The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
Page 1
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–1760
Lewis Namier
Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837
Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850
Copyright © 2007 by Linda Colley
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers, London.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Endpaper illustration copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum
Maps by Peter Wilkinson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Colley Linda.
The ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: a woman in world history / Linda Colley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-53944-1
1. Marsh, Elizabeth, 1735–1785. 2. Women travelers—Biography. 3. England—Biography. 4. Africa—Description and travel. 5. Asia—Description and travel. 1. Title.
CT788.M2187C65 2008 910.92—dc22 [B] 2007022675
www.pantheonbooks.com
v3.1
Jan Colley’s book
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Other Books by This Author
Dedication
LIST OF PLATES
LIST OF TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST OF MAPS
CONVENTIONS
Introduction
1 Out of the Caribbean
2 Taken to Africa, Encountering Islam
3 Trading from London, Looking to America
4 Writing and Migrating
5 An Asiatic Progress
6 World War and Family Revolutions Ending – and Continuing
FAMILY TREES
NOTES
MANUSCRIPT SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Photo Insert
PLATES
Some of the fifteen varieties of beads known to have been manufactured on Nicholas Crisp’s Hammersmith estate before 1640 for his trade in gold and slaves in West Africa (Courtesy of Andy Chopping/Museum of London Archaeology Service)
‘A new map of the island of Jamaica’ by John Senex, 1719 (Historic Maps Collection, Princeton University Library)
‘View of Port Royal’ by Richard Paton, c.1758 (National Maritime Museum, London)
Kingston harbour (Historic Maps Collection, Princeton University Library)
‘Ship’s Carpenter’, etching by Thomas Rowlandson, 1799 (National Maritime Museum, London)
George Marsh, by Benjamin Wilson (Christie’s Images, London)
‘The Navy Office in Broad Street’, engraving by Benjamin Cole, c.1756 (The Trustees of The British Museum, London)
Saffron Island, Menorca (Courtesy of Jonathan Coad)
‘Chatham Dockyard’, by Joseph Farington, c.1788–94 (National Maritime Museum, London)
An illuminated letter from Sidi Muhammad, 1766 (The National Archives – ref: SP102/2 f.22)
John Perceval, later 2nd Earl of Egmont, by Francis Hayman (National Gallery of Ireland)
Sir William Musgrave, by Lemuel Francis Abbott (British Library/Sotheby’s Picture Library, London)
The future General Sir Eyre Coote, attributed to Henry Morland, c.1763 (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Admiral Sir Edward Hughes, watercolour in Madras style, c.1783 (The British Library, London)
Hamburg, engraving by Johann Georg, c.1750 (AKG Images, London)
‘A view of a section of the Port of Barcelona including Moorish and European merchants and their ships’. Eighteenth-century engraving by Moulinier (Mary Evans Picture Library, London)
The Lower Crisp in Florida as it now is (By kind courtesy of Professor Dan Schafer)
The Upper Crisp (By kind courtesy of Professor Dan Schafer)
‘Examination of a bankrupt before his creditors in the Court of King’s Bench, Guildhall’, by Augustus Charles Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson (Guildhall Library, City of London)
Money lenders in Calcutta (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
‘In India on the March’, by Samuel Davis (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/Bridgeman Art Library, London)
‘Procession at the Great Temple of Jagannath, Puri’, British school, c.1818–20 (The British Library, London)
Lockleys, the Hertfordshire mansion acquired by Elizabeth Marsh’s daughter and Sir George Shee (Reproduced by kind permission of Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies. Document ref: D/Eof/7)
Captain John Henry Crisp, Elizabeth Marsh’s half-Indian grandson (The British Library, London)
Preparing for the scientific expedition to Sumatra at the Madras observatory (The British Library, London)
TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS
The world opened: a pocket globe made in London in 1776 and showing James Cook’s recent ‘discoveries’ (National Maritime Museum, London)
‘The West Prospect of Portsmouth, in Hamp-Shire’. Engraving by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, 1749 (The British Library, London)
The sea, mobility and providence: page from the Marsh family Bible detailing Francis Marsh’s escape from drowning c.1694 (Private collection)
‘A Draught of the Marlborough as she appear’d in the late engagement in the Mediterranean’. Etching, 1744 (National Maritime Museum, London)
Detail from a pastel portrait of George Marsh by J.G. Huck, c.1790 (Private collection)
A Moroccan corsair ship and some captives. Engraving by A.H. Stibold, c.1779 (From Relations sur les Royaumes de Marrakech et Fes by George Host. Editions la Porte, 2002)
A view of Marrakech. Danish engraving of 1779 (ibid.)
A plan of the Danish gardens outside Sidi Muhammad’s palace (ibid.)
‘A New Map of the Isle of Man’ by Thomas Kitchin, 1764 (The British Library, London)
‘Map of Bishopsgate Ward’ by Thomas Bowen, engraved by Thomas Bowles, 1767 (The Guildhall Library, City of London)
‘Map of the Islands of Shetland’ by Herman Moll, 1745 (National Library of Scotland)
‘Plan of the Lordship of Lower Crispe and the Lordship of Upper Crispe’, 1769 (By kind courtesy of Professor Dan Schafer)
Sketch of the Dolphin made by Captain Samuel Wallis on his voyage around the world, 1766–68 (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Australia)
‘A View of the Town of Rio Janeiro’. Pencil drawing by Alexander Buchan, 1768 (The British Library, London)
‘A plan of the Environs of the City of Dacca’ by James Rennell, c.1781 (The British Library, London)
A page from Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian Journal (Elizabeth Crisp’s Journal of a Voyage by Sea from Calcutta to Madras, and of a journey from there back to Dacca, from the Bound Manuscripts Collection (170/604). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA)
An officer of the Madras army, possibly by Tilly Kettle, c.1770 (National Army Museum, London)
A box palanquin, with four bearers and a parasol holder. Anonymous watercolour in the Benares style (The British Library, London)
A salt digger. Anonymous painting, c.1825 (The British Library, London)
Hindu weavers. Anonymous watercolour, c.1798–1804 (The British Library, London)
Philip Francis. Etching by James Sayers, 1788 (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
‘A chart of the track of the Scarborough, on her homeward passage, from Port Jackson, on the E. Coast of New South Wales, towar
ds China’, by Captain John Marshall. Engraving, 1789 (National Maritime Museum, London)
MAPS
The world – as Elizabeth Marsh and her extended family experienced it
The Caribbean
The Mediterranean world of Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp
Elizabeth Marsh’s Morocco
Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian journey
The world – as Elizabeth Marsh and her extended family experienced it
CONVENTIONS
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
‘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 grandfat
her, 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.1 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.