The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  A plan of the Danish gardens outside Sidi Muhammad’s palace.

  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’.61

  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.62

  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: ‘Lā ilāha ilia Allāh wa-Muhammad rasūi Allāh’. 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.)63 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.64

  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.65 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.66

  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 crew and passengers could well have found themselves in Marrakech for many months, if not years, and Elizabeth Marsh, a twenty-year-old woman with ‘nobody near me that I knew’, could have been exposed to many more palace encounters.67 She could also of course have been forced into sexual submission.

  The romantic, salacious and imperial legends that have clustered around female slavery in Islamic societies – and the considerable ignorance and archival silences that still surround these women – can obscure what this would have meant. Female slaves in Moroccan and Ottoman households normally enjoyed safer, easier lives than slave soldiers in these regions, or than most Africans sold into slavery on Caribbean and American plantations. Female slaves might, if they were very lucky, and if they were purchased by affluent men, be beautifully adorned and elegantly accommodated, as Sidi Muhammad’s favourites evidently were. Their owners might even come to love and cherish them. But even the most cosseted female slave was still property. She had no right of refusal to sexual congress with her master. Coerced into intimacy, she was always vulnerable to physical indignities and violence. A slave soldier was at least mobile; and, if he survived, he might even win some kind of advancement through his exploits. But, unless she was taken as a wife, or produced a child for her master, once her physical attractions faded, a slave woman could easily become neglected, or be married off to another slave, or to a free person of her owner’s choice.68 As Elizabeth Marsh perceived retrospectively, giving in to Sidi Muhammad’s gift-laden seductions would have reduced her to ‘passive obedience, and non-resistance’.69 Her own resistance, such as it was, may have helped to save her from this. Rather more important though, for a devout and personally charitable Muslim ruler like Sidi Muhammad, is likely to have been her claim that she was married.

  The surviving evidence suggests that he was not convinced of the truth of this claim, but also that he did not feel able simply to disregard it. Elizabeth Marsh’s precise marital status really did become the salient point. A possible proof of this lies in the official correspondence of Jaime Arvona, Sidi Muhammad’s Menorcan slave-secretary and confidant. In the letters Arvona wrote on his master’s instructions to various British officials at this time, he habitually refers to James Crisp and the Pophams by their surnames. But he calls Elizabeth Marsh just ‘the Lady’. Arvona may have described her thus simply in accordance with the protocol of Islamic societies. According to this, one did not, politely, refer directly to females by their names and thus expose them to a public knowing, except in legal processes where formal nomenclature had to be a matter of record. Thus, when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu made her famous visit to Istanbul in the early eighteenth century alongside her Ambassador husband, her Ottoman hosts invariably and out of courtesy referred to her as ‘leydi/lady’ or ‘Madam’, never by her name.70 But in Elizabeth Marsh’s case, Arvona may have exploited this particular piece of etiquette in order to help a stranded female and a fellow European in distress. Whatever the reason, he did not call her ‘Mrs. Crisp’ in his letters, since the acting Sultan refused anyway to believe that this was really her title. But neither did Arvona refer to her as ‘Miss Marsh’, even though he knew very well that this was who she was in fact. His fellow Menorcan slave, Pedro Umbert, who had talked to Crisp and Marsh during their time at Sla, had earlier informed him of the subterfuge they were intending. Instead, Arvona habitually referred to Elizabeth Marsh simply as ‘the Lady’, a title that conceded nothing, but also gave nothing away.71 It was the only time in her life that she seems routinely to have been accorded on paper a status that she always coveted.

  Since her story held, and since Sidi Muhammad had much greater priorities, negotiations to do with sex were quickly overtaken by more conventional, exclusively masculine politics. The day after his final interview with Elizabeth, the acting Sultan summoned James Crisp, the Pophams, the Master and crew of the Ann – but not her – to the palace. At his order, they attached their signatures to a letter to the British Governor of Gibraltar, Baron Tyrawley. In it, the acting Sultan complained again of the ‘ill treatment’ he had met with from the British, but declared that ‘he would set them an example of moderation, as well as justice’. The hostages were free to leave. Or, more precisely, they were free to be fetched. The British would not and could not invade Morocco. Effectively, this letter gave formal notice that the Royal Navy would now be permitted to retrieve the hostages from its shores.72

  Once the letter reached Gibraltar, the wheels began to turn. On 7 October 1756, the Portland, the same fifty-gun warship that had helped to escort Elizabeth Marsh and her family away from Menorca the previous April, was dispatched by Admiral Sir Edward Hawke to rescue her again.73 A week later, the ship reached Larache, a trading and corsairing centre on the southern embankment of Morocco’s Loukos estuary, and by 21 October it was in sight of ‘the towers of Sallee’ (Sla). Anchored in Sla road the following day, Jervis Maplesden, the Portland’s captain, took note of what little was left of the Ann, ‘laying on her beam ends on the shore’. Most of its usable timber was missing, he reported, having been cannibalized by the corsairs in order to repair their own ships. The Ann’s cargo had also vanished, as the locals had promptly unloaded James Crisp’s casks of brandy and sold them to some local Dutch merchants.74

  The Portland’s arrival at Sla, and subsequent mooring off Asfi, were followed by an extended game of epistolary diplomacy, hard bargaining and naval posturing. ‘I am come in peace and humility,’ Captain Maplesden assured the acting Sultan in his first letter, and he maintained this conciliatory tone throughout. But, while flying a flag of truce from the Portland’s masthead, he also took care to exercise his ship’s ‘great guns and small arms’ on a daily basis and within sight of those on shore. ‘His Imperial Highness took a great deal of pleasure of the contents and style of your letter,’ was Arvona’s response to Maplesden’s first communication. It showed, he went on smoothly, that Britain did, after all, possess some public servants who were both ‘capable and civil’.75 By early November, Sidi Muhammad had formally agreed that ‘Mr. Crisp, the Lady, Mr. Popham and his son’, and the crew of the Ann would be allowed to board the Portland and ‘proceed on their voyage’. Naturally, he told Maplesden through Arvona, there would need to be some return. By March 1757 he expected Britain to appoint a full-time consul in Morocco to facilitate trading relations between the two countries. He also expected presents – which meant naval stores. Otherwise, Gibraltar would be starved of Moroccan supplies, and he would declare war on Britain’s merchant shipping, which was already under pressure from French warships and privateers:

  Thank God, all the empire [Morocco] is in pea
ce, and … [obeys] one Head, that knows everything that passes in Europe, and knows how to distinguish what is convenient to his dominions.

  All the mutual compliments, bluffs, counter-bluffs and barely concealed threats ended at 10 a.m. on 17 November, when Elizabeth Marsh and the men who had travelled with her on the Ann were finally rowed out to the Portland.76 Captain Maplesden gave up his cabin in the forecastle for her private use. It was the first time in over three months that she had slept in a room on her own.

  Elizabeth Marsh’s last weeks in Morocco seem to have been deeply troubled. She was physically unwell, probably from a mixture of malnutrition and heat stroke, but suffering too from a ‘dejection of spirits’. John Court, the Barbary merchant who had helped the hostages in Marrakech and subsequently accompanied them to Asfi, commented later on how she had ‘lost so great a share’ of her usual liveliness and stamina during this final phase of captivity. She was understandably nervous that something might go wrong, that Maplesden’s negotiations would misfire, and that she would never be allowed to leave. Even when being rowed out from Asfi to the Portland, she remained ‘in extreme dread, until we reached the man of war, fearing a signal from the shore to order our return’.77 The confrontation with Sidi Muhammad, and having to pass ‘for what I really was not’, also preyed on her mind. Not least because what she ‘really was’ seemed now far less clear than before. She had lost sight of her family, and been taken away from the sea. She had been brought against her will to another continent, and into a physical, cultural and human landscape that she barely understood. She had masqueraded first as James Crisp’s sister and then as his wife; and in Sidi Muhammad’s palace she had come close to losing her religion, name, language, country, mode of dress, virginity and moral moorings; had perhaps even been tempted at some level to abandon these things. She had wanted travel, but found instead, as she put it, varieties of’cruel restraint’.78