The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  Egmont eventually acquired over 120,000 acres in Nova Scotia (out of a total of 3.5 million acres of land granted away there in the 1760s), and 65,500 acres in Florida. He also encouraged some of his friends, dependants and navy employees to invest in colonial land, including his new secretary George Marsh. ‘He was certain he should raise a considerable fortune’ in America, Egmont told Marsh, ‘and next to his own family, he wished most heartily success to me and mine’.75 Marsh took him at his word. Late in 1763, he contemplated acquiring land for himself in Nova Scotia. He subsequently also seems to have encouraged James Crisp to apply to Egmont for fishing grounds off what later became Prince Edward Island.76 These early schemes came to nothing, but in January and June 1766, at Egmont’s prompting, the Privy Council issued orders allotting James Crisp first five thousand acres, and then a further fifteen thousand acres, in East Florida, ‘to be surveyed in one contiguous tract in such part of the said province as the said James Crisp or his attorney shall choose’. This placed the Crisps potentially on a par as landowners in the new province with the likes of Charles Townshend, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Duke of Buccleuch, one of Scotland’s richest patricians, and General James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia, each of whom also received twenty thousand acres of East Florida land.77

  These Privy Council orders were not land grants, but warrants of survey. Recipients were expected either to journey to East Florida in person, or to appoint agents to go in their stead, to select a stretch of land equal in extent to the number of acres specified in the order, have it properly surveyed, and record the survey with the colony’s Governor, Colonel James Grant, a Highland Scot, who would then, and only then, formally authorize the grant. After that, the new landowners were expected to recruit and transport out Protestant white settlers, one for every hundred acres of Florida land in their possession. If a third of an estate was not so settled within three years, all of it could be forfeit to the Crown.78 As suggested by this lengthy process, and by the status of James Crisp’s fellow would-be great landowners in East Florida, large-scale transatlantic land speculation usually demanded a substantial outlay of capital over many years. Yet Crisp was already in business difficulties when he received his allocation of East Florida land in 1766, and was declared bankrupt the following year. That he nonetheless embarked on this Florida speculation, devoting most of his energies to it during his last years in England, owed something to his appetite for risk (and his desperation at this point), and more to the fact that he and Egmont had been able to forge a close working relationship, and were alike in scheming in large, sometimes overreaching terms.

  James Crisp embarked on this land speculation as part of a consortium, the ‘Adventurers’, as Egmont called them. These consisted of some of Crisp’s own business associates, along with navy contacts of the Marsh family, plus Elizabeth Marsh’s cousin by marriage, James Morrison, who received his own five thousand acres in East Florida. The idea was that the Adventurers’ respective stretches of land in the province should lie adjacent to each other, a colony within a colony, as Egmont explained when he wrote to Governor Grant introducing the agent they had dispatched to East Florida, one Martin Jollie:

  This gentleman is employed by Mr. [Turner] Fortrey, Commissioner of the Victualling, [by] Messrs. [James] Crisp and [James] Anderson, merchants of eminence in London and of extensive dealings, by Messrs. [Edward] Wood and [James] Morrison and Mr. Porett of the Navy to wait upon you … to view with your permission the province of East Florida, to fix upon the land and to take up the portions to which they are so entitled.

  All of the Adventurers, Egmont assured Grant, were ‘very able to exert themselves effectually in this undertaking, which is intended to be carried on by a common fund, and joint stock without any loss of time’. As for himself, he continued: ‘I am requested not only to give my advice and to suggest a plan for their proceeding, but even to become an adventurer with them in the execution.’79

  This severely over-modest assessment of his role pointed to another distinctive aspect of this land speculation – and to the reason why, for a while, James Crisp and Elizabeth Marsh could plausibly view Florida as a second chance. Egmont did join these strictly middle-class adventurers. As the months went by, he also ‘took front place and all the troubles’ in the project, as well as bearing of necessity most of the growing expenses. As far as James Crisp was concerned, Egmont made sure that ‘his lands were long before his bankruptcy perfectly secured to me, so that his creditors have no claim upon them’. This was not because he wanted to absorb the Crisps’ twenty thousand acres, or the land allocations of the other consortium members, into his own huge Florida estates. Rather, as Egmont wrote, ‘I desire a great deal of land because I can then be able to give away a great deal.’ The idea was that James Crisp and the other Adventurers would convey their Florida acreage to him, Egmont, and that he would bear most of the preliminary monetary and managerial burdens. Then, Egmont would ‘execute reconveyances to each of them’, and the Adventurers would take back their now up-and-running Florida estates.80 James Crisp and Elizabeth Marsh had, apparently, found a way of becoming major American landowners at minimal cost to themselves.

  Egmont wanted to develop East Florida in this way because he imagined the country (which he never saw) in quasi-feudal terms, and specifically in terms of Ireland. His family had previously given away over 160,000 of its Irish acres, partly to ‘natives’, but mainly to ‘younger sons of gentlemen and tenants in England’. The result, Egmont believed, had been a ‘bond of union’ on his Cork estates, and a ‘gentle’, useful and appreciative spirit of subordination. He now intended to attempt a similar social and economic experiment across the Atlantic. He envisaged the ‘conquered countries’ of North America being ‘cast into provinces (nearly the size of Ireland) of eighteen million of acres each’. As far as their settlement was concerned, he wanted to encourage ‘the employment of small capitals’ as a means of avoiding both the ‘outrageous monopoly’ characteristic of Caribbean plantation society, and the aimlessness that would leave ‘the creation of the New World … to a fortuitous concourse of heterogeneous atoms’.81 This vision of a systematic and paternalistic American empire shaped his treatment of the ‘Adventurers’, and the way in which he and James Crisp planned the twenty thousand acres allotted to Crisp in East Florida. There was, they decided, to be a ‘Lordship of Lower Crisp’ (or Crispe) on the north shore of Doctor’s Lake, extending inland through the oak, hornbeam and magnolia trees for six miles from what is now Orange Point. This would contain a little (not an unseemly large) town, and at least two ‘villages’. ‘Upper Crisp’, on the south side of the lake, was to include a ‘manor house’ or a ‘castle’ for James Crisp and his family, or their chosen prime tenant, and a village of sixteen log cabins with a one-acre garden, a cow and a pig apiece. There was to be another ‘little town’ where some chosen Native Americans were to be encouraged to settle in the ‘English fashion’, and would be treated with justice. While Egmont supplied most of the money, ethos and official sponsorship for this model community, James Crisp’s role was to fill it with industrious tenants and workers – and with commercial enterprise. ‘Mr. Crisp … really meant to embark himself largely upon the lands of his grant,’ Egmont assured Governor Grant from London, ‘… and was prepared to engage not only many adventurers from hence, but many useful people for raising silk, wine etc. from Italy where he had a great correspondence.’82

  As this suggests, while Egmont saw East Florida through a dream of Ireland, James Crisp seems to have yearned for it to be another, better Mediterranean world. In more than one way, he viewed the colony potentially as home. Spain had ceded it to the British in 1763, and although most of the former colonists had left, East Florida’s buildings, the layout of its agricultural system and the ordering of its one substantial city, St Augustine, forty miles south of Doctor’s Lake, were still recognizably Spanish. As far as James Crisp was concerned therefore, with his memories of more
prosperous years in Barcelona, this new land was in anticipation not alien at all. He knew and had made money in Spain, and had traded with its empire. Now he would get to know and learn how to flourish in a one-time Spanish colony. East Florida’s projected economy, too, seemed peculiarly well suited to his commercial strengths and mixed cultural background. Its coastline was conveniently situated for trade with Spain’s Caribbean and South American colonies. He was used to trading in textiles, and East Florida was expected (legitimately) to offer fertile ground for the growing of indigo, one of the most valuable blue dyes for fabrics. The colony’s rivers, claimed the author of An Account of East Florida (1766), contained ‘rather more fish’ than those in the rest of the American south, and Crisp understood the catching and salting of fish. Vines were expected to grow abundantly in East Florida, which was also judged ‘better adapted to the silk-worm than any country in Europe’, and Crisp had dealt in wine and silks. Most of all, ‘the fogs and dark and gloomy weather, so common in England, are unknown in this country’.83 Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp were in flight from darkness. East Florida was bright.

  ‘Plan of the Lordship of Lower Crispe and the Lordship of Upper Crispe’, a version drafted in 1769 of a plan made earlier by James Crisp and the Earl of Egmont.

  Exactly what Elizabeth thought of the scheme is not known, but she was certainly aware of the details of it, and not just from her husband. Her father, Milbourne Marsh, signed several of the legal documents to do with these Florida lands.84 Her uncle, George Marsh, acted as link man between Egmont and Crisp, while James Morrison, her cousin by marriage, was also one of the ‘Adventurers’. Members of her family became involved in this way because they were a cohesive clan, but also because ‘Upper Crisp’ and ‘Lower Crisp’ did appear a potential haven. They seemed to offer a sanctuary in which James Crisp might finally escape his creditors, and where he and his wife and children could rebuild their lives among other sympathetic souls, including Crisp’s London partner, Francis Warren, who migrated to the province around 1768. Moreover, as substantial landowners, the Crisps could hope to possess assured status there, a manor house even:

  Since the great increase of expence in England, of every article of life, persons of liberal minds but narrow fortunes, feel immeasurable distresses. The impossibility of preserving rank without a fortune, and the mortification of finding our accustomed respect in life daily diminish, and our circumstances more and more confined, is a situation thoroughly miserable.

  Yet, argued the author of this ‘Exhortation to gentlemen of small fortune to settle in East Florida’, published in London two months before James Crisp’s bankruptcy, by crossing the Atlantic to this new land, ‘a gentleman with only a thousand pounds, whether with or without a family’, might be ‘happy, independent, and in a few years rich’. ‘There is neither mystery nor speculation in the case,’ he concluded: ‘it all turns upon a solid matter of fact.’85

  Because so many early schemes woven around British East Florida were naïve, hyperbolic or dishonest, and because of what happened after the Declaration of Independence in 1776, historians have sometimes dismissed the province as doomed to failure from the start, a sort of eighteenth-century New Eden, a swamp relentlessly sucking up money and dreams. In reality, as more experienced land developers recognized, what settlers and investors in East Florida needed, even more than money, was time. Time to survey and mark out viable plantations and farms in a place for which, in 1763, there were not even any British maps available, or reliable descriptions in the English language; time to import a sufficient labour force; and time to establish crops that were appropriate for a subtropical climate and for land that was only a hundred feet above sea level. Those British investors who did have time to hang on had cause, by 1775, to believe that theirs had been a sensible investment, and that future prospects were good. By then the Earl of Egmont’s East Florida lands were securing his heirs a modest profit. Even parts of New Smyrna, Andrew Turnbull’s initially disastrous experiment of relocating Menorcan and other Mediterranean labouring families in East Florida (something that James Crisp had envisaged earlier), were beginning to be well cultivated and to make money.86

  But James Crisp was a bankrupt, and therefore desperately short of time. He was able to keep afloat for a while, and even to cover some of his East Florida expenses, by handling navy victualling business for George Marsh, and by exploring some new and important contacts with the East India Company. Then, in September 1768, under pressure from both new and old debts, he ‘suddenly failed’ to such an extent that absconding became the only alternative to debtors’ prison. East Florida could not be the bolt-hole of choice, because the Adventurers’ agent there, Martin Jollie, had still not obtained all of the necessary official paperwork for Upper and Lower Crisp. It was only on the last day of December 1768 that a surveyor called George Rolfe dispatched the relevant papers to Gerard De Brahm, the brilliant Swiss cartographer who was responsible for mapping Britain’s new North American lands and waterways. In keeping with the ownership of the estates now encircling it, Rolfe proposed that Doctor’s Lake should in the future be renamed ‘Lake Crisp’. Not just twenty thousand acres of land, but also a stretch of water, were to blazon the Crisp name on future maps of Florida.87 Five days after this, on 5 January 1769, on the other side of the Atlantic, with no means of knowing that these documents were finally available, and that his land grant might therefore soon proceed, James Crisp signed a conveyance surrendering all rights in Upper and Lower Crisp to the Earl of Egmont.88 Then, in order to avoid the bailiffs and utter ruin, he carried out a scheme that he had plotted some months before, in the event of Florida and his affairs failing. He set sail from London, without his wife and children, and not westwards for America, but rather to the eastern coast of the Indian subcontinent.

  And Elizabeth Marsh? These years in London were the longest time she spent living continuously on land and in one place. For much of this period hers was a conventional, and therefore largely invisible, and essentially dependent, middle-class female existence. She looked after a husband in a succession of rented houses. She gave birth to and brought up children; and she enjoyed for a while a degree of metropolitan style and socializing that she never subsequently forgot. Now, in early 1769, she was thirty-three years of age, with two children under the age of seven, no money, no house, and of course no paid employment. She was forced back on her parents’ support, and she possessed no guarantee that even if James Crisp survived the voyage out to India, he would ever send for them all to join him there. ‘I … may say, with too much truth,’ she wrote bitterly at this time, ‘that the misfortunes I met with in Barbary have been more than equalled by those I have since experienced, in this land of civil and religious liberty.’89

  Beyond the obvious self-pity, this yoking together of her North African ordeal and her experiences in London contained a fundamental truth and synchronicity that she did not wish however to explore or even to acknowledge. In the mid-1750s, wide-ranging warfare and the transnational ambitions of a Moroccan prince had shattered her life, broken her engagement and forced her into a different marriage. In the 1760s, James Crisp’s enterprises and reputation, which had been built on dealings with four continents, had in turn foundered on events and forces in many different parts of the world. To be sure, he had sometimes overreached himself, just as she, in setting sail from Gibraltar in July 1756, had been personally foolhardy. But in both cases, the root causes of their respective disasters had been changes and conflicts over which individuals could have little or no control. The world was both widening and shrinking, and both of their lives had been twisted out of customary moulds in the process. Elizabeth Marsh was not much concerned, however, with the parallels between her husband’s plight and her own. She was preoccupied with her own despair, and with the need to redeem her reputation and finally to assert herself. It was a commonplace that bankruptcy and a loss of credit-worthiness dishonoured a man in much the same way as loss of sexual virtue, or th
e imputation of it, dishonoured a woman. Directly in Morocco, and now indirectly because of her husband’s far-flung business failures, she had been exposed to shame and ruin twice over. Hers was ‘a story of real distress’: and she resolved to tell it.90

  4

  Writing and Migrating

  THE FEMALE CAPTIVE, Elizabeth Marsh’s only venture into print, and ostensibly an account of her ordeal in Morocco, was published anonymously in London in August 1769. Like so much else that she did, it was a singular, thoroughly individual performance, and simultaneously an outcrop of much wider contemporary trends. Books which allowed men and women the illusion that, ‘without stirring a foot’, they could nonetheless ‘compass the earth and seas, visit all countries, and converse with all nations’ had always been a significant genre wherever printing presses operated, and the more sustained, violent and exploratory contacts occurring between diverse peoples by the mid-eighteenth century only increased the lure, volume and variety of travel writings.1 In 1756, the year of Elizabeth’s capture in the Mediterranean, Charles de Brosses published his Histoire des navigations aux Terres Australes. This was the first major compendium of voyages to the Pacific, and a version speedily appeared in English. Two years earlier, indigenous warriors in Pennsylvania had seized a Scottish indentured servant called Peter Williamson. He converted his real and imaginary adventures in their company into French and Indian Cruelty exemplified in the Life … of Peter Williamson (1757), a more nuanced text than its title suggests, and one of the most frequently reissued and expanded volumes in Britain to be devoted to a vision of Native American society.2