally situated for legal and illicit trade with Spain’s settlements in the Americas, and for staging attacks on them and on Spanish treasure ships, bearing gold and silver from New World mines back to Seville. At some 140 miles from east to west, Jamaica was also ten times larger than the rest of Britain’s Caribbean islands combined. Tropical, fertile and well-watered, it offered – for all its steep, mountainous interior and steamy forests – sufficient arable land, or so at first it seemed, to accommodate large numbers of incoming white smallholders. When Milbourne Marsh arrived, individuals of very modest means, indentured servants, shopkeepers, skilled labourers, cooks, peddlers, retired or runaway sailors, itinerants, pen-keepers (cow-farmers), garrison troops and the like still made up between a half and a third of Jamaica’s white population. But the island’s smallholders were in retreat before the rise of much larger landed estates and a single crop. Jamaica’s sugar industry did not reach the height of its profitability until the last third of the eighteenth century. Even so, by the 1730s, with over four hundred sugar mills, the island had comfortably overtaken Barbados as the biggest sugar-producer in Britain’s Empire.
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The Caribbean
Although much of the technology employed on sugar plantations remained unchanged for centuries, these were still brutally innovative places. The unending work of planting, harvesting and cutting the sugar cane, milling it, boiling and striking the sugar syrup, transporting the finished products, rum, molasses, and the various sugars to the dockside, and loading them aboard ship, fostered task specialization, the synchronization of very large quantities of labour, and the imposition of shift systems and a ruthless time discipline.
(#litres_trial_promo) Establishing the necessary mills, boiling houses and other fixed plant required large-scale capital investment; and plantation owners were acutely dependent on long-distance oceanic trade and communications to sell their products – and to recruit and import their workforces. As the historian David Eltis writes:
The slave trade was possibly the most international activity of the pre-industrial era. It required the assembling of goods from at least two continents [Asia and Europe] … the transporting of those goods to a third [Africa], and their exchange for forced labour that would be carried to yet another continent [the Americas].
Between a third and a half of the more than 1.2 million men, women and children purchased by British traders and carried in British ships from West Africa between 1700 and 1760 were probably landed in Jamaica. When Milbourne Marsh arrived here, the island contained almost eighty thousand black slaves, most of them recent arrivals from the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin.
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There were other ways, too, in which Jamaica functioned as a laboratory for new ways of living and new types of people. Port Royal, Milbourne Marsh’s landfall on the island’s south-eastern coast, was an extreme case in point. The English had found its deep offshore waters, and its position at the end of a nine-mile spit separating Kingston harbour from the Caribbean, ideally suited for the loading and unloading of merchantmen from Europe and North America. Port Royal was also useful, they soon discovered, for piracy and for conducting contraband trade with, and raids against, Cuba, Hispaniola and mainland Spanish America. In 1688, 213 ships are known to have docked at Port Royal, almost as many as the total number calling that year at all of New England’s ports. With its almost seven thousand slaves, shopkeepers, merchants, sailors, book-keepers, lawyers, sea captains, craftsmen, wives, children, smugglers and ‘crue of vile strumpets and common prostratures’, the town was also more populous at this stage than its main competitor in British America, Boston, Massachusetts. And since its two thousand houses, many of them brick and some of them four prosperous storeys high, clustered together on barely fifty acres of gravel and sand, Port Royal was probably the most crowded and expensive English-speaking urban settlement outside London.
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Then came the earthquake. It happened at 11.43 a.m. on 7 June 1692. In ten minutes, two-thirds of Port Royal and two thousand of its citizens disappeared beneath the sea. A further three thousand died of injuries and disease in the days after:
The sky, which was clear and serene, grew obscured and red throughout the whole extent of Jamaica. A rumbling noise was heard under ground, spreading from the mountains to the plain; the rocks were split; hills came close together; infectious lakes appeared on the spots where whole mountains had been swallowed up; immense forests were removed several miles from the place where they stood; the edifices disappeared … This terrible phenomenon should have taught the Europeans not to trust to the possessions of a world that trembles under their feet, and seems to slip out of their rapacious hands.
In so describing its destruction, Abbé Raynal and his collaborators were adding an anti-colonialist twist to a tradition of moralizing disapproval of Port Royal that was in existence well before the earthquake.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet this lost town, a kind of maritime Pompeii, had been a dynamic and creative as well as a corrupt, exploitative place, and after the earthquake there were repeated attempts to rebuild it. They were aborted by a major fire in 1704 and a succession of hurricanes; and when Milbourne Marsh arrived, little remained of Port Royal except ‘three handsome streets, several cross lanes, and a fine church’, the nearby garrison, Fort Charles, and a small naval dockyard where ships from Britain’s Jamaica fleet were repaired and victualled. The town’s main commercial and slaving businesses had moved to nearby Kingston, which was more sheltered from the elements, and there were barely five hundred white inhabitants remaining in Port Royal, most of the men amongst them employed by the Royal Navy or as soldiers in Fort Charles.
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Port Royal’s most material legacy was arguably Jamaica’s developing sugar monoculture, since both the town’s gentile merchants and their Jewish counterparts had been important sources of credit for planters wanting to purchase land and slaves.
(#litres_trial_promo) As this suggests, Jamaica was at once brutally divided by racial difference and violence, and in some respects also a cosmopolitan, even tolerant environment. The cosmopolitanism expressed itself in flamboyant consumerism. A taste for imported Chinese ceramics, for instance, seems to have been more prevalent in households in Port Royal before 1692, and in other Jamaican settlements, than in either British or mainland colonial American homes. At another level, British Jamaica resembled ‘a curious terrestrial space-station’ full of ‘fragments of various races, torn from the worlds of their ancestors’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Most white incomers, like Milbourne Marsh himself, were young, single, male Protestants from southern England; but there were also Scots, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Portuguese-speaking Sephardic Jews from Brazil and Surinam, Huguenots, Dutchmen, occasional French and Spanish spies, smugglers and traders from nearby St Domingue and Cuba, and mainland American colonists, principally from Boston, New York and Philadelphia. There were about 8300 of these miscellaneous whites by the early 1730s, and the island’s ethnically and culturally diverse black population outnumbered them by more than ten to one.
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Many Africans caught up in the slave trade perished long before they arrived at Jamaica. They were killed resisting capture, or they died of shipborne diseases, or they committed suicide in order to escape the pain and humiliation of servitude, or out of a belief that death would restore their spirits to their homelands. Of those who reached the island and stayed there, as distinct from being re-exported to Spanish America or the Dutch West Indies, perhaps half died in the first two or three years, that apprentice phase of slavery which local whites termed ‘the seasoning’. And few Jamaicans, black or white, slave or free, survived on the island for longer than fifteen years.
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Milbourne Marsh and the other men on the Kingston saw their first ‘guineaman come in with slaves’ to Port Royal harbour shortly after their own arrival. Captain Thomas Trevor was so struck by the sight, and by the sounds coming from those on board the slave-ship, that he made a special note of the event in his logbook.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was an act that marked him out as a newcomer to the Caribbean; and neither he nor most of his fellow seamen on the Kingston were in a position to understand that slave ships might be lethal even to those who were not imprisoned on board. Jamaica’s heavy rains and malarial swamps killed easily enough, and new arrivals were particularly vulnerable. They were still more so if they made landfall – as the crew of the Kingston did – during the rainy summer months:
New-come buckra,
He get sick,
He tak fever,
He be die
He be die.
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Slave ships transported in still further risks. They often carried smallpox, and in their water casks and cisterns they also brought in the West African mosquitoes that spread yellow fever. Once in port, the insects would seek out fresh human hosts, and places in which to breed. New immigrants with no immunity were easy targets, and so were men crowded together in damp wooden ships equipped with their own water barrels.
The 327 seamen aboard the Kingston had remained healthy on the three-month voyage out from Portsmouth, but this changed once they were exposed to Jamaica’s infection, climate, and the appalling sanitation of Port Royal and Kingston. Two weeks after its arrival, the ship was already ‘growing bad’ and losing men. The mortality rate lessened once it started patrolling the Caribbean, only to increase when it moored off Jamaica’s other naval base, Port Antonio, on the north-eastern coast of the island, a place at this time of ‘prodigious rains … insomuch that sometimes for several months together, there is hardly one fair or dry day in a week between’. For some weeks in early 1733, the Kingston was unable to put out to sea. Many of the original crewmen had died, and some of the survivors were too weak for the heavy manual labour and agility demanded by a wooden ship of war.
(#litres_trial_promo) And this was when the man called Milbourne Marsh began to show his quality.
He had come to Jamaica knowing something of the risks. Six years before the Kingston’s voyage, in 1726, Rear-Admiral Francis Hosier had led a naval squadron of 4750 men out of Portsmouth to intercept Spanish treasure ships in the West Indies. Yellow fever killed him in Jamaica within a year, along with four thousand of his men.
(#litres_trial_promo) British newspapers, folk tales and ballads ensured that this disaster was widely known, especially in Milbourne’s home town of Portsmouth, so joining a ship bound for the Caribbean was a calculated gamble on his part. In 1732 he was twenty-two and single, with no formal education or means of support except his own skills. The Kingston, with its sixty guns, was the flagship of Commodore Richard Lestock, who would soon be replaced by Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle. Joining it as a carpenter’s mate gave Milbourne more wages and status than were available on voyages and in shipyards nearer home, a chance of attracting the attention of influential patrons in the navy, and passage to a frontier society where poor whites could sometimes encounter greater opportunities, if they survived.
That Milbourne Marsh did so, and lived to father Elizabeth Marsh, was a function not simply of luck, but also of his persistent intelligence and confidence, and his specific skills. A carpenter aboard a Royal Navy warship was a warrant sea officer. Like his fellow warrant officers, the gunner and the boatswain, he was not regarded – as fighting sea officers usually were – as a gentleman. Ships’ carpenters were not granted a formal navy uniform until the end of the eighteenth century, and they did not expect to dine at the captain’s table or in the wardroom. They were specialist craftsmen with a distinctive role aboard ship, and a recognized status. Even a carpenter’s mate was treated as roughly on a par with a midshipman, the apprentice rank for commissioned officers. ‘The carpenter’, declared the navy’s printed regulations at this time:
is to take upon himself the care and preservation of the ship’s hull, masts, yards, bulkheads, and cabins, etc and to receive into his charge the sea stores committed to him by indenture from the Surveyor of the Navy. At sea, he is to visit daily all the parts of the ship, and see if the ports are well secured, and decks and sides be well caulked, and whether any thing gives way; and if the pumps are in good order; and from time to time to inspect into the condition of the masts and yards, and to make a report of every thing to the Captain.
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The ability to carry out these duties efficiently was especially valued in the Caribbean. Even after hulls began to be sheathed in copper, wooden ships rarely lasted in these warm, stormy, worm-ridden waters for more than three years, and constant maintenance was required to keep them seaworthy even for this long. Consequently, Milbourne Marsh’s skills assured him a particular status here, and he seems consciously to have exploited this in order to advance and stay alive. In January 1733 he abandoned the fever-stricken Kingston to replace a dead man as ship’s carpenter on the Deal Castle. The move increased his workload, since this new vessel was a modest twenty-four-gun frigate with a smaller crew to share the tasks of maintenance and sailing, but it gained him promotion, higher wages, and for a while a healthier working environment. In August, when crewmen were being taken off the Deal Castle to join an expedition against rebel slaves, Milbourne promptly switched ships again, moving this time to be carpenter of the Rupert, a veteran 930-ton warship with a crew of 350.
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Unlike most men at sea, a ship’s carpenter was not woken up every four hours at night to stand watch. Nor did he usually have to snap to attention when ‘All hands on deck’ was piped. So although his was an arduous, often dangerous job, frequently carried out in the rigging fifty to seventy feet above deck, Milbourne Marsh experienced a better working life off Jamaica than many of his comrades. He was more rested and less stressed, and he would have been buoyed up by a consciousness of his modest indispensability. Once on the Rupert, he spent most of the next nineteen months at sea, and therefore less at risk of disease, but never straying out of the Caribbean, and returning at regular intervals to Port Royal, something that had begun to be important.
The name she went by was Elizabeth Evans, and he claimed later that she was about one year younger than himself. She had been an Elizabeth Bouchier, and living as a single woman in Port Royal, when she met and married James Evans in 1728.
(#litres_trial_promo) Evans was another migrant, possibly Pennsylvanian by origin, and worked part-time as a shipwright on the Royal Navy vessels anchoring off the port. Milbourne Marsh and Elizabeth Evans appear to have known each other well before August 1734, because it was in this month that Evans made his will. For a man of his sort, this was an atypical act. Since death snatched Jamaicans so quickly, most died intestate; and white craftsmen and artisans only occasionally went to the expense of setting out their final dispensations and opinions in legal script. Evans, though, whose signature on the will, and the ‘few old books’ he left behind, reveal a certain level of literacy, chose to have this final say, this last exercise of power. Mindful of the ‘peril & dangers of the sea and other uncertainties of this transitory life’, he declared, he wanted to make his wishes known ‘for the sake of avoiding controversies after my decease’.
(#litres_trial_promo) As well as these formulaic pieties, he also had something substantial to leave; and someone, and perhaps two people, to accuse.
James Evans had prospered in Jamaica. He had obtained a licence ‘to sell and retail wine, beer, ale or other strong liquor’ in the house he rented in Port Royal.
(#litres_trial_promo) Judging by the inventory, this drink shop was a modest establishment, with six old tables, each equipped with a candlestick, seating for eighteen, a spittoon, a close stool, and little else in its interior except a chest and a corner cupboard, and some beds (the establishment may have doubled as a brothel). But, together with the wherry he owned and rented out to the Royal Navy, the business had allowed Evans and his wife to live in modest style. They owned ‘a new feather bed & pillows’, pewter-ware, supplies of fine linen – and at least nine adult slaves. As was customary in slaveholding systems throughout the world, these people had been given new names so as to erase their pre-slave selves and re-inscribe them as property. For his female slaves, Evans had selected mock-classical names that bear witness again to his literacy, and to its limits. There was ‘Cresia’ and her two ‘pickaninnys’, and ‘Palla’ (Pallas?) and her child, and Venus and Silvia, who all worked in one capacity or another in the drink shop. Since Evans used his male slaves to crew his wherry, and rented them out to the navy as dock labourers and caulkers, they were named in more practical, masculine style. As with his women slaves, however, Evans gave them single names, not multiple names like white people. He called them ‘Plymouth’, or ‘Gosport’, or ‘Bristol’, or after other British ports, as if they were horses or pet animals, not human beings.
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By Jamaican standards, this level of slave-ownership on the part of a skilled craftsman was not unusual. The 157 inhabitants of Port Royal who were registered as slave-owners in 1738 laid claim on average to nine slaves apiece.
(#litres_trial_promo) But to Milbourne Marsh, an English incomer with no property beyond the contents of his sea-chest, the sight of this level of affluence in a fellow shipwright must have been startling, and it is unlikely that it was merely physical and emotional attraction that drew him initially to James Evans’ wife.
Evans took his meagre revenge, as he would have seen it, in his will. His still ‘beloved wife Elizabeth Evans’, he stipulated, was to inherit all of his estate, including ‘all negroes’, but with a single exception. One of the household’s male slaves was to be given up, and shipped off in perpetuity to an Evans family member in Philadelphia. The slave who was to be sent away, James Evans specified, was ‘one negro man named Marsh’. No individual of that name is included in the inventory of Evans’ estate, which lists all of his slaves. He seems to have inserted this provision about a ‘negro man named Marsh’ in his will as a calculated, posthumous insult to an interloping Englishman named Milbourne Marsh, and perhaps also as a glancing verbal slight aimed against his own wife. By the end of the year, for whatever reason, James Evans was dead, leaving behind goods and human chattels valued in his inventory at more than £625. On 12 December 1734, the day after Elizabeth Evans was formally granted permission ‘to take into her possession and to administer’ all of her late husband’s property, she married Milbourne in Kingston’s Anglican church.
(#litres_trial_promo) By January 1735, she was pregnant.
Who was she, this woman Milbourne Marsh took to wife? And how had she come to be in Port Royal before marrying her first husband in 1728? The name ‘Elizabeth Bouchier’ does not appear in lists of indentured servants and convicts from Britain coming to Jamaica around this time, though this does not prove she was not amongst them.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nor can she be conclusively identified from the surviving Jamaican parish registers – but then, these too are incomplete documents. No record of baptisms for Port Royal seems to have survived, for instance, earlier than 1722. More unusually, the Family Book that was compiled much later by Milbourne Marsh’s younger brother, George Marsh, yields no information about this woman. It was George Marsh’s custom, after introducing individual family members in the Book, to allocate a brief sentence to their spouses, especially if this could illustrate his clan’s respectability and upward mobility. Thus, while he set down his cousin Warren’s wife as ‘a very bad woman’, he was much more concerned to record how his own father had married ‘the best of women’, and how his niece Margaret Duval’s husband was a ‘most worthy sensible good man’, and so forth. In the paragraphs of the Family Book he devoted to Milbourne Marsh, however, the relevant sentences where a judgement on his elder brother’s spouse might have been expected have been inked out.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Marsh family’s surviving correspondence also reveals nothing about this woman, and only very occasionally acknowledges her existence. Virtually the only extant formal record of the Elizabeth Bouchier who became first Elizabeth Evans and then Elizabeth Marsh, after her brief appearance in Kingston’s marriage register, is her (now removed) memorial tablet in a church in Chatham, Kent. ‘She was’, Milbourne Marsh had engraved there, ‘a good Christian wife and mother.’ But after this careful testimonial, he supplied no details of her parentage or place of origin.
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She remains a question mark in this story, therefore, but there are at least two possible answers. A widow called Margaret Boucher is listed in the Port Royal vestry minutes as living in a rented house in the town in the late 1730s, and as in receipt of occasional charity. Given the casualness with which surnames, especially those of the poor, were recorded at this time, Milbourne Marsh’s new wife may have been this woman’s daughter. If so, she was white or passed for such, since Margaret Boucher’s name is included in ‘A List of the white inhabitants of this parish’ compiled in Port Royal in 1738.
(#litres_trial_promo) If this particular ‘Margaret Boucher’ was her widowed mother, the woman who had once gone under the name of Elizabeth Bouchier clearly left her behind in Jamaica when she escaped to England in 1735, and she made no effort to perpetuate Margaret Boucher’s first name when she came to christen her own daughter.
There is however another possibility. There were Bourchiers – and not just Bouchers – resident in Jamaica at this time. The former, whose surname was also spelt in various ways and who seem to have arrived on the island in the 1660s, were planters. If she did possess some blood relationship with this family, the woman who went on to become Elizabeth Marsh’s mother is unlikely to have been a legitimate child. Daughters of Caribbean planters born in wedlock did not customarily go on to marry shipwrights. She might conceivably have been a mulatto, the mixed-race, possibly christened child of a white landowner – perhaps Charles Bourchier, who died in 1726 – and an African slave mother.
(#litres_trial_promo) Or there may have been no blood relationship, just a plantation past at some point. Manumitted slaves in Jamaica sometimes took and kept the surnames of their former owners.
It was widely believed that incoming mariners established easier, more equal relations with members of Jamaica’s black and mulatto population than most of the island’s white residents were willing or able to do. ‘Sailors and negroes are ever on the most amicable terms,’ a one-time resident in Jamaica wrote later:
This is evidenced in their dealings, and in the mutual confidence and familiarity that never subsist between the slaves and the resident whites. There is a feeling of independence in their intercourse with the sailor, that is otherwise bound up in the consciousness of a bitter restraint … In the presence of the sailor, the Negro feels as a man.
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This was an overly sentimental verdict. At least one of the reasons for incoming British sailors cultivating members of Jamaica’s black population was crudely exploitative: the number of single white women in the island’s port towns who were of artisan or servant status, and therefore potentially available as seamen’s companions, was very limited.
Nonetheless, this kind of socializing rested on more than sex, money and loneliness. Visiting sailors and blacks tended to come together on this and other Caribbean islands because they shared a consciousness of difference. If blacks and mulattos were divided from Creole settlers by their skin colour, culture of origin, belief systems and, usually, their un-freedom, sailors too were a people apart, ‘a generation differing from all the world’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Tanned, often with long pigtails and amateurish ‘tattoos’ made with ink or gunpowder, markedly agile, and frequently mutilated in some way, sailors looked very different from men who spent all their lives on land. They walked, moved and dressed differently. They possessed, like Jamaica’s black population, their own distinct vocabularies, songs and magical beliefs; and crucially they were transients, men who had left home, family and country, or been torn away from them by press gangs. That they should sometimes have gravitated towards men and women who had also been snatched, even more brutally, from their homelands, was scarcely surprising. In Kingston parish, where Milbourne Marsh married Elizabeth Evans in December 1734, two graveyards ‘to the westward and leeward of the town’ were reserved for ‘free people of colour’ on the one hand, and for ‘soldiers, seamen, and transient people of every description’ on the other.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even in death, mariners, mulattos and blacks might be set apart from everyone else, and placed together.
They also came together at sea. Rather like Jamaica itself, the Royal Navy was at once violent, dangerous, cosmopolitan and innovating: ‘a new kind of power, which must change the face of the globe’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Some of the most complex and expensive machines of their age, the navy’s ships were relatively tolerant and – to a controlled degree – even meritocratic spaces. The skills involved in maintaining and sailing these vessels were so specialized, and in such high demand, that possessing them could sometimes trump a man’s skin colour, just as it often trumped social class.
(#litres_trial_promo) Like most navy men, Milbourne Marsh was accustomed to working alongside sailors who were free blacks. Such men enjoyed the same rights and earned the same wages as their white counterparts. In the Caribbean, the navy also employed black slave seamen, who did the same job as equivalent whites and free blacks, and worked and lived alongside them, but whose wages were paid to their owners. This was the case with a close comrade of Milbourne’s, John Cudjoe. He worked as one of the two servants allowed Milbourne in his capacity as ship’s carpenter: ‘servant’ in this context meaning an apprentice under training. Both servants earned the same wage, just under £14 per annum on top of their keep, but in Cudjoe’s case the money went to his owner, a Jamaican settler. Both men shared quarters with Milbourne and worked with him on a daily basis; and when the latter moved from the Deal Castle to the Rupert in August 1733, John Cudjoe went with him.
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So while, in his choice of a wife, Milbourne Marsh was evidently willing to profit from slave-ownership, he also took daily, comradely contact across racial lines for granted. Whether he also knowingly crossed racial lines in marrying Elizabeth Evans, and whether this contributed to the Marsh family’s subsequent documentary reticence about this woman, will probably never be known. Biography, it has been said, is like a net that catches and brings to the surface an individual life. But a net is only a set of holes tied together by string, so some things slip through. There are always life-parts, and body-parts, that get lost, and the birth identity of Elizabeth Marsh’s mother is one of these.
(#litres_trial_promo) As far as she herself is concerned, attempting to establish her precise ethnic origins may be more than usually inappropriate. In 1733, Jamaica’s governing assembly passed a law stipulating that ‘no one shall be deemed a mulatto after the third generation … but … shall have all the privileges and immunities of His Majesty’s white subjects of this island provided they are brought up in the Christian religion’, a belated recognition of the extent of miscegenation, and of its muddled human consequences.
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So, even if she was mixed race in terms of her origins, the one-time Elizabeth Bouchier may have seen herself, even before her two marriages, as a person undergoing change and flux, beyond easy categorization. ‘The fiction of the census’, Benedict Anderson has written of present-day attempts to fix a person’s identity, ‘is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one – and only one – extremely clear place. No fractions.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth Marsh, brand-new wife of Milbourne Marsh, may have been a person of fractions. For a variety of reasons, her daughter, another Elizabeth Marsh, also seems at times to have viewed herself in these terms; and in her case, the fact that one of these fractions may have been linked in some manner with slavery will need at intervals to be borne in mind.
In 1735, Milbourne Marsh, his new bride and their unborn child had first to survive. Jamaica’s parish registers suggest that a quarter to a third of white children born on the island at this time perished before their first birthday. James and Elizabeth Evans appear themselves to have buried a child in Port Royal in 1730, a daughter who can have been at most barely one year old. But Jamaican parish documents severely understated the volume of infant mortality. Vicars charged money to register baptisms, and parents often held off from making the monetary and emotional investment until a child had survived for several months. Many died earlier than this, and were buried unchristened and unrecorded. Among the children of black slaves, death in the early weeks and months of life was common, and on some plantations may have been the norm. Even if a child survived until its third decade, it was unlikely that both parents would see it do so. Jamaican marriages lasted on average less than nine years before being broken by the death of one or both partners. For a child to reach full maturity, and for its mother and father still to be around to witness this, was exceptional even among the very wealthy.
(#litres_trial_promo) What prospects then – for all his newly acquired property – could there be for Milbourne Marsh, a working sailor at risk from the sea as well as from Jamaica? And what prospects could there be for his new wife, Elizabeth, who had already lost a child?
Their private fears of death, which determined so much on Jamaica, were sharpened by mounting racial unrest. Running away and forming armed communities in the island’s rugged mountains was one of the oldest forms of slave resistance. By the early 1730s, these maroons – as the runaways were termed – had become so numerous, and sufficiently organized, for its continuance as a colony to seem at risk. Jamaica was some thousand miles distant from Britain’s other Caribbean islands, but dangerously close to Spanish Cuba and French St Domingue. This was one reason why the Kingston and the Rupert, and by 1735 nineteen other Royal Navy warships, were patrolling the Caribbean. But the navy exercised limited power over Jamaica’s interior, and – as was nearly always the case – the number of British soldiers available was painfully small. The island’s governing assembly and plantocracy had therefore dual reasons for alarm. ‘The terror of them spreads itself every where,’ Jamaica’s Governor, Council and Assembly reported to London of the maroons in February 1734. Their military successes had exerted ‘such influence on our other slaves, that they are continually deserting’. ‘Hopes of freedom’ were even shaking ‘the fidelity of our most trusty slaves’.
(#litres_trial_promo) If this level of slave flight were to persist, and if slave anger mutated into large-scale violent resistance, the sugar industry might falter and white settlers might be tempted to abandon the island. In that event, the French or the Spanish, or both, might invade.
Milbourne Marsh experienced some of the consequences of growing panic among Jamaica’s whites at first hand. Several of his former shipmates on the Kingston and the Deal Castle were swept into fighting the maroons on shore, and on 10 October 1734 John Cudjoe was taken off the Rupert at his owner’s request. Slave escapes had reached such levels by now that Cudjoe’s owner may have wanted him under her surveillance, or she may simply have been desperate for his labour. The fact that Milbourne’s former servant shared his Akan surname, which means ‘male born on Monday’, with one of the most prominent maroon chieftains, Cudjoe, who would force the British to a treaty in 1739, may also have provoked superstitious unease and hostility aboard the Rupert itself.
(#litres_trial_promo) During this same month, October 1734, martial law was declared on Jamaica. Six hundred additional men were raised from its parishes to serve as militia, and London shipped out six new military companies to aid them. By now, Milbourne was closely involved with Elizabeth Evans. Their marriage that December, the certainty by February 1735 that a child was on the way, and mounting fears among Jamaica’s whites that ‘We cannot say we are sure of a other day,’ made them determined to get out.
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Milbourne Marsh acted with his customary efficiency. On 7 March the Kingston arrived at Port Royal and began lengthy preparations for its voyage back to England. By 10 March, Milbourne had signed on again with his old ship, where he retained friends and patrons. He seems to have sold, or given over his rights in, the drink shop at Port Royal and the wherry to a naval official there. It is possible, though not proven, that he sold the slaves, Palla, Cresia, Silvia, Gosport and the rest, to the Royal Navy, which employed both male and female slaves in its Jamaican dockyards. This indeed may have been how he funded his new wife’s passage to England.
(#litres_trial_promo) Certainly, her escape from the island was aided by Milbourne’s own specialized skills. On paper, Royal Navy warships were exclusively masculine spaces, but women who posed no obvious sexual temptation were sometimes permitted to sail on them, especially if their responsible male possessed leverage of some kind. When the Kingston left Jamaica that June, Elizabeth Marsh senior was six months pregnant, and she was the wife of one of the ship’s most indispensable craftsmen. Twice married to a mariner, she also understood what was expected of her. She seems to have made private arrangements for her food with the Kingston’s purser so as to keep clear of the ship’s formal accounting system, and she would probably have spent the days of the voyage resting her growing bulk on the orlop deck, the quietest, darkest and most secluded space aboard.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was on 20 August 1735 that they sailed into Portsmouth harbour, barely a month before the birth of their daughter.
Such time as this new Elizabeth Marsh spent on dry land during her first nineteen years was mainly lived here, at Portsmouth. The family found lodgings in the New Buildings, a recent development of austere workingmen’s houses in what was then the northern end of Portsea Island. It was only a short walk from here to St Thomas, the medieval church on Portsmouth’s High Street where Elizabeth Marsh was christened on 3 October 1735.
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The New Buildings gave Milbourne Marsh easy access to his work. The development had been constructed with public money just outside the walls of Portsmouth’s naval dockyard, so that shipwrights and other workers could arrive punctually for their thirteen-hour day. Although he worked sometimes in the dockyard, and sometimes at sea, Milbourne organized his life so as to spend as much time as possible with his family. He deployed his customary tactic of using his specialized skills to lever himself into a new job whenever the current one became inconvenient. In September 1735, the month he became a father, he abandoned the Kingston and, armed with a recommendation from Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle, moved back as a ship’s carpenter on the Deal Castle. The latter was classed only as a sixth-rate warship, and therefore unlikely to be sent into the thick of battle in the event of war. Small vessels like this could still however be dispatched on missions in foreign waters; and when the Deal Castle was ordered to South Carolina in 1739, Milbourne jumped ship again. He took himself off to the Cambridge, an eighty-gun warship undergoing conveniently lengthy repairs in Portsmouth harbour.
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Partly as a result of her father’s ingenuity, these early years in Portsmouth were the most stable of Elizabeth Marsh’s life. Yet, for all that this was a far more secure and healthy environment, Portsmouth shared certain important characteristics with Jamaica. It was vitally involved in empire and organized violence; it was a place of pioneering industrialization; and it was markedly cosmopolitan, and caught up in intercontinental trade and migration. Not for nothing was Portsmouth sometimes described – and sometimes condemned – as England’s equivalent to Port Royal before the earthquake: ‘If that was Sodom, this is Gomorrah.’
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At first sight, the town appeared an ancient, walled place of some six hundred houses, occupying part of the island of Portsea, and linked to the mainland by a system of gates and bridges. But the gates and bridges were closely guarded, because Portsmouth was Britain’s premier military town, and the Royal Navy’s main operational base and dockyard. There were six naval dockyards in England at this time, all of them situated along its southern coast. On the Thames there were Deptford and Woolwich, both small dockyards. At the mouth of the Medway in Kent there was Sheerness, and twelve miles up the river the much bigger yard of Chatham. Then there were the so-called western dockyards, Plymouth and Portsmouth. By the 1730s, the latter had overtaken Chatham as the most important.
(#litres_trial_promo) Hidden behind high walls, inconspicuous to casual travellers arriving by road, Portsmouth looked utterly different when approached from the sea:
A spacious harbour, and the great ships lying at their moorings for three or four miles up, and the harbour for a mile at least on each side covered with buildings and thronged with people; the water covered with boats passing and repassing like as on the Thames … The prospect from the middle of the harbour gives you the idea of a great city.
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The dockyard’s specialized warehouses and rope-, mast- and rigging-houses were some of the biggest, most expensive constructions of the time dedicated to secular purposes. Almost 2200 skilled workmen were employed here in 1735, who were divided into twenty-three different categories, and tolled into work at morning and out at night by bells. A further 259 men were attached to the dockyard’s ropeyard. In what was still a primarily agricultural economy, this represented an extraordinary concentration of labour. Even a hundred years after this, it was still rare for industrial establishments anywhere in the world to employ more than five hundred men.
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Surrounded by sea, but always short of fresh water, wreathed in coal smoke from the dockyard’s many forges, and full of the noise of metal on wood, Portsmouth, then, was a prime site of state power and imperial projection. But, as indicated by the pair of seven-foot-high dragon-headed pagodas from China erected by its dockyard in the 1740s, and by the mixture of coins and languages in use in its streets, the town was also a magnet for outsiders and alien influences. Portsmouth was where most foreign diplomats made landfall in Britain before taking the London road to present their credentials at court. It was the main British depot outside of London of the East India Company. Ships from Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Canton unloaded textiles, spices and ceramics in Portsmouth, as well as passengers and occasional Asian seamen. This was also a garrison town, and companies of soldiers marched through it en route for, or returning from, overseas expeditions; and Portsmouth was a commercial port as well as a naval base. There were Arab traders arriving from the Levant, seamen and fish-dealers from Hudson’s Bay and New England, Baltic suppliers catering to the Royal Navy’s ceaseless appetite for timber, so-called ‘Port Jews’ eschewing the distinctive life of their people in order to trade and lend money, and smugglers from nowhere in particular.
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Elizabeth Marsh’s early exposure in Portsmouth to the sights and sounds of difference and diversity, and simultaneously to the Royal Navy and to the force of the British state, has to be factored in if we are to understand how she came to be the person she was, and to lead the life that she did. But she was also shaped of course by her family. ‘I was the daughter of a gentleman,’ she once wrote.
(#litres_trial_promo) The truth was more interesting.
While almost everything about her mother remains unclear, her father’s background is remarkably well documented. Milbourne Marsh had been christened in St Thomas church in Portsmouth in October 1709. His father, George Marsh (b.1683), was also a ship’s carpenter with the Royal Navy, which was typical enough, since shipbuilding was a closely guarded trade, customarily passed on through the males of a family over generations. Milbourne’s mother, who was born Elizabeth Milbourne in 1687, possessed her own link to the maritime, though a significantly different one. Her father, John Milbourne, ‘an excellent pen man’, was employed after 1713 as clerk to Sir Isaac Townsend, the Resident Commissioner at Portsmouth naval dockyard.
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This blood connection with someone who worked with pen and paper was important, and the careful perpetuation of his mother’s surname in Milbourne Marsh’s own first name shows that his family was well aware of this. Both of Milbourne’s parents were literate, and both took pleasure in using words. As would be true of Elizabeth Marsh, they were compulsive storytellers. From his father, George Marsh, Milbourne heard tales about his grandfather, yet another mariner, called Francis Marsh. On a voyage from Lisbon back to Southampton in the early 1690s, this particular Marsh was wrecked off the Isle of Wight. ‘The ship and everything in it but himself were lost,’ but Francis Marsh – or so Milbourne and his siblings were told – plunged into the sea with his banknotes and valuable papers wrapped up in an ‘oil skin bag’, together with ‘a small family bible, not above 7 inches long, 4 or 5 inches broad and about 1 inch and a half thick’, and was ‘miraculously saved on shore on the beach’. Milbourne’s mother’s favourite tales were of her grandfather, a Northumberland-based dealer in Scottish cattle called John Milbourne. In May 1650, she claimed, he had risked his life hiding the Scottish royalist hero James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, when he was on the run from the Scottish Covenanters who were allies of Parliament. Only when Montrose left this plain man’s sanctuary, and went seeking help from a nearby landowner, was he betrayed and handed over to his enemies and execution.
Tokens of these and other past family dramas were carefully preserved. George Marsh senior and his wife kept a print of the Marquess of Montrose on a wall in every lodging house they occupied. As for Francis Marsh’s providential Bible and prayer book, what passes for this volume still exists today, its battered pages bearing annotations by one of George Marsh senior’s sons. The content of these family legends, and the tenacity with which they were held, suggest the eagerness of Marsh family members to view themselves as something more than mere skilled artisans. Milbourne Marsh and his siblings were brought up on ‘a slender income by good management and prudence’, but the stories he and they listened to, and that he passed on in turn to his own daughter, Elizabeth Marsh, evoked a rather different status. God, these family romances proclaimed, had intervened to preserve one of their ancestors by a ‘wonderful deliverance’. Yet another ancestor had performed an act of signal service to the cause of Britain’s monarchy. Moreover, as Milbourne Marsh’s mother told her children by way of other stories, they should rightfully have been rich. Her father John Milbourne, she insisted, ‘a fine handsome person, a good scholar and of great abilities’, had once owned a colliery in Northumberland and was ‘highly esteemed by the nobility and gentry of the county’. But he lost some of his money to a nobleman (worthless aristocrats are a recurring motif in Marsh family sagas), and his housekeeper subsequently cheated her way into his bed, faked his will, and ‘got possession of the whole fortune’.
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The moral that family members were encouraged to draw from these stories – and Elizabeth Marsh certainly grew up believing this – was that they were marked out in some fashion, and deserving of more than their immediate, circumscribed surroundings and conditions of life. The stories also reveal something else about how she grew up. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, long-distance migration was not an aspect of the coming of modernity. Frequently, it was a practice that was learnt and adopted by a family’s members over successive generations, and that often increased in scale and duration in the process. Elizabeth Marsh’s restlessness, it is clear, was in part an inherited trait. Her father Milbourne Marsh took ship to the Caribbean, but his forebears were also sailors and migrants. His father and grandfather were mariners familiar with European waters. His mother’s family moved between northern England and Scotland, and then down to southern England. And whether Elizabeth’s own mother’s roots lay in West Africa or in England, she too must have been of voluntary or involuntary migrant stock, before sailing herself across the Atlantic to England in 1735.
From Milbourne Marsh’s family – and perhaps from her mother’s – Elizabeth Marsh also inherited good looks and physical toughness. Milbourne’s father, George Marsh senior, was described as a ‘remarkable fine person’, ‘upwards of six feet high … very upright and well proportioned, [and] amazingly strong and healthy’. Although the Navy Board awarded him a pension in the mid-1740s, he seems to have continued working part-time as a shipwright, and was seventy when he was killed in an industrial accident in 1753.
(#litres_trial_promo) Married in 1707, he and Elizabeth Milbourne produced nine children and, unusually for their time and social level, eight of them reached adulthood. What were then untreatable diseases, and maritime accidents, killed off five of these Marsh progeny before they reached the age of forty, but the life spans of the remaining three confirm a family tendency towards physical vigour and good health. Milbourne Marsh (b.1709) lived to be almost seventy; George Marsh the younger (b.1722) made seventy-eight; while their sister Mary Marsh (b.1712) reached her eighties. It is striking too how, in different ways, and in conformity with the family’s stock of stories, all three of these longer-lived Marsh siblings constructed for themselves richer, more varied existences than their parents. Even Mary Marsh’s life, hampered by her gender, illustrates this. Once in her teens, she went to London to find work, and married a French Huguenot, Jean Duval. He worked as a baker in Spitalfields, a once semi-rural suburb in the east of London that has always attracted a disproportionate number of refugees and immigrants. This alliance with a family of French origins, attached to another form of Protestantism, made more than Mary’s own life more diverse. Visits to aunt Mary and uncle Duval in London in the 1740s and early ’50s seem to have allowed Elizabeth Marsh to learn to speak and read French, one of the prime accomplishments that normally connoted gentility.
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The ‘industrious revolution’, as the marked changes in family aspirations at this time have been called, a rising level, throughout Europe and North America and possibly beyond, of individual and clan desire, expectations, and household expenditure, also affected Milbourne Marsh, and to a more spectacular degree his brother, George Marsh the younger.
(#litres_trial_promo) The temperaments and changing fortunes of these two men, Elizabeth Marsh’s father and her uncle, are important because both men played crucial roles in her development, influencing what she came to be, and what she came to do.
Like most mariners in the age of sail, Milbourne Marsh had gone to sea very early. He recalled in middle age how, when just eleven years old and already sailing the Mediterranean, he was regularly handling explosives. He would be sent on shore from whatever vessel he was on at the time, and ordered to blow up rocks into small stones so as to provide ballast for the ship’s hold.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet to view him simply as a manual labourer would be quite wrong. Thomas Rowlandson’s sensitive study of a ship’s carpenter was made more than a decade after Milbourne’s death, but the tools the artist gives his figure – an adze in one hand and a drawing instrument in the other – accurately convey the occupation’s composite quality. As suggested by the adze (an axe with a curved blade), it involved hard physical effort. Timber had to be cut to size, a ship’s rotten wood and any cannon shot embedded in it cut out and made good. As indicated by the drawing instrument, however, this was only part of the job. Milbourne was fully literate, and he had to be. A ship’s carpenter was expected to write ‘an exact and particular account’ of his vessel’s condition and propose solutions to any defects. He needed to know basic accounting so as to estimate the cost of repairs, and keep check of his stocks of timber and other stores. And he required mathematical and geometrical skills: enough to draw plans, calculate the height of a mast from the deck, and estimate the weight of anchors and what thickness of timber was required to support them.
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Looked at this way, it becomes easier to understand why the foremost English shipwright of the late seventeenth century, Anthony Deane (c.1638–1720), was knighted and made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Because of increased transoceanic trade, expanding empire, the growth of European and of some non-European fighting navies, and recurrent warfare, skills of the sort that Milbourne Marsh commanded were in urgent national and international demand. Not for nothing do we refer today to ‘navigating’ and ‘surfing’ the web. Rather like cyberspace now, the sea in Milbourne Marsh’s time was the vital gateway to a more interconnected world. Consequently, those in possession of the more specialist maritime skills were in a position to rise economically, and often socially as well. ‘The Ship-Carpenter … to become master of his business must learn the theory as well as practice,’ Britain’s most widely read trade directory insisted in 1747: ‘it is a business that one seldom wants bread in, either at home or abroad.’
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The nature of her father’s occupation was of central importance in Elizabeth Marsh’s life. At one level, and along with her many other seafaring relations, Milbourne Marsh gave her access to one of the few eighteenth-century organizations genuinely possessed of something approaching global reach: the Royal Navy. This proved vital to her ability to travel. Long-distance oceanic journeying was expensive, but over the years Elizabeth’s family connections repeatedly secured her free or cheap passage on various navy vessels. She also gained, by way of these maritime menfolk, a network of contacts that stretched across oceans: in effect two extended families, her own, and the navy itself. ‘A visit from Mr. Panton, the 1st Lieutenant of the Salisbury,’ she would record while sailing off the eastern coast of the Indian subcontinent in 1775: ‘he seemed well acquainted with most of my family.’
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But her father’s occupation also impacted on her in less enabling ways. It is conceivable that she grew up aware that her mother was different in some manner, or looked at askance by her relations. She certainly seems to have been perpetually insecure about her own and her family’s social position. Milbourne Marsh was from a self-regarding maritime dynasty that encouraged ambition, and he was a master craftsman in a global trade; but his was still an interstitial, sometimes vulnerable existence, lived out between the land and the sea, and between the labouring masses on the one hand, and the officer class on the other. Some of the tensions that could ensue can be seen in two crises that threatened for a while to engulf them all.
In April 1741, six of Milbourne’s workmen in Portsmouth dockyard sent a letter to its Commissioner accusing the carpenter of embezzlement. He had kept back new beds and bedding intended for his current ship, the Cambridge, his accusers claimed, and arranged for them to be smuggled out of the yard at midday, ‘when all the people belonging thereto are absent’. He had used naval timber to make window shutters, chimneypieces, and even palisades. Milbourne’s joiner reported that he had seen ‘the outlines of the head of one [a palisade] drew with a black lead pencil on a small piece of board’ on his desk, ‘which he verily believes was intended for a pattern or mould’. Another of Milbourne’s accusers told of being ordered to chop up good oak for firewood, and how he had carried the sticks out of the dockyard to the Marsh family’s lodgings in the New Buildings, where the carpenter ‘was in company the whole time’.
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Charges of embezzlement, if proved, normally brought instant dismissal from a navy dockyard. Milbourne Marsh retained his post and livelihood not because his excuses convinced (they were judged ‘indifferent’), but because his superiors recognized his ability (‘the carpenter bears the character of a good officer’). It is the private man and the family’s lifestyle, though, which emerge most sharply from this incident. The workmen’s resentment at Milbourne’s efforts to add some distinction and ornament to his family’s stark lodgings (and perhaps also to make extra money from selling illicitly-constructed window shutters, etc.), like their scorn for his small attempts at a social life (‘in company the whole time’), and their determination to inform against him in the first place are suggestive. These things point to a man and a family visibly getting above themselves and their surroundings, experiencing industrious revolution, and consequently arousing envy. Milbourne’s shuddering answer to his workmen’s accusations confirms this, while also showing how entangled he necessarily still was in deference:
Honourable Sir the whole being a premeditated thing to do me prejudice, for my using of them ill (as they term it) in making them do their duty. Hope you look on it as such, as will appear by my former behaviour and time to come.
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He was literate enough to know how to use the word ‘premeditated’, but his syntax was not, could not be, that of a formally educated man, and he was naturally terrified of dismissal. Even more revealing is his explanation of why exactly he had defied regulations and commandeered the navy’s bedding:
My wife having been sick on board [the Cambridge] for five weeks, and no probability of getting her ashore, [I] thought it not fit to lie on my bed till I had got it washed & well cleaned, so got the above bedding to lie on till my own was fit.
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So it was not just Milbourne Marsh who was amphibious, dividing his time between the sea and the land. His wife, and therefore presumably their five-year-old daughter also, were caught up in this way of living too. Already, Elizabeth Marsh was travelling.
Milbourne’s wife and child – soon children – were also caught up in fears for his survival, and therefore for their own. He fought in only one sea battle during his career, but it was a major one. In 1742 he was sent to the Mediterranean. Based first on the Marlborough and then on the Namur, a ninety-gun second rate and the flagship of Admiral Thomas Mathews, Milbourne Marsh also worked on the thirty-odd other warships in Britain’s Mediterranean fleet, dealing with day-to-day repairs as they waited for the combined Franco-Spanish fleet to emerge from Toulon, France’s premier naval base, and fight.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is not clear whether any of his family accompanied him, or if they waited throughout in Portsmouth, or London, or with his parents who were now in Chatham, Kent. What is known, because Milbourne Marsh later gave evidence to a naval court martial, is that on 11 February 1744, for the first and only time in his life, he saw action.
‘I can tell you, exactly to a minute, the time we fired the first gun,’ he would tell the court, for ‘… I immediately whip’d my watch out of my pocket, and it was then 10 minutes after one o’clock to a moment.’ The enemy vessel that the 780-man crew of the Namur engaged was the Real, the 114-gun Spanish flagship and part of a twenty-seven-ship Franco-Spanish fleet. Initially, Milbourne the specialist was allowed to experience the battle below deck. Once the Namur started sustaining damage, however, his skills drove him above: ‘The Admiral sent for me up, and ordered me to see what was the matter with the mizzen topmast’ – that is, the mast nearest the ship’s stern. He had to climb it, and then the main mast, under fire throughout, for the Real was only ‘a pistol-shot’ away from them. Milbourne’s breathless account of what happened next is misted by nautical phraseology, but conveys something of what it was like to clamber across the rigging of a sailing ship under fire, and how difficult it was to make sense of a sea battle as it was happening:
At the same time I acquainted the Admiral of the main top mast, I was told, but by whom I can’t tell, that the starboard main yard arm was shot. I looked up, and saw it, from the quarter deck; I went to go up the starboard shrouds to view it; I found several of the shrouds were shot, which made me quit that side, and I went up on the larboard side, and went across the main yard in the slings, out to the yard arm, and I found just within the lift block on the under side, a shot had grazed a slant … when I went down, I did not immediately acquaint the Admiral with that, for by that time I had got upon the gangway, I was told that the bowsprit was shot, and immediately that the fore top mast was shot.
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In strategic and naval terms, the Battle of Toulon proved an embarrassment for the British. For reasons that provoked furious controversy at the time and are still debated now, many of the Royal Navy ships present did not engage. The damage to the Namur’s masts and rigging, which Milbourne tried so desperately to monitor, persuaded Admiral Mathews to withdraw early from the fighting on 11 February, and he retreated to Italy two days later. The Franco-Spanish fleet was forced back to Toulon, but emerged from the encounter substantially intact. Milbourne Marsh’s own account of the battle underlines again some of the paradoxes of his work. His testimony makes clear that he was obliged to possess a pocket watch, still a rare accessory at this time among men who worked with their hands. It is also striking how confidently this skilled artisan communicated with the Admiral of Britain’s Mediterranean fleet. Indeed, when Mathews was court martialled for failing at Toulon, he asked Milbourne to testify on his behalf. Yet what happened in the battle also confirms the precariousness of the carpenter’s existence, and therefore of his family’s existence.
At one stage, the Namur’s withdrawal left the Marlborough, Milbourne Marsh’s former ship on which many of his friends were still serving, alone to face enemy fire. He watched, from relative safety, as the sails of the Marlborough caught fire, and as its main mast, battered by shot, crashed onto its decks. The ship stayed afloat, but its captain and about eighty of its crew were killed outright, and 120 more of its men were wounded. The battle also killed the Namur’s Post-Captain, John Russel, who had been one of Milbourne’s own patrons, along with at least twenty-five more of the ship’s crew. As for the Spanish, a British fireship had smashed into some of their warships, resulting, it was reported at the time, in ‘the immediate dissolution of 1350 souls’. Witnessing death on this scale, experiencing battle, persuaded Milbourne to change course. He was not a coward: one of his private discoveries at Toulon was that, at the time, he ‘did not think of the danger’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But he was now in his thirties, married, a father, and his parents’ oldest surviving son, whereas most seamen were under twenty-five and single. So in 1744 Milbourne Marsh left the sea. For the next ten years he repaired ships at Portsmouth and Chatham dockyards. On land, at what passed for home.
For his daughter, Elizabeth Marsh, this decision led to a more stationary, and seemingly more ordinary, life. To be sure, there were certain respects in which her experiences in the 1740s and early ’50s already made her distinctive. Moving between Portsmouth, London and Chatham, and between various ships at sea and the land, allowed her in some respects an ironic counterfeit of genteel female education, but also more. In addition to the fluent French she acquired from aunt Mary and uncle Duval, she learnt arithmetic and basic accounting from her father, and she acquired a relish for some of the more innocuous pastimes common among sailors, reading, music and singing. She learnt too how to operate without embarrassment in overwhelmingly masculine environments, and how to tolerate physical hardship; and she also learnt, through living close to it, and through sailing on it from infancy, how not to fear the sea, or to regard it as extraordinary, but rather to take travelling on it for granted. She also learnt restlessness and insecurity, and – from watching her mother – a certain female self-reliance.
Mariners’ wives had to be capable of a more than usual measure of independence and responsibility, because their husbands were so often away. During Milbourne’s absences at sea, Elizabeth Marsh senior ran their household in the New Buildings and its finances by herself.
(#litres_trial_promo) She also had to cope at intervals with the harshness and enforced intimacies of living aboard ship. Both of their sons, Francis Milbourne Marsh and John Marsh, the latter Elizabeth Marsh’s favourite and confidant, seem to have been born at sea. Giving birth to the elder, Francis, may indeed have been what confined Elizabeth Marsh senior to the Cambridge in Portsmouth harbour – that is, several miles from shore – for several weeks in 1741, and what tempted Milbourne to ‘borrow’ supplies of navy bedding ‘till my own was fit’.
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In the normal course of events, none of these mixed influences on their daughter Elizabeth Marsh would have mattered very much. When her father left the sea in 1744 after the Battle of Toulon, his and the family’s prospects were modest, and would have appeared predictable. One of the attractions of working in naval dockyards, as distinct from a commercial shipyard that paid higher wages, was that they allowed skilled employees a job for life. Once he came ashore in 1744, Milbourne’s income declined slightly, from £50 per annum to around £40, a sum that placed the family at the bottom of England’s middling sort at this time, ‘the upper station of low life’, as Daniel Defoe styled it.
(#litres_trial_promo) But at least there was security. It seemed likely that Milbourne would build and repair a succession of warships until he was pensioned off, that his two sons would in due course become shipwrights in their turn, and that ultimately his only daughter would marry a man of the same trade. But this was to reckon without changes that crossed continents, and the second influential man in Elizabeth Marsh’s life: her uncle George Marsh.
Born in January 1723, George Marsh was the eighth and penultimate child of George Marsh senior and Elizabeth Milbourne. This position in a large artisanal family may have made him slighter in physique, and more susceptible to illness – he seems to have suffered sporadically from epilepsy – but he was as driven as any eldest child. Initially sent to sea in 1735, because his father was not ‘able to purchase me a clerkship’, he soon moved to an apprenticeship to a petty officer in Chatham dockyard, and by 1744 was working as a clerk for the Commissioner of Deptford’s naval dockyard.
(#litres_trial_promo) His next break came almost immediately. In October 1745 the House of Commons demanded a detailed report on how naval expenditure in the previous five years, when Britain had been at war with Spain, compared with that in the first five years of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–07). As he was ‘acquainted with the business of the dockyards, and no clerk of the Navy Office was’, George Marsh was ‘chosen … to perform that great work’. Labouring at the Navy Office in London ‘from 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning till 8 or 9 o’clock at night from October to the end of January’, mining a vast, unsorted store of records for the requisite figures, and organizing and writing up the usable data, exacerbated his epilepsy. He suffered intermittent attacks of near-blindness and dizziness, and ‘fell several times in the street’, he recorded much later, ‘and therefore found it necessary to carry constantly in my pocket a memorandum who I was and where I lodged’. He nonetheless produced the report ‘in a few months’.
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This episode suggests some of George Marsh’s qualities: his ferocious capacity for industry, strong ambition, and utter belief in paperwork. It also suggests how – through him – Elizabeth Marsh was connected to yet another aspect of modernity and change. The circumstances of her birth and upbringing had already linked her with slavery, migration, empire, economic and industrious revolutions, the navy and the sea. But it was primarily through her uncle George Marsh that she connected with the expanding power of the British state at this time, and with an ever more conscious mobilization of knowledge and paperwork in order to expand that power. To paraphrase the economist J.R. McCulloch’s later verdict on the East India Company, Elizabeth’s father, Milbourne Marsh, was caught up with the power of the sword, Britain’s fighting navy; but it was her uncle, George Marsh, who exemplified the power of the pen and the ledger.
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And he was unstoppable. He rose early every morning, drank only water, confined himself to two meals a day, took regular exercise, spent little on himself, and worked very hard. In 1750 he moved from the provinces to the tall pedimented brick building that Christopher Wren had designed for the Navy Office in Crutched Friars by the Tower of London. From 1751 to 1763, George Marsh was the Clerk in charge of seamen’s wages. He then spent almost ten years as Commissioner of Victualling, before becoming Clerk of the Acts in 1773. This was the position that Samuel Pepys had occupied after 1660, and used as a power base from which to transform the administration of the Royal Navy. Pepys, however, had been able to draw on aristocratic relations and on high, creative intelligence. George Marsh possessed neither advantage, yet he retained the Clerkship of the Acts for over twenty years, and ended his career as a Commissioner of the Navy. At his death in 1800, this shipwright’s son was worth by his own estimate £34,575, over £3 million in present-day values.
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The contrast between his remarkable career and his evident personal limitations reduced some who worked and competed with him to uncomprehending fury. George Marsh, complained his own Chief Clerk in 1782, was
totally unfit for the employment as he can neither read, spell, nor write. This office has in my memory been filled with ability and dignity … but the present Clerk of the Acts has neither, and we should do ten times better without him, for he only perplexes matters.
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Yet, as this denunciation suggests, some of the criticism George Marsh attracted at different stages in his career was rooted in snobbery, and he was always able to exploit people’s tendency to underestimate him. In reality, he wrote all the time, privately, and not just in his public capacity. His papers also confirm that he read widely and that, like his parents and his niece Elizabeth Marsh, he enjoyed constructing stories. More than any other member of his immediate family, perhaps because he spent virtually all of his life in a single country, George Marsh seems to have been conscious of the scale of the transformations through which he was living, and he sought out different ways to make sense of them. He was the one who stayed behind. He was the spectator, the recorder, the collector of memories and eloquent, emblematic mementoes. Most of all, George Marsh was someone who relished facts and information, and knew how to deploy them: ‘I am sensible my abilities fall far short of some other men’s,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but [I] am very certain no one knows the whole business of the civil department of the Navy better or perhaps so well as I do.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This massive, cumulative knowledge gave him an element of power, as did his acute understanding of how patronage worked.
As his correspondence with successive aristocratic First Lords of the Admiralty reveals, he was both unctuously deferential in his dealings with his official and social superiors, and capable sometimes of hoodwinking them. In private, and like his parents, George Marsh tended to be critical of members of the aristocracy, writing regularly about the superiority of ‘the middle station of life’, and of those (like himself) who had to work seriously hard for a living. But he was adept at the patronage game, which necessarily involved him paying court at times to ‘the indolent unhappy nobility’, and he was interested in securing advancement and favours for more than just himself. He ‘always had a very great pleasure’, he wrote, in ‘doing my utmost to make all those happy, by every friendly act, who I have known to be worthy’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Chief among these worthy beneficiaries were the members of his own family. It was George Marsh’s willingness and ability to use his power and connections to promote his family that transformed Elizabeth Marsh’s expectations, and that separated her forever from the life-trajectory that might have been anticipated for a shipwright’s daughter. Having as her uncle someone with access to influence over several decades was one of the factors that made her life extraordinary. By way of George Marsh, she was able at times to have contact with some of the most powerful men in the British state, while also being helped to travel far beyond it.
His first substantial intervention in his niece’s life was indirect, but it changed everything. In January 1755, using his connections at the Navy Board, George Marsh secured for Milbourne Marsh the position of Naval Officer at Port Mahón in Menorca.
(#litres_trial_promo) A ‘Naval Officer’ in eighteenth-century British parlance was not a fighting sea officer. The post was a clerical and administrative one, in an overseas dockyard, and for a ship’s carpenter it represented a distinctly unusual career break. To begin with, it tripled the family’s income. In the late 1740s and early ’50s, Milbourne had rarely earned more than £12 a quarter, whereas this new post brought with it an annual salary of £150, and the opportunity to make more.
The rise in income was only part of the alteration in the family’s status and outlook. As a carpenter aboard ship, Milbourne had been an uneasy amalgam of specialist craftsman, resident expert and manual labourer. This now changed. Nothing would ever take him completely from the sea, or from his delight in the construction of wooden ships and in drawing plans, but from now on he ceased to work with his hands for much of the time. The announcements of his promotion in the London press referred to him as ‘Milbourne Marsh Esq.’, thereby conceding to him the suffix that was the minimum requirement for being accounted a gentleman.
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But the most dramatic change involved in his promotion to Naval Officer was one that affected his whole family, his wife, their sons, and – as it turned out – the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Marsh most of all. In March 1755, the family left Portsmouth forever and sailed to the Mediterranean and Menorca. She was on her way.
2 Taken to Africa, Encountering Islam (#ulink_d1e012cb-8f8c-5126-a0de-6249b0ea8a3b)
MOVING TO MENORCA meant an immediate change of landscape, climate and cultural and religious milieu, and a conspicuous change of scale. Accustomed, when on land, to crowded ports in the world’s foremost Protestant power, Elizabeth Marsh now found herself on a rocky, sparsely cultivated, ten-mile-long Mediterranean island of twenty-eight thousand souls, where a sprinkling of Jews and Greek Orthodox Christians were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Catholics, and where the dominant language was a form of Catalan. Most of the four-thousand-odd Britons on Menorca were soldiers or sailors. The officers among them, and the few civilian professionals and merchants, generally held aloof from the local Catholics (who tended to cold-shoulder them in turn), organizing for themselves a cosy, desperately restricted simulacrum of social life back home.
(#litres_trial_promo) In her case, the claustrophobia scarcely had time to register. What did was a rise in status marked out by shifts in behaviour and consumerism. She seems to have learnt how to ride and to have acquired a riding costume. Her father could now afford a music teacher, and she began reading sheet music, as distinct from simply memorizing tunes. And, in place of shared lodgings, she moved with her family into a substantial freestone house on Hospital Island, a twelve-acre offshore islet in Mahón harbour. She was ‘happily situated’, she wrote later, abruptly promoted to minor membership of a colonial elite, and refashioning herself in a setting where young, single Protestant women who might conceivably pass as ladies were flatteringly sparse.
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Milbourne Marsh’s new life was also substantially different. No longer a full-time manual worker, he was now a ‘pen and ink’ man, without a uniform or a sword, and therefore on a different and lower level than the senior military and sea officers who ran the colony, yet indispensable and multi-tasked. Part of his job as the island’s Naval Officer was to act as Clerk of the Cheque: that is, as senior financial officer of Menorca’s naval dockyard. The naval stores lining the wharves of Mahón’s huge harbour, which extends inland for some six thousand yards, were his responsibility. So was paying the Britons and Menorcans who worked in the dockyard as shipwrights, sail-makers and carpenters, and in the navy’s victualling office, bakehouse, windmills and magazines. In addition, Milbourne acted as Clerk of the Survey, drafting maps and drawing up plans for new buildings and defences. At intervals he was Master Shipwright too, overseeing the repair and careening of incoming British warships and transports, and keeping an eye on the merchant ships arriving with provisions and bullion to pay the troops. In his limited leisure time he joined his wife, sons and newly accomplished daughter on Hospital Island, with its ‘rocks and precipices … intermixed with scattering houses’, where the navy’s local commander, surgeon and any visiting admirals were also accommodated.
(#litres_trial_promo) But Milbourne’s daylight hours were spent in the undistinguished row of low-storeyed sheds that made up the naval dockyard, or rowing the small boat that came with his office from ship to ship in the harbour, seeking out information from their captains, or mustering men and resolving disagreements, or surveying the island’s innumerable coves, inlets and bays.
For Menorca was not a place of refuge and colonial ease. The British had seized it from Spain in 1708 for essentially the same reason that had led the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and Catalans to invade it before them, and for much the same reason too as would cause the United States Navy to maintain a base of operations there in the nineteenth century. Menorca offered an advantageous location from which to monitor and to seek to dominate the western Mediterranean. In the words of a British writer in 1756:
All ships sailing up the straits of Gibraltar, and bound to any part of Africa, east of Algiers, to any part of Italy, or to any part of Turkey, either in Asia or Europe, and all ships from any of those places, and bound to any port without the straits-mouth, must and usually do pass between this island and the coast of Africa.
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Some of the main sea routes to and from Genoa, Livorno, Nice, Sicily, Marseilles, Lisbon, Tetuan and Tripoli lay within easy reach of Menorca. So did ships setting out from Spain’s Mediterranean ports, and from its naval bases, Cartagena and Cádiz. Possessed of Menorca and sufficient force, Britain could intervene in the commercial and naval activities of three of its imperial competitors: France, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire with its provinces in Northern Africa. Toulon, the prime French naval base, was 220 miles away from Menorca, within striking distance of a British fleet using the island as a base. Of course, the converse also applied. Ringed and replete with commercial, strategic and warlike possibilities, Menorca was itself a natural target. It was a ‘frontier garrison’, one politician had remarked in the 1720s, where discipline and watchfulness were mandatory ‘as if it were always in a state of war’.
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The members of the Marsh family were introduced to the risks attendant on the island’s location and strategic role almost as soon as they arrived in 1755. The aftershocks they experienced that November from the Lisbon earthquake, which killed over 100,000 people in the Iberian peninsula and Morocco, and caused tremors in France, Italy, Switzerland and Finland, and tsunamis as far apart as Galway, Ireland, and Barbados, were accompanied by other far-reaching convulsions, engineered by human actors. France and Britain were at war again. This time, by contrast with their previous conflicts, the fighting did not begin in Europe. The initial battles of what Americans generally term the French and Indian War, and Europeans call the Seven Years War, took place in parts of Asia and the Caribbean, and above all in North America; and both the onset of the war, and its unprecedented geographical extent, impacted directly on Menorca – and on Elizabeth Marsh.
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The Mediterranean world of Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp
Although Menorca was tiny, its complex coastline, ‘indented with long bays and promontories’, and its disgruntled Catholic population were too extensive to be adequately guarded in wartime by the resident British garrison. Retaining the island in these circumstances required reinforcements on land, and also a significant naval presence. This time, such reinforcements were not easily available. Before the 1740s, it was rare for large numbers of Royal Navy ships to be stationed for any length of time in Asian or American waters. Now that war was spilling over into different continents, the resulting dispersal of Britain’s naval resources left traditional European frontier sites like Menorca more exposed and potentially vulnerable. As a later Admiralty report argued:
If our possessions and commerce increase, our cares and our difficulties are increased likewise; that commerce and those possessions being extended all over the world must be defended by sea having no other defence … [Yet] it is impossible to keep at all of them, perhaps at any one, a strength equal to what the enemy can send thither.
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In late 1755, when rumours were already circulating of a French invasion force assembling in Toulon and Marseilles, there were just three British ships of the line in the Mediterranean, as against fifteen patrolling off the coasts of Bengal and North America. By early 1756, when 150 ships and 100,000 troops were in readiness along France’s Mediterranean coast, the situation for the British was only marginally better. More than one hundred Royal Navy vessels were under repair or guarding Britain’s own coasts, and an additional fifty were in service in extra-European waters, but only thirteen warships were available for other locations.
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As a result, in 1756 those on Menorca were left substantially to fend for themselves. For Milbourne Marsh, in his capacity as Naval Officer, this meant locating and purchasing obsolete vessels from various Mediterranean ports, and then converting them into fireships that could be sailed against any invading French fleet. He also supervised the splicing together of surplus masts and cables to fashion a 250-yard-long barrier that could be floated across the narrow entrance to Mahón harbour. In early April, Menorca’s military out-stations and outlying wells were destroyed to keep them from falling into French hands. Most of the island’s Catholics were disarmed, and soldiers and their families, along with the island’s pro-British Jewish and Greek inhabitants, began assembling, with hundreds of live cattle and other supplies, behind the walls of Fort St Philip at the entrance to Mahón harbour.
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Had Elizabeth Marsh and her family belonged unquestionably to the lower ranks, this would have been their refuge too. As almost four hundred other women did, she would have spent the next two and a half months under siege in Fort St Philip’s web of subterranean stone passages, ‘the garrison knocked about her ears every minute, and some of her acquaintances killed or wounded every day’. Conversely, had the family’s social status been more assured, she might have been dispatched – like many of the officers’ womenfolk – to Majorca, the neighbouring Balearic island ruled by still-neutral Spain.
(#litres_trial_promo) As it was, her fate was determined once again by the distinctive, indispensable nature of her father’s skills. On Saturday, 17 April, Milbourne Marsh was summoned to the island’s naval commander:
Upon the French being landed on the island of Menorca, Commodore Edgcumbe gave him an order … to proceed from thence in His Majesty’s ship the Princess Louisa to Gibraltar, and there to take upon him the duty of Master Shipwright.
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By now there were five Royal Navy ships off Mahón, ‘moored head and stern in line across the harbour’s mouth’, but still manifestly too few to engage the 120 French warships and transports assembling off the coast of Ciutadella, to the west of the island, or to slow for very long the troops that these vessels were disgorging. Two of these British warships left on 21 April, which was when Milbourne Marsh carefully finished up and signed his remaining official paperwork, and ‘the same day the enemy appeared on this side of Mahón’. The following day, a Thursday, the forty-gun Princess Louisa with the Marsh family on board, together with the Dolphin and the Portland, slipped away to Gibraltar.
(#litres_trial_promo) She was rescued, but not saved.
For it is now that Elizabeth Marsh begins to struggle out of the meshes of family plots and transcontinental forces and events, and seeks to take charge of her own life. She arrives in Gibraltar on 30 April 1756. Within two months, she has determined to sail to England by way of Lisbon. Although by this stage Britain and France are formally at war, and the Mediterranean is criss-crossed by French and British warships under orders to ‘take, sink, burn or otherwise destroy’ each other’s naval and merchant vessels, she insists on setting sail, initially in defiance of her parents’ wishes, and as a lone female traveller among men.
She has her private reasons for acting this way, but she can also make a prudential case for her decision. After just three days in Gibraltar, Milbourne Marsh has been able to compile a report on its naval facilities and defences. The British have long neglected the fortress for reasons of economy, and his assessment is uncompromising and discouraging:
The capstans, partners and frames [are] entirely decayed, the mast house, boat house, pitch house, smiths shop and cable shed all decayed, and tumbling down; the yard launch wants a thorough repair, and in case there may be a necessity to careen or caulk any of His Majesty’s ships, there is neither floating stages for that service, or boat for the officers to attend their respective duties; the shed within the new mole gates that was used for repairing sails in, likewise the shed for the use of the artificers are both decayed and tumbling down.
This, and more, is what he proceeds to tell Admiral John Byng, who is also newly arrived at Gibraltar, under instructions to sail with ten warships to relieve the besieged British garrison on Menorca. Even before Byng sets out, Milbourne’s damning report has therefore encouraged him to begin contemplating failure. ‘If I should fail in the relief of Port Mahón,’ he informs his superiors in London on 4 May, ‘I shall look upon the security and protection of Gibraltar as my next object.’
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Subsequently, these words will be interpreted by the senior officers at Byng’s court martial as evidence of a lack of determined resolution and aggressiveness on his part. Yet this is not altogether fair. Gibraltar, a three-mile-long rocky promontory off southern Andalusia in Spain with no source of fresh water at this time except for the rain, is like ‘a great man of war at anchor’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is formidable, a natural fortress, but with weaknesses corresponding to its strengths. The Rock gives its British occupiers a strategically key position from which to monitor the straits between the Mediterranean and Atlantic. If it is closely besieged from the sea, however, there is nowhere for its inhabitants to retreat except into Spain. Reports from diplomats and spies have been circulating since March 1756 that if Menorca falls (as it does at the end of June), France will move on to attack Gibraltar, and then offer both of these territories back to Spain in return for the loan of its naval fleet in the war against Britain.
(#litres_trial_promo) If the French do attack Gibraltar – and if Spain turns hostile – how can the fortress defend itself without adequate stores, or the dockyard facilities necessary to keep a fighting navy at sea and in action?
Because he is thinking along these lines, Byng will decide to retreat after his fleet’s inconclusive encounter with the marquis de la Galissonière’s French squadron on 20 May 1756. He will hurry back to defend Gibraltar, leaving Menorca’s garrison to its fate, and so ultimately condemn himself to a naval firing squad. For the men of the Marsh family, however, Byng’s anxieties about the poor state of Gibraltar’s naval dockyard and defences have substantial compensations. ‘It requiring a proper person to inspect into and manage these affairs,’ Byng informs London, ‘I have taken upon me to give Mr. Milbourne Marsh … an order to act as Master Shipwright … and have given him orders to use his best endeavours to put the wharf etc. in the best condition he can, for very soon they will be wanted.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The added responsibility boosts Milbourne’s annual salary from £150 to £200, and this is in addition to the accommodation and food the navy allows him. By July, John Marsh is also in naval employ, working as clerk to his father, who no longer has the time to write his own letters. Elizabeth Marsh’s situation is necessarily different. For her, there can be no job. If a Franco-Spanish force lays siege to Gibraltar, there may be no easy means of escape this time, especially for a single, twenty-year-old woman who is associated with the British. Moreover, now that the war has reached Europe, Gibraltar itself is filling up with troops and is increasingly crowded and unhealthy. There are over a thousand men confined in its naval hospital, and every day some of them die.
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All this enables Elizabeth Marsh to rationalize her decision to leave and to persuade her parents to agree, but she is also influenced – indeed misled – by her past. She is used to sailing in large, well-crewed, well-disciplined warships that are designed to take punishment as well as give it, and accordingly she has no fear of the sea. But the Ann, on which she embarks on the afternoon of 27 July, is a battered, unarmed 150-ton merchantman, loaded with casks of brandy, and with only ten crewmen. The man in overall charge is James Crisp, a nominally British merchant based in Barcelona who is already known to the Marsh family; and there are two other passengers, an Irish trader called Joseph Popham who is in his late forties, and his adolescent son William.
(#litres_trial_promo) Since it is wartime, the Ann sails in convoy with fourteen other merchant vessels bound for Lisbon and under the protection of the forty-four-gun Gosport. This too misleads Elizabeth, for naturally she trusts the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, and like most sea officers, Captain Richard Edwards dislikes convoy duty, and he is also peculiarly bad at it. On the Gosport’s previous voyage, from Plymouth to Gibraltar, he has more than once lost sight of all thirty-four vessels entrusted to his care. In the case of this new Lisbon convoy, the fog that is so common in this stretch of the Mediterranean puts a further strain on his abilities. Although there is ‘moderate and fair weather to begin with’, one day out from Gibraltar the mist is so thick that he can no longer see any of the fifteen merchantmen sailing with him. Edwards orders the Gosport’s rowing boats to be hoisted aboard so as to make up speed, and fires its guns to signal his location.
(#litres_trial_promo) Those on the Ann hear the shots, and on the morning of 30 July catch a last glimpse of the Gosport, seven miles away. The Ann’s Master desperately carries ‘all the sail he could, in order to keep up with the man of war, even to endangering our lives, for there was six feet [of] water in the hold, before any one knew of it’. Used to the sea, but not to the limitations of small merchantmen, Elizabeth Marsh, by her own admission, was ‘entirely ignorant of the danger we had been in until it was over’.
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But by now they are all lost: the other merchant ships, the Gosport that takes ten days to reach Lisbon, and the Ann that finally emerges from drifting in deep fog at 2 p.m. on 8 August to see ‘a sail to windward giving us chase and at half past seven came within pistol shot of us’. It is not – as they first think – a French warship. It is a twenty-gun Moroccan cruiser with more than 130 armed men on board. With flight now out of the question, Crisp and the Pophams agree to row over to the Moroccan vessel, thinking that it is simply a matter of showing their Mediterranean pass and establishing their identity, for Morocco and Britain are formally at peace. Elizabeth Marsh meanwhile was ‘tolerably easy, until night drew on, when fear seized my spirits, at their not returning at the time appointed. I continued in that state, until the morning … [when] instead of seeing the gentlemen, boats, crowded with Moors, came to our ship, in exchange for whom our sailors were sent on board theirs.’ She remains on the Ann four more days, as do the Moroccan boarders. Then, on 12 August, she is rowed over to their ship, terrified by ‘the waves looking like mountains’, because she is no longer observing them from the secure upper decks of a warship, and because – like most seafarers at this time – she is unable to swim. Once all are on board the corsair ship, there is a brutal social but not yet a gender divide. The ordinary sailors from the Ann are left roped together on deck. But James Crisp, Joseph Popham and his son, and Elizabeth are pushed into a cabin ‘so small as not to admit our standing upright. In this miserable place four people were to live.’
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During the three days she is confined here – and still more afterwards – what become significant are the things that she takes note of and is careful to remember, and the aspects of her ordeal and changing surroundings that she either refuses to acknowledge, or is in no position to understand. She is used to living at intervals at sea among hundreds of men, and so copes well with the utter lack of privacy, the discomfort, the smells, the stray glimpses of the others’ nudity, the glances they snatch of her own. ‘Miss Marsh’, Joseph Popham concedes later, ‘… has supported herself under her misfortunes beyond what may be expected from her tender sex.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It is not so much the embarrassments and hardships of being mewed up in a stinking cabin with three males that begin to undermine her, or even the shock of violent capture, so much as a sense of being torn from all moorings. She has grown up in tight, usually well-disciplined communities, the cherished only daughter of a respected master craftsman. Socially marginal in terms of British society in general, she has nonetheless been sure of her place in her own maritime sphere. As this strange, nightmarish ordeal progresses, her sense of personal anchorage loosens, and she feels marked out by her gender in new and dangerous ways.
She has already spent several days on the Ann surrounded by curious, occasionally ribald Moroccan seamen, with – or so she later records – only the ship’s elderly steward standing between her and them. Now, imprisoned on the corsair ship, William Popham tries to relieve his own fears by telling her ‘stories of the cruelties of the Moors, and the dangers my sex was exposed to in Barbary’. When they finally disembark at the port of Sla (Salé) on Morocco’s Atlantic coast on 15 August, and Elizabeth Marsh rides the mule they give her for two miles over rough tracks into its old town, she is greeted by ‘a confused noise of women’s voices from the top of the houses, which surprised me much, until I was informed it was a testimony of joy on the arrival of a female captive’. There are more reminders of her difference. As she, the Pophams and James Crisp wait in the half-ruined house allocated them, confined again to a single room, some local European merchants bribe their way in and undertake to smuggle out letters. The captives wait until night ‘lest the guards should suspect what we were upon’, and then they write.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joseph Popham writes to a patron, Sir Henry Cavendish in Dublin, urging him to get his brother the Duke of Devonshire, a former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to intervene on the captives’ behalf. James Crisp writes to the new Governor of Gibraltar, James O’Hara, Baron Tyrawley, and to Sir Edward Hawke, who has replaced Byng as Commander-in-Chief of the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Both Popham and Crisp pass on personal messages in postscripts to their letters, but their first instinct is to make contact with public figures who are possessed of influence. When Milbourne Marsh finally learns of his daughter’s real plight (the newspapers initially report that the Ann has been seized or sunk by the French), he reacts in a similar fashion. He immediately, and with characteristic confidence, appeals for aid to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Anson. Elizabeth Marsh by contrast has no contacts with powerful males at this stage of her life, and so writes only to her parents. Consequently her letters, unlike most of the others, do not survive.
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Those who now have power over her also remind her of the vulnerabilities of her position. When the captives are taken for questioning before a high-ranking Moroccan official at Sla, James Crisp is able to converse with him in Spanish, the language that Maghrebi elite males and incoming Europeans often employ to communicate with each other. But Elizabeth, who knows little Spanish, is conducted into the official’s harem, ‘the apartment of his ladies’, and brought for the first time into the company of a Moroccan woman, whose name she never learns. With no interpreter available, they see each other – or so she claims later in print – only in terms of mutual strangeness:
She was surprisingly tall and stout, with a broad, flat face, very dark complexion, and long black hair. She wore a dress resembling a clergyman’s gown, made of muslin, and buttoned at the neck, like the collar of a shirt, which reached her feet. She had bracelets on her arms and legs; and was extremely inquisitive, curious in examining my dress and person, and was highly entertained at the appearance I made.
Whatever her own ancestry, Elizabeth Marsh will later stress for her readers this Moroccan woman’s ‘very dark’ skin. More significantly, she will parade her own Christian, Anglican faith by evoking a vicar’s surplice in her description of the Moroccan’s djellaba.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet, at the time, it is the possible resemblances between her plight and the situation of the other woman – not what divides them – that nag at her most. Both of them are confined in different ways; but what if, in the future, she herself comes to be immured in Morocco in a similar fashion to that of the other woman? It is someone who has access to both local Muslim and Christian societies, a slave called Pedro Umbert, who first puts this possibility into words. A Menorcan by birth, captured by corsairs and now the property of Morocco’s acting Sultan, Sidi Muhammad, Umbert has been ordered to Sla to negotiate with members of its European merchant community.
(#litres_trial_promo) He is drawn to the captives because both Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp can speak some Catalan, his cradle tongue, and having established their story, he urges them to replace one deception with another.
Since their capture, Crisp has been posing as Elizabeth’s brother ‘in order to be some little protection to me’. Now, Umbert warns them:
I should be in less danger of an injury, at Morocco, by his [Crisp] passing for my husband than my brother. My friend replied, he imagined I should be entirely safe, by his appearing in the character he then did; and, as he had been examined by the principal people of [Sla] concerning the truth of it, it was then too late to alter that scheme. The conversation then dropped, and he left us; but his advice, and the manner in which he had given it, greatly alarmed me.
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Her unease at masquerading as James Crisp’s wife, which she finally agrees to do, sets her even more apart from her male companions. With the terrors and discomfort of their capture at sea receding, and epistolary contacts with home restored, they are feeling moderately complacent. Even when the order arrives for them to be escorted to Marrakech, where Sidi Muhammad has his court, Joseph Popham for instance remains phlegmatic. He feels sorry for ‘poor Miss Marsh’, he writes in one of a series of smuggled-out letters, faced with the prospect of a three-hundred-mile ride across mountains and desert, but ‘not under the least apprehension … nor was not from the beginning’. Perhaps, he adds, Milbourne Marsh might be contacted in Gibraltar and encouraged to ship over some practical comforts for his daughter: ‘a small firkin of good butter, some cheese, tea and sugar … a little mace, cinnamon and nutmegs, two bottles of Turlington drops for fear of illness, [and] half a pound of best sealing wax’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Basic groceries, herbs and condiments to offset the unfamiliar, almond sweetness of Moroccan food, a laudanum-based medicine that is widely used on both sides of the Atlantic for everything from bruises and coughs to headaches, and wax to seal up their incessant correspondence: these are the only precautions and palliatives that occur to Popham at this stage. Nor does he worry that sealing their letters with wax may prove an insufficient safeguard. Like Elizabeth Marsh, he does not yet fully understand.
In part, Joseph Popham’s confidence reflected the transformations that had occurred in Britain’s relations with Morocco and other Maghrebi powers since the seventeenth century. At that time, corsairs operating out of Morocco, and from Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers and other Ottoman ports, had posed a major threat to Christian shipping in the western Mediterranean and parts of the Atlantic, and also and intermittently to some western European coastlines.
(#litres_trial_promo) Before 1660 – though not after – there may have been as many European sailors, fishermen, traders, male and female passengers, and coastal villagers seized and enslaved in this manner in Morocco and throughout the Ottoman Empire as there were West Africans traded into Atlantic slavery by Europeans. Perhaps 1.25 million Europeans were captured and initially enslaved in this fashion between the late 1500s and the end of the eighteenth century; and many more were taken overland by Ottoman armies, in eastern Europe and Russia, and in occasional forays into western Europe. The Ottoman assault on Vienna in 1683 alone is said to have resulted in over eighty thousand men, women and children being carried into slavery.
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As far as the Mediterranean was concerned, these modes of violence and enslavement were never one-sided. There were abundant, nominally Christian, corsairs and pirates also active in the eastern and western portions of the sea in the late medieval and early modern eras. Many were sponsored by France, or Spain, or various Italian states, or by the Knights of St John on Malta; and – as was true of their Islamic counterparts – many of these Christian sea-raiders were motivated more by greed for potential ransoms than by religious zeal or antipathy. But so long as Ottoman and Maghrebi corsairing and slave-taking persisted, they could pose considerable dangers to vulnerable individuals and regions, and the fears they aroused were far more widespread. Even in the 1750s, ships belonging to some of the weaker European states, such as Genoa, and small villages situated around the rim of the Mediterranean, remained exposed to Maghrebi sea-raiders. Sailing past coastal Spain in transit to Menorca and Gibraltar, the members of the Marsh family would have noticed how rare it was to see inhabited villages close to the shorelines, and how small fishing and trading communities tended to cluster instead on hillsides at a prudent distance from any beach. As a Royal Navy officer remarked in 1756:
The reason of their houses being thus situated is the fear of the Moors, who would, if their houses were accessible, land and carry whole villages into slavery, which is frequently done notwithstanding all their caution, much more so in that part of Spain that lies on the coast of the Mediterranean.
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For the British, the threat from Maghrebi corsairs was normally minimal by this time. The Royal Navy’s power and Mediterranean bases deterred most corsairs from attacking British merchant shipping. So too did a certain community of interests. Since the early 1700s the British had come to rely on Morocco, and to a lesser degree on Algiers and Tunis, for supplies of provisions, horses and mules for their garrisons in Menorca and Gibraltar; and they paid for these not only with cash and luxury re-exports like tea and fine textiles, but also with guns, cannon and ammunition. Set apart by religion, culture, mutual prejudice and different levels of power and wealth, imperial Britain and imperial Morocco were to this extent interdependent and usually tolerant of each other in practice.
(#litres_trial_promo) This was why Joseph Popham and the other male captives from the Ann initially allowed themselves to feel relaxed about their predicament in 1756. They assumed that once the British authorities learned of it, an appropriate ransom would be paid, a warship would be dispatched to rescue them, and that would be the end of it. The politicians and navy officials in London, Dublin and Gibraltar who received their written requests for assistance took a more serious and more accurate view of the Ann’s capture, though they too failed to appreciate all the forces that were involved.
Since the death of the ’Alawi dynasty’s most famous Sultan, Moulay Ismail, in 1727, Morocco’s wealth and importance had been undermined by epidemics, earthquakes, recurrent periods of drought and repeated civil wars. The right to the throne of Moulay Abdallah, the nominal Sultan in 1756, had been violently contested on five different occasions. By this stage, real authority had definitively and by his own wish slipped away from him to his son, Sidi Muhammad, who was a very different ruler in both calibre and ideas. Sidi Muhammad was ‘too fierce to be tamed without some chastisement’, the British Governor of Gibraltar had predicted some months before the Ann’s capture, though this was neither true nor to the point.
(#litres_trial_promo) But the new acting Sultan was ruthless and adroit enough to play on Christian preconceptions about arbitrary and barbaric Muslim rulers. In 1755, the captains of some Royal Navy vessels had cut deals with some independent warlords on Morocco’s northern coast, supplying them with armaments in exchange for fresh provisions for their crews. Sidi Muhammad’s response was swift. He launched a punitive strike against the European merchant communities in Sla:
His Highness made prisoners of all the Christian merchants and friars; but Mr. Mounteney being English, he put a large chain on his neck, and bolts upon his legs, and gave him so many bastinados that he was left for dead, although he afterwards died in his own house, for understanding that the Prince intended him a lingering death because he was an Englishman, and having lost his senses, he hanged himself.
This was not merely one more stock European horror story of Barbary cruelties. Jaime Arvona, yet another Menorcan-born slave who was fluent in French, Spanish and Arabic, and who acted as treasurer, secretary and royal confidant in the acting Sultan’s court in Marrakech, sent this account of Mounteney’s miserable fate to a British diplomat in September 1755 on Sidi Muhammad’s explicit instructions.
(#litres_trial_promo) The British might have recognized in this communication a violent opening bid. They might have remembered that European traders and Christian clerics were normally free to operate in Moroccan cities, just as low-grade Christian slaves, as well as privileged individuals like Arvona, were routinely given days off to celebrate the main Christian holidays and freedom of worship every Sunday. But they focused more on Sidi Muhammad’s threat as transmitted by Arvona:
I dispatch this express to give you advice that His Highness intends to place his Governors all along the coast as far as Tangier and Tetuan … the first Englishman that puts foot in his country he will make him a slave.
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‘My ships and galliots at sea shall look out for you,’ Sidi Muhammad himself had warned a British sea officer in the summer of 1756, ‘and take you wherever they meet you.’ This deterioration in Anglo – Moroccan relations in late 1755 and early 1756 formed part of the background to the corsair attack on the Ann. When the Danish Consul in Morocco, Georg Höst, learnt of the incident, his sense of the captives’ plight was therefore initially unambiguous. ‘The passengers (some merchants and a woman)’, he noted in his diary, had been ‘detained as slaves’.
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Riding out of Sla under guard with the rest of the captives on 30 August, Elizabeth Marsh knows little of this. She is both caught up in violent public events that she is in no position fully to understand, and preoccupied with the personal. She is intent, to begin with, on her physical comforts, on the fact that a Spanish merchant from Rabat has lent her a tent for the journey and improvised a sidesaddle for her mule that soon proves both painful and insecure. As the caravan moves southwards through plains and deserts towards Marrakech, she struggles more seriously with agoraphobia. For the first time in her life, she has moved out of sight of the sea, and she can no longer make out either any signs of permanent human settlement: ‘there was no appearance of a house or a tree but a large tract of country, abounding with high mountains, affording little worthy of notice, though I made as many observations as I could in my confined situation, without any books’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Without books or maps, or personal access to Arabic, or Spanish, or any Berber language, and with no sequence of built towns by which to measure distance and progress, only a succession of douars or encampments, she is robbed of formal geography. She cannot give names to the stages of her journey. Since the caravan travels in the cool of the nights, and stops for short intervals of sleep during the hottest parts of the day, she is also deprived of a confident sense of clock and calendar time. She is dehydrated and malnourished, surviving for the most part on eggs and milk, and is now persistently reminded of her exposed female status. The makeshift sidesaddle has had to be abandoned for ‘such a machine as the Moorish women make use of’. This is placed across her mule ‘over a pack, and held a small mattress; the Moorish women lie on it, as it may be covered close; but I sat with my feet on one side [of] the mule’s neck, and found it very proper to screen me from the Arabs’. The device also increases her isolation, while further advertising that she is the lone female member of the caravan. When some passing Bedouin tribesmen are ‘inclined to be rude’, her guard shouts out – or so she is told – that ‘I was going as a present to Sidi Muhammad’.
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The Moroccan admiral in charge of the caravan, Rais al-Hadj al-Arbi Mistari, seems to have taken it along a customary route for slaves and captives disembarked at Sla. Over the course of six or seven days (there is no sure way of telling, for the captives lose track of dates), they move south from Rabat, skirt the Middle Atlas mountains, cross the Oum er Rbia river, where she almost drowns, and finally the Tensift river just north of Marrakech. Elizabeth Marsh is not the first woman claiming Britain as her home to be forced to make this journey, nor will she be the last. She is, however, the first to record her experiences; indeed she is the first woman in history to write at length about Morocco in the English language. But the mental notes she stores up at the time are only occasionally those of a conventional travel-writer. Unlike many other eighteenth-century female travellers, she does not for example commit to memory anecdotes illustrative of her unusual pluckiness (though her physical hardiness in making this journey on mule-back and at a rapid pace is clear). Nor, with some exceptions – like her first sight of mountains ‘which reached above the clouds’ – is she much concerned with a landscape that for the most part she can see only as empty.
(#litres_trial_promo) She travels under coercion, and under growing mental as well as physical stress, and as a result the journey she comes to describe is partly internal, an exploration of her own mind and fears.
Elizabeth Marsh’s Morocco
Eight miles outside Marrakech, the caravan halts, her tent is pitched and her sea-chest is opened, and through an interpreter Mistari orders her to change her dress ‘in order to make some figure at going into Morocco’. For the first time since leaving Sla, she puts on fresh clothes, wrapping a nightcap around her head for protection from the sun, ‘as I was told they did not intend to let me wear my hat’. Once ‘ornamented, as they imagined’, she is placed, not on her own mule, but in front of James Crisp on his:
At the same time, one of the guards pulled off his hat, and carried it away with him; which treatment amazed us extremely: But our astonishment increased, when our fellow-sufferers were made to dismount, and walk, two and two, bare-headed, the sun being much hotter than I had ever felt it, and the road so heavy, that the mules were knee-deep in the same.
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So, as Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp finally ride into Sidi Muhammad’s city and power base, they are cut off from the thousands crowding to see them, not just by fear and fatigue, but also by different systems of signs. The watching Moroccans may have interpreted their comparatively affluent Western clothes as a welcome demonstration that higher-grade captives than usual had been won, and could be ransomed accordingly. They would undoubtedly have noticed that all of the prisoners had been deprived of their hats, and therefore stripped after a fashion of their identity. Hats at this time were the most obvious sartorial markers of people who were European. But for Crisp – and even more for Elizabeth Marsh – being made to ride together on a broken-down mount amidst noisy and abusive crowds is likely to have had a different set of connotations. Apart from the obvious humiliation and discomfort, the ordeal would have been reminiscent to them of the crude charivari or rough music processions still sometimes inflicted by vengeful villagers and townsfolk in Britain, and in other Western European societies, on conspicuously adulterous or disorderly couples. Placing victims on a donkey, parading them through the streets ‘amidst raucous, ear-shattering noise, unpitying laughter, and the mimicry of obscenities’: this is what is customarily involved in rough music rituals. And this is what the ‘shouts and hallooings’ of the Marrakech crowd, the cuts inflicted on Crisp’s legs by the horsemen who hurtle past them, and the crude gestures made at Elizabeth herself would have reminded them of now.
(#litres_trial_promo) Already deeply conscious of masquerading as husband and wife, they enter Marrakech the red, with its landscape of scattered, quadrangular minarets, in a manner reminiscent (to them) of shame and sexual misbehaviour.
Their self-consciousness increases when they are made to dismount, separated from the other captives, and confined for most of the afternoon alone in the upstairs room of an ancient castle three miles’ distance from Sidi Muhammad’s palace. Unconcerned by now with polite Western conventions, Crisp and Elizabeth Marsh allow themselves to sit on the floor, ‘lamenting our miserable fate’. As a result, when they are finally let out, brought outside the palace gates and, after more hours of standing, at last see the acting Sultan, it is through a haze not simply of exhaustion and European preconceptions, but also of more personal preoccupations. Elizabeth does register some things with conspicuous accuracy. She takes note of the acting Sultan’s concern with dignity and ritual: ‘He was mounted on a beautiful horse with slaves on each side fanning off the flies, and guarded by a party of the black regiment,’ that is by members of the ‘Abid al-Bukhari, forcibly recruited dark-skinned Haratin and black slave soldiers. She reports, correctly, that this encounter occurs in the open air. Unlike their fellow Sunni Muslims, the Ottoman Sultans, Moroccan rulers do not traditionally receive envoys, petitioners and supplicants in rich interiors. Nor do Moroccan Sultans customarily issue their pronouncements at audiences in writing by way of scribes, but – as on this occasion – personally and through the spoken word. She notes too how the ‘Moorish admiral and his crew’ fall on their knees before their ruler, kiss the ground ‘and, as they arose, did the same to his feet’. As a Moroccan envoy later records, it is a ‘custom with our Sultan, when we are close to him, we kiss the soil, which is considered as a prostration of gratitude [to God]’.
(#litres_trial_promo) All these things Elizabeth Marsh sees and later writes down. But what does Sidi Muhammad see in this meeting?
In 1756 he is in his mid-thirties, very tall by contemporary standards at five foot ten, and in the words of one of his British slaves at this time, ‘well made, of a majestic deportment, of a dark chestnut colour, squints with his right eye, but still an agreeable aspect’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, Elizabeth Marsh judges him, wrongly, to be about twenty-five. Sidi Muhammad is determined to restore and expand the Sultan’s authority over his divided, partly tribal society, and he can be ruthless in response to foreign and domestic enemies. As more percipient European envoys are increasingly willing to acknowledge, however, the new acting Sultan is also conspicuously charitable, highly organized and hard-working, sharply intelligent, and possessed of wide interests. Robbed in his youth of a conventional, princely education by Morocco’s civil wars and the need to fight, he now operates according to a fixed and demanding schedule. His custom is to get up very early every morning, ride out to inspect his city and the work of his outdoor slaves, breakfast alone sitting in his gardens, and then combine governance with intellectual and religious study. He has set up a small council with which he can discuss works of Islamic literature and history, and he meets daily with the scholars who are attached to his court.
(#litres_trial_promo) As this suggests, Sidi Muhammad is devout, and deeply attached to a kind of pan-Islamic world-view. All too aware of the growing wealth and aggression of the major European powers, he is eager to consolidate defensive alliances with other Muslim rulers, especially with the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, the world capital of Islam. During his formal reign as Sultan of Morocco (1757–90), Sidi Muhammad will dispatch three embassies to Istanbul, in each case to advance pacts of mutual support against the ‘infidels’.
(#litres_trial_promo) His desire for a close rapport with the Ottoman Sultan, and his concern to support his fellow Maghrebi rulers in Tunis and Algiers against European predators, also rest on deep religious conviction.
Like Christianity, Islam is a monotheistic religion with universalistic aspirations. Wherever in the world they live, Muslims are linked by Arabic, Islam’s sacred language, by the injunction to carry out the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and by the concept of the dar-al-islam, the land of Islam, which allows them to ‘imagine and experience the local as part of a larger Islamic universal whole’. These tenets of belief inform Sidi Muhammad’s own brand of internationalism, though they do not account for all of it. Unlike his father and predecessor as Sultan, Moulay Abdallah, he has gone on the hajj, and is an attentive visitor to other pilgrimage sites.
(#litres_trial_promo) The evidence suggests that he may even have aspired to be recognized as Caliph of the Muslim west: that is, as a politico-religious sovereign acting as a twin pole, along with the Ottoman Sultan in the east, in upholding the entire Islamic world. In other words, the ruler whom Elizabeth Marsh and her fellow bedraggled captives confront this early September 1756, outside the gates of his Marrakech palace, is a clever, determined and reflective individual who possesses horizons that are far wider than Morocco itself. Sidi Muhammad makes this clear even in what he announces to them, through his interpreters, although the captives are scarcely in a position to appreciate the full significance of his words. They are not after all to be enslaved, he tells Elizabeth, James Crisp and the others. Instead, they will be detained as hostages until Britain agrees to establish a proper Consul in Morocco.
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For Consul, read commerce. Sidi Muhammad has perceived that, in order to consolidate his own authority and to restore Morocco’s viability as a stable and prosperous polity, any suspicion of the non-Muslim world must be balanced by more normalized relations and positive engagement based on trade. He may conceivably aspire to be Caliph of the West, and he certainly wants to forge closer alliances with fellow Muslim rulers. But he also wishes to foster connections with other parts of the world in order to develop his country’s commerce and thereby increase his own revenue. He has already, in 1753, negotiated three trade treaties with Denmark. Over the course of his reign, the Sultan will go on to sign some forty agreements with other major European states and entrepôts, with Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Prussia, Sweden, Venice, Hamburg, and with Dubrovnik, an important commercial player in the Adriatic.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The present Emperor is so very circumspect in all his affairs,’ Joseph Popham will write in 1764, by which time Elizabeth’s onetime fellow captive has been transmuted into British Consul to Morocco, ‘that he concerns himself in the most trifling transactions relative to European matters.’ And Sidi Muhammad looks to the west beyond Europe. He will become the first Muslim ruler in the world to acknowledge American independence. In 1784, he will also order his corsairs to capture a US merchant ship, the Betsey. Once they are taken hostage, the Sultan uses the members of the Betsey’s crew as bargaining tools, and in 1786 the US Congress agrees to a treaty establishing full diplomatic relations with Morocco.
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There are clear and significant parallels between what happens to the Betsey in the wake of the American Revolutionary War, and the fate of the Ann at the start of the Seven Years War. In both cases, Sidi Muhammad has resort to a traditional mode of maritime violence for novel and constructive purposes. He is not in the business of making holy war on Christian seafarers, nor is he straightforwardly in search of ransoms, though to his victims it can seem like that. This is not jihad, as it is conventionally and narrowly imagined in the West, but something very different. These particular acts of Moroccan corsairing are designed not to punish or distance non-Muslims, but to force Western powers into closer dialogue and into negotiation. Sidi Muhammad wants the West’s attention and respect. Most of all, he wants and needs increased access to and influence over Western commerce. The essential reason for this lies in that same semi-desert emptiness of much of Morocco that has perplexed and disoriented Elizabeth Marsh.
Like the rest of the Arab world, Morocco at this time was severely underpopulated. As late as 1800, there may have been only seventeen million people scattered throughout Arabia, North Africa, the Western Sahara, Sudan and Greater Syria. By contrast, the Indian subcontinent and China, both geographically smaller territories, contained respectively some two hundred and over three hundred million inhabitants at this time. In contrast too with India and China, the Arab world – with the exception of Egypt – was not populated overwhelmingly by productive peasant farmers, but substantially by semi-autonomous tribespeople. Outside its great cities, many of Morocco’s inhabitants were what Elizabeth Marsh chose to style as ‘wild Arabs’, peoples who were often nomadic and beyond the ruling Sultan’s easy control.
(#litres_trial_promo) All this influences Sidi Muhammad’s determination to build up Morocco’s overseas commercial connections, while at the same time exercising some authority over them. His country is too arid, and too sparsely cultivated, to provide for a highly productive agricultural economy, and there is consequently no large, docile peasantry that can easily be fleeced by way of royal taxation. His best hope of enhancing royal revenue and reach, therefore, is by expanding and supervising Morocco’s trade. To be sure, trans-Saharan trade still remains important; and, in addition, there are and there have long been plenty of European merchants active in Morocco’s ports and cities. In the three months she is a hostage here, Elizabeth Marsh will record meetings with traders from England, Ireland, Sweden, France, Spain, Denmark, Greece and the Dutch Republic. But in earlier reigns it has proved easy for such European intruders to get Morocco’s overseas trade substantially into their own hands, and cream off some of the profits. Sidi Muhammad’s aim is therefore both to make his country even more wide open than before to European commerce and commercial players, and to monitor such trade more closely and effectively so that he is able to tax it. This is why, as one French diplomat puts it, ‘the emperor … became a merchant himself’.
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In the process, Sidi Muhammad also became an actor in what in retrospect can be viewed as this period’s proto-globalization, a man preoccupied both with extending his influence in the Islamic world, of which he and Morocco were a part, and with developing and exploiting connections with widely different regions of the Christian West. Sidi Muhammad’s reign is a vivid reminder that, in the words of one historian: ‘proto-globalization was, in effect, a multi-centred phenomenon, strengthened by the active participation of Muslim elements’. As European and American diplomats will become increasingly aware, the Sultan is at one and the same time devoutly Muslim and interested in traditional scholarship, and in some respects a cosmopolitan, commercially driven and consciously innovative figure. ‘A man of great quickness of parts and discernment,’ the British Ambassador conceded in 1783, ‘… beloved much by his subjects.’ However, added this same writer, the Sultan possessed another marked characteristic: ‘his excess in women, in which he confines himself within no bounds’.
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And so Elizabeth Marsh re-enters the story. After hearing the interpreter translate Sidi Muhammad’s formal declaration, she and the other weary hostages are dismissed and taken to a house in the mellah, the Jewish quarter of Marrakech, just to the east of the royal palace. Normally this is walled in on all sides, a segregated place with a single gate guarded by the Sultan’s soldiers. But the Lisbon earthquake and its aftershocks, which recur throughout her time in Morocco, and remind her with their noise of ‘a carriage going speedily over a rough pavement’, have reduced sections of the mellah and its walls to rubble. Although Jews in Morocco are generally allowed freedom of worship, and some play important commercial roles, and act as intermediaries in diplomatic encounters with European Christians, they are still marginal people, subject to mistreatment and punitive taxation. The largest in Morocco, the Marrakech mellah is essentially a ghetto for the disadvantaged, the home not just of the city’s Jewish population, but also of many of its European slaves.
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Elizabeth takes in the dismal, half-ruined one-storey square building that is to be their prison, ‘its walls … covered with bugs, and as black as soot’, and chooses to have her tent pitched outside in its open courtyard. But there is no time to rest. Jaime Arvona, the acting Sultan’s high-level Menorcan slave and favourite, arrives with an order that she, but not the other hostages, is to be escorted to the palace. She goes with him through a succession of gates and gardens, and past a series of guards. As she draws nearer to the centre of the palace complex, she is instructed to take off her shoes because she is entering the domain of a prince of the blood, a descendant of the Prophet. Once inside, there are more rooms, and more guards, until finally there is ‘the apartment wherein His Imperial Highness was’.
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Until now, Elizabeth Marsh’s ordeal in Morocco has been shared with others. Progressively more isolated in her own mind, she has in fact hardly ever been alone. Accordingly, a number of different individuals have been able to observe and report on her. Some of the other captives and several European merchants and envoys have written about her time in Sla and the journey to Marrakech. She has featured in official and private correspondence between British sea officers, politicians, diplomats and colonial officials. And she and the others have been the subject of formal diplomatic missives and proclamations by Sidi Muhammad himself, as well as detailed accounts by slaves and interpreters attached to his court. Individuals of no political weight or wealth, Elizabeth and her companions nevertheless leave an extensive and unusually diverse imprint on the archives. But once she enters barefoot through the gates of Sidi Muhammad’s palace, she becomes the sole chronicler of what happens there, a solitary voice. And her story will only be written down much later, when she is in another country, and subject to different influences and new pressures.
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As she describes it, this first palace encounter is brief, an occasion at which she is carefully appraised perhaps, but unable to register much herself except the cool, richly clad individuals gazing curiously at her. Sidi Muhammad sits at his ease alongside four of his women, ‘who seemed as well pleased as he was himself at seeing me. Not that my appearance could prejudice them much in my favour.’ Elizabeth is self-conscious as well as frightened, aware of her sun-scorched face (or is this a deliberate assertion for her reading public that she is indeed pale-skinned?) and of her crumpled riding-dress, marked with sweat and sand from her journey. One of the women offers her, through an interpreter, some fresh Moroccan clothes. When Elizabeth declines, she takes ‘her bracelets off her arms; and put them on mine, declaring I would wear them for her sake’. Without much experience of jewellery, Elizabeth’s immediate, dazed reaction to these open-sided silver bangles is that they look like horseshoes. The rituals of hospitality over, she is dismissed:
But my conductor, instead of taking me to our lodgings, introduced me into another apartment, where I was soon followed by the Prince, who, having seated himself on a cushion, inquired concerning the reality of my marriage with my friend. This enquiry was entirely unexpected; but, though I positively affirmed, that I was really married, I could perceive he much doubted it … He likewise observed, that it was customary for the English wives to wear a wedding ring; which the slave [interpreter] informed me of, and I answered, that it was packed up, as I did not choose to travel with it.
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At last the acting Sultan allows her to leave, giving her ‘assurances of his esteem and protection’. She is escorted back to the dim, mosquito-infested house in the mellah, but over the next two days her situation changes. As at Sla, the hostages are visited by some members of the European merchant community, who come to offer assistance. There is John Court, an intelligent and cultivated London-born merchant based at Agadir, who has travelled widely in sub-Saharan Africa, and has been summoned to Marrakech by Sidi Muhammad to act as an intermediary. His companion is an Irish trader called Andrews, from Asfi on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Naïvely, Elizabeth Marsh confides to these two men both that her ‘marriage’ to James Crisp is only a pretence, and tells them something of her encounter in the palace.
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Naïvely, because she is now doubly at risk. As Andrews warns her, there is a danger that some of Sidi Muhammad’s spies and slaves will hear gossip, or find evidence in her papers, that she has lied and is not in fact a married woman. She is also increasingly at risk among her own people. It has been over a month since their capture, and by now the other passengers from the Ann, Joseph Popham and his son, are noticeably going their own way: ‘We seldom had the pleasure to see our fellow-captives, as they found much more amusement in the company of the ship’s crew, than with my friend and myself.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Even thirteen years after the event, when she wrote these words, Elizabeth Marsh was unwilling to admit that it might not have been a search for amusement that kept the Pophams away from her and James Crisp, but disapproval and/or embarrassment. At the time of her Moroccan ordeal – for all her recent gloss of ladylike accomplishments – she was still firmly artisan in background, and used to the compromises of shipboard life. She may thus not fully have appreciated that her conduct had gone well beyond what conventional middle-class males like the Pophams would have seen as acceptable in a young unmarried woman. She had chosen to travel without a female chaperone. She had been obliged to sleep (or not sleep) in rooms alongside three men to whom she was not related. She had pretended to be first the sister, and subsequently the wife, of James Crisp. And now she had been escorted, without the others, to the palace of a Muslim prince. Whatever happened in the future, and however involuntary some of these actions had been, her reputation was under pressure.
It becomes still more so when Jaime Arvona returns with ‘a basket of fruit … [and] a variety of flowers’, and an order that she accompany him once more to the palace. She dresses herself, she will write, ‘in a suit of clothes, and my hair was done up in the Spanish fashion’.
(#litres_trial_promo) True or no, this is a wholly exceptional detail. Nowhere else in any of her writings does Elizabeth Marsh comment on her appearance, except to note its deterioration. During the various journeys and emergencies that make up her life, she may record that her hair is becoming brittle, or that her complexion is burnt, or that she is eating too much, or that she is sick, but the only gesture of physical vanity she admits to is before this second meeting with Morocco’s thirty-five-year-old acting ruler. As before, her errand takes her through gardens and buildings that are aesthetically mixed. Now that Morocco and Denmark are in commercial alliance, the acting Sultan has secured a succession of royal Danish gardeners who are busy redesigning three of the gardens in his palace complex, creating walkways of trees, intricate mazes and flowerbeds. The interior of Sidi Muhammad’s stone and marble palace is also, seemingly, a study in hybridity. There is traditional mosaic work and glazed tiles in geometric designs, but there is also a smattering of Western consumer goods: ‘several fine European pier glasses with very handsome hangings’ in the royal apartments, for instance, and ‘in each room is a fine gilt branch for wax candles’.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is not a straightforward act of emulation of Western tastes, however. In Islamic tradition, light possesses a divine quality as the visible manifestation of God’s presence and reason. As he consistently tries to do, Sidi Muhammad has borrowed from the West with premeditation, for his own purposes and in his own way.
The man himself is
tall, finely shaped, of a good complexion … Dressed in a loose robe of fine muslin, with a train of at least two yards on the floor; and under that was a pink satin vest, buttoned with diamonds. He had a small cap of the same satin as his vest, with a diamond button. He wore bracelets on his legs, and slippers wrought with gold. His figure, altogether, was rather agreeable, and his address polite and easy.
As this suggests, it is primarily in terms of surfaces and commodities, and their seductive power, that Elizabeth Marsh describes this second palace encounter. She is offered not traditional coffee, but tea, a re-export from Asia. It arrives in ‘cups and saucers which were as light as tin, and curiously japanned with green and gold. These I was told were presents from the Dutch.’ This is one of the details that confirm that she did indeed witness the royal apartments of Sidi Muhammad’s palace. Earlier in 1756, the Dutch government and the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, had sent the acting Sultan a series of presents in the hope of securing a commercial treaty with Morocco: luxury textiles, a coach, ornamented pistols, and these cups and saucers that were probably, like the tea, imported from China and Batavia (today’s downtown Jakarta). It is with yet more international commodities that the acting Sultan makes his proposition:
A slave brought a great collection of rarities, which were the produce of different nations, and shewed them to me. I greatly admired everything I saw, which pleased the Prince exceedingly; and he told me, by means of the interpreter, that he did not doubt of my preferring, in time, the palace to the confined way of life I was then in; that I might always depend on his favour and protection; and that the curiosities I had seen should be my own property.
Elizabeth Marsh rejects his suggestion. She reiterates through the interpreter that she is married to James Crisp, and that she does not ‘wish to change my situation in that respect, and whenever it was agreeable to him, I would take my leave’.
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Instead, she is passed on to one of Sidi Muhammad’s women, seated at the opposite end of the room. Elizabeth Marsh describes her, too, in terms of surfaces and commodities. But while the acting Sultan, who aspires to be a merchant of sorts, is surrounded by the products of transoceanic trade, this lesser, female being is mainly, though almost certainly not entirely, Moroccan in ornament:
She had a large piece of muslin, edged with silver, round her head and raised high at the top; her ear-rings were extremely large, and the part which went through the ears was made hollow, for lightness. She wore a loose dress … of the finest muslin, her slippers were made of blue satin worked with silver.
Dressed in fine Indian textiles, which have perhaps also been presented by the Dutch, or which may have been shipped across the Indian Ocean by Arab or Asian traders, this woman converses with Elizabeth, using as her interpreter a French boy-slave who is young enough to be allowed in the company of the acting Sultan’s harem.
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It is at this point that the narrative changes in quality and tone.
Given the quantity and quality of detail she supplies, much of it unavailable in any other English-language source at this time, there can be no doubt that Elizabeth Marsh did have at least one close encounter with Morocco’s acting ruler in the inner rooms of his Marrakech palace. It is probable too that he sought to retain her there for sexual purposes. But what kernel of accuracy there is in Elizabeth’s scarcely believable account of what happens now, when she is in the company of the acting Sultan’s woman, is simply unknowable. As she tells it, the French boy assures her that the Moroccan woman alongside her is merely uttering routine pleasantries. Since the woman appears friendly and waves her hands as if making gestures of encouragement, Elizabeth risks repeating some of her words. What she inadvertently says, or attempts to say, is as follows: ‘La ilaha illa Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah’. This is of course the primal statement of Muslim commitment: the affirmation that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is God’s prophet.
Unsurprisingly, on her speaking these words, ‘the palace was immediately in the utmost confusion, and there was every sign of joy in all faces’. Sidi Muhammad orders silence, and Elizabeth Marsh is taken swiftly out of the public rooms into a large, secluded apartment ‘much longer than broad, and crowded with women, but mostly blacks’, that is part of the seraglio. (There may be a small ring of truth here. An English slave at Sidi Muhammad’s court reported in the 1750s that it was the acting Sultan’s custom to have a black, that is a sub-Saharan, female slave bring his chosen women to his bed.)
(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth waits there, both frightened and intensely curious, refusing offers of refreshments in case the food and drink are drugged. Then she is summoned to attend Sidi Muhammad once more, this time in a different, private apartment. He is
seated under a canopy of crimson velvet, richly embellished with gold. The room was large, finely decorated, and supported by pillars of mosaic work; and there was, at the other end, a range of cushions, with gold tassels, and a Persian carpet on the floor.
They converse again through an interpreter:
‘Will you become a Muslim? Will you properly consider the advantages resulting from doing as I desire?’
‘It is impossible for me to change my sentiments in religious matters, but I will ever retain the highest sense of the honour you have done me, and hope for the continuance of Your Highness’s protection.’
‘You have this morning renounced the Christian faith and turned Muslim. And a capital punishment, namely, burning, is by our laws inflicted on all who convert and then recant.’
‘If I am an apostate, it entirely proceeds from the fallacy of the French boy, and not from my own inclination. But if my death will give you any satisfaction, I no longer desire to avoid this last remedy to all my misfortunes. Living on the terms you propose would only add an accent to my misery.’
He seems perplexed, but continues to importune her. On her knees, she replies:
‘I implore your compassion, and – as a proof of the esteem you have given me reason to expect – I beseech you to permit me to leave you forever.’
He covers his face with his hands and waves her away. The slave interpreter grabs her by the hand, and:
Having hurried, as far as possible to the gates, found it no easy matter to pass a great crowd which had assembled there. My worthy friend [James Crisp] was on the other side, with his hair all loose, and a distracted countenance, demanding me as his wife; but the inhuman guards beat him down for striving to get in, and the black women, holding me and hallooing out – No Christian, but a Moor – tore all the plaits out of my clothes, and my hair hung down about my ears. After a number of arguments, my friend prevailed; and, having forced me from the women, took me in his arms, and, with all possible expedition, got out of their sight.
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Rewritten and converted into dialogue, Elizabeth Marsh’s retrospective published account of the climax of this, her last interview with Sidi Muhammad, reads like an extract from a contemporary play or novel. This is scarcely surprising since she certainly drew some inspiration from the latter form of literature, and possibly also from the former. Nor is the drama, even melodrama, of this part of her story at all surprising. She wrote it in 1769, in the midst of another and different phase of her ordeal, when she was under acute pressure. Yet for all the naïve literary artifice, and a clear element of invention (it was Western European states, for instance, not Maghrebi societies, that traditionally burnt religious apostates), authentic bewilderment and terror still seep through her words. This was not surprising either. Her danger in Morocco had been real, and her temptations had been real.
Because women rarely worked as sailors or traders, and travelled far less frequently than men, they formed over the centuries only a minority of the Europeans who were captured at sea by Muslim corsairs. But European women who were captured in this fashion were far more likely than their male counterparts to be retained for life for sexual or other services in Maghrebi and Ottoman households. This was particularly the case if they were young, single, poor, or in some other way unprotected. In the 1720s, Moroccan corsairs are known to have taken at least three British women at sea. Two of these were the wives of prosperous Jewish merchants who were captured alongside them, and in due course all of these individuals were ransomed and handed over to the Royal Navy. The remaining woman, Margaret Shea, was young and single when she was captured travelling on her own from Ireland in 1720, and she was treated very differently. Impregnated after being brought to Morocco, passed between several owners, and converting or forced to convert to Islam, she seems never to have got home.
(#litres_trial_promo) Such incidents also occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. After his formal accession to the Sultanate in November 1757, Sidi Muhammad committed himself to reducing corsairing and slave-taking as part of his wider policy of improving commercial relations with the West. Nonetheless, he is known to have retained attractive and vulnerable Christian female captives. In about 1764, a very young Genoese woman was shipwrecked on Morocco’s Mediterranean coastline. Like Elizabeth Marsh, she was brought to Sidi Muhammad’s palace at Marrakech, but unlike Marsh she converted to Islam, submitted to entering the harem first as a concubine, then as one of his wives, learnt to read and write Arabic, and was renamed Lalla Dawia.
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As a Genoan, this woman hailed from a modest republic possessed of only a small navy and limited diplomatic leverage. Yet although Elizabeth Marsh and her fellow hostages came by contrast from the world’s foremost Protestant power, this did not automatically guarantee their safety or her own virtue. When Lalla Dawia told her story in the 1780s to an English doctor, William Lempriere, who had been allowed into the Sultan’s harem in order to treat her, she made no mention of actual acts of coercion, as distinct from threats, being used against her when she first arrived at Sidi Muhammad’s palace in 1764. With no immediate prospects of escape or rescue, and cut off from her family, her resistance had simply been worn down over time in the face of the Sultan’s blandishments. This could easily have been Elizabeth’s fate too. In 1756 Britain was engaged in a transcontinental war, and needed Moroccan supplies for its only remaining Mediterranean base, Gibraltar. Its politicians were in no position to dispatch an expeditionary force against Sidi Muhammad to rescue a handful of low-grade hostages, and in any case, acting in that fashion was never at any time standard British policy. Britons who were captured at sea and brought to Morocco in this period customarily spent at least a year, and usually more, in confinement or engaged in hard labour there, until the Sultan of the day allowed negotiations to get under way for their release. So the Ann’s
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