The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  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.2 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’.3 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.4 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’.5

  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.6 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.7

  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’.8 In more senses than one, the proliferation of such artifacts suggested a more graspable world: one that might even be pocketed.

  The world opened: a pocket globe made in London in 1776 and showing James Cook’s recent ‘discoveries’.

  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.9

  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.10 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’.11 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’.12

  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 t
he Caribbean

  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.1 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 coastguards, 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.2