The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  The decade after the appearance of Elizabeth’s own book saw the Scottish explorer James Bruce reaching the source of the Blue Nile, Olaudah Equiano voyaging to the Antarctic, the publication of Louis de Bougainville’s account of his circumnavigation and researches in the Pacific (1771), John Hawkesworth’s version of James Cook’s first voyage on the Endeavour (1773), Constantine John Phipps’s A Voyage towards the North Pole (1774), and Cook’s own Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777). By comparison with these polite and popular bestsellers and startling journeys, The Female Captive was a minor work by an under-educated woman who had been exposed to the Maghreb only very briefly. But it included previously unavailable ethnographic and political observations, and it was, among many other things, a travel book. Its publisher, Charles Bathurst of Fleet Street, who was also a printer and a bookseller, took care to market it as such. He insisted on a no-nonsense subtitle (‘A Narrative of Facts which happened in Barbary’), and prefaced the work with a map of Morocco.

  Elizabeth Marsh’s book was a product of its time in a more specific respect. In the 1760s, more than twice as many new and reprinted works of fiction by women were issued in Britain as in the previous decade.3 There was also a marked increase in women’s non-fiction, including a sub-genre to which The Female Captive loosely belongs. By now, the number of British men holding official, imperial or commercial posts outside Europe was expanding conspicuously. Some of these individuals took their womenfolk along with them, and some of these women subsequently wrote and published. An early example of this new writing about the non-European world by attendant British females was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters, which were published posthumously in three volumes in 1763, and included her experiences in Istanbul in 1717–18, when her husband had been Ambassador Extraordinary to the Ottoman court. Lady Mary had preserved (and invented) some of her letters home from Istanbul, Belgrade and Tunis, intending to work them up into a coherent travel book, but she was too patrician, and too much of her generation, to risk such sustained exposure in print in her lifetime. The belated appearance of what became known as her Turkish letters, a calculated mix of reportage, reflection and fiction, influenced passages in Elizabeth Marsh’s book, and possibly also Charles Bathurst’s willingness to publish it. ‘I confess,’ Lady Mary says in the preface to the Turkish letters,

  I am malicious enough to desire, that the world should see, to how much better purpose the LADIES travel than their LORDS; and that, whilst it is surfeited with Male-Travels, all in the same tone, and stuft with the same trifles; a lady has the skill to strike out a new path, and to embellish a worn-out subject.4

  The women most likely to strike out and commit their travel writings to print remained, however, those not born to regard themselves securely as ladies. Janet Schaw, a Scot with aristocratic connections, compiled a long, vivid narrative of her voyages to the West Indies and North Carolina in 1774, accompanying a brother in transit to a government post in Jamaica. She was careful to leave it unpublished. Middle- and lower-class women travelling overseas with and for their menfolk could be less diffident. Frances Brooke was the wife of a British Army chaplain, and joined him in Quebec in 1763, just days before it was formally declared a British colony. She incorporated some of her husband’s military experiences during the Seven Years War in Nova Scotia and New York, and her own observations of settlements of Huron peoples and French Catholic society in Quebec, in The History of Emily Montague (1769), the first novel in English to be devoted to Canada, and a highly successful, still readable work of faction. Jemima Kindersley, who published Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies in 1777, was from a similar background, the widow of an army officer who took her to Bengal and Allahabad in the mid-1760s, and then died, leaving her in economic distress. Mary Ann Parker, a navy widow who had previously accompanied her husband to Botany Bay, prefaced her account of their journey, A Voyage round the world (1795), with a plea on behalf of her ‘numerous family’ of bereft children. Anna Maria Falconbridge was less impecunious, but still part of this same pattern of dependent but opinionated females writing in the last third of the eighteenth century about a more interconnected world. Falconbridge’s social origins were modest and controversial. Her first husband, a slave-ship surgeon turned abolitionist, was dispatched in 1791 to re-establish a colony of free blacks in Sierra Leone. She made use of her experiences alongside him there to write her Narrative of two voyages to the River Sierra Leone (1794–95) so as to make money, communicate topographical and ethnographic information, and advance a cause – in her case support for slavery, but opposition to colonialism.5

  Elizabeth Marsh had obvious points in common with these women. She too was socially marginal. The overland and overseas journeys that she described in The Female Captive had also occurred in the wake of her accompanying a male relation in British state employ abroad, in this case her father Milbourne Marsh. And, more even than was true of Brooke, Kindersley, Parker or Falconbridge, she wrote while in desperate need of funds.

  Yet The Female Captive differs from most self-professed travel books, whether by female or male authors, the formally educated or the autodidactic. Strange, awkwardly written, and even shocking, it broke new ground in more than geographical and observational terms. Contemporaries dimly perceived this. Issued in two slim volumes priced at five shillings the set, and manifestly written by an amateur, the book sold out rapidly. About 750 copies were probably issued in 1769. There was no later edition, and by the early 1770s Marsh’s book had become ‘very scarce’ and difficult to obtain. Several circulating libraries kept it in stock for decades, but only one copy now appears to survive.6 This suggests that The Female Captive was swiftly bought up by the sort of private individuals whose libraries and other belongings were not preserved after their deaths, and/or that copies were scanned and thumbed so often, or lent out to others so much, that they simply fell to pieces. The book also received more critical attention than most published at this time. No review seems to have greeted the initial publication of Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish letters, but The Female Captive provoked at least two long notices. Elizabeth’s reviewers, though, were left bewildered and irritated. Her book contained ‘no very interesting incidents’, one complained, but then went on to quote from it for five pages.7 The biggest challenge it posed for unwitting readers was that it was about less, but also far more, than its title promised.

  Unlike many travel writers, Elizabeth Marsh possessed no detailed notes compiled at the time of her journey, and no conspicuous reserves of knowledge about the society she was describing, because her Moroccan progress had been involuntary and carried out under duress. And unlike Peter Williamson and other narrators of captivity, she was not writing in the immediate aftermath of escape. When she planned The Female Captive, events in the late 1760s were far more to the foreground of her mind than ‘Facts which happened in Barbary’ in 1756. As a result, the book became not just a version of her Mediterranean and Moroccan experiences, but a personal statement, and a meditation on a variety of restrictions and desires. This is why it still possesses the power to move. Travel writing, like the novel, focuses on ‘the centrality of the self’, and for Elizabeth Marsh this was a critical part of its attraction.8 The Female Captive is a guide to her state of mind and her emotions in the wake of James Crisp’s bankruptcy and flight. It is the closest she comes to sustained autobiography. It is also a work in which she gives more away than she probably intended. As the title page proclaimed, this was ‘WRITTEN BY HERSELF’.9

  Elizabeth Marsh wrote the book in her parents’ house in Chatham, Kent, where she took refuge with her children, Burrish and Elizabeth Maria, after James Crisp left for India in early 1769, and no money remained to pay for lodgings in London. In returning to England in 1765, at the age of fifty-six, and accepting the post of Agent Victualler at Chatham, her father Milbourne Marsh had made both a professional and a creative sacrifice. Two years before, at t
he end of the war, he had resumed his old job as Naval Officer in Menorca. Given the brief to oversee essential repairs on the island in the aftermath of the French occupation, he had instead devised a scheme that transformed its dockyard into the most substantial and impressive overseas naval facility controlled anywhere by a European power.

  Milbourne had tried his hand at such plans before. While in Gibraltar he had presented his superiors with a scheme to modify its defences, ‘humbly proposed by Mr Marsh Master Shipwright’. He was now confident enough to attempt something far more ambitious. Early in 1764 he submitted a set of plans that provided for some of Menorca’s dockyard amenities to be removed from the existing crowded and inadequate site near Mahón, and reestablished on Saffron Island, a speck of ground just offshore from the north side of the harbour. ‘And having proposed the doing thereof,’ reported the Navy Board to the Admiralty in London excitedly,

  as also the levelling the island, and that wharfs, careening pits, sheds for stores and other like conveniences may then be erected, the whole expense whereof, he has estimated will amount … to the sum of £6348 exclusive of timber to be sent from England … And he having also acquainted us, that by performing the aforesaid works, the island will then have upon it six [in fact eight] wharfs, each of two hundred feet long and be capable of careening that number of ships at the same time.10

  It was a measure of how seriously London took the Mediterranean in strategic, imperial and commercial terms – and of how seriously Milbourne Marsh was taken – that, at a time of anxious post-war retrenchment, this initial, far too conservative financial estimate was accepted, Saffron Island was purchased, and the scheme put in force. It was Milbourne who drew up most of the plans for the extensions to the dockyard and for Saffron Island’s eight new careening wharves, based on observations and notes he had been assembling since his first visits to Menorca in the 1720s. He also designed the new dockyard buildings, many of which remain intact today. They are austere, clean-lined constructions, sheds, warehouses and dormitory wings for the dockyard workers and for visiting sailors and officers, with their only concession to ornament a handsome clock tower for the measuring out of time and work. Saffron Island, ‘so necessary and noble an undertaking’, as one senior navy officer later described it, was where Milbourne Marsh’s deep knowledge of the practicalities of ship design and repair, his talent for technical drawing, and his compulsion wherever he was to build, finally came together in a significant way.11 This was the project he had substantially to abandon in 1765 in order to return to England so as to be nearer to his only daughter and his failing son-in-law.

  Superficially, his new posting seemed a promotion. Perfectly located for defending southern England and London, and with a large, naturally protected harbour, Chatham had been the site of a naval dockyard since at least the 1500s. Since then, its highly specialized buildings had grown in tandem with the navy itself, and when Milbourne took up his position in October 1765, Chatham’s dockyard extended for over eighty acres. ‘The buildings here are indeed like the ships themselves, surprisingly large, and in their several kinds, beautiful,’ Daniel Defoe had written earlier in the century:

  The warehouses, or rather, streets of warehouses and storehouses for laying up naval treasure are the largest in dimension and the most in number, that are anywhere to be seen in the world: the rope-walk for making cables and the forges for making anchors and other ironwork, bear a proportion to the rest; as also the wet-dock for keeping masts and yards of the greatest size, where they lie sunk in the water to preserve them, the boat-yard, the anchor yard; all like the whole, monstrously great and extensive … like a well-ordered city.12

  But although Chatham’s dockyard now looked even more ‘monstrously great and extensive’, it was in partial decline, the gradual silting up of the River Medway clogging its usefulness and range of functions. By the 1760s, deeper-bottomed vessels were taking over three months to sail along the river into Chatham’s estuary, and the largest warships could only attempt the journey for a few days during the spring tides. No longer able to operate as a prime base for the fleet, Chatham dockyard was obliged to reinvent itself. Its labour force of 1400 men increasingly concentrated on repair work and ship construction (Horatio Nelson’s flagship the Victory was built and later refitted here), while the dockyard’s senior officers consoled themselves with their substantial, often elegant brick houses, a legacy of when this was Britain’s most important naval site on land.13

  Chatham’s victualling yard was situated a little upstream of the main dockyard. Nothing remains of it today, but the surviving ground plan of the house that Milbourne Marsh occupied in his capacity as Agent Victualler shows that this dwelling was close to the street, and its dimensions – thirty-two by thirty feet – suggest at least eight or nine rooms arranged on three main storeys, in addition to attics and cellars. At the back of the house there were steps leading down to a seventy-five-foot-long walled garden, while across the yard Milbourne had access to a wash-house and stables, and his own office, maintained, one visitor recorded, ‘in the completest order imaginable’.14 Lord Tyrawley, an irascible, efficient man who was Governor of Gibraltar during Elizabeth Marsh’s Moroccan ordeal, expressed a widely-held view when he complained that men of Milbourne’s type and rank, ‘paymasters, clerks, storekeepers, agent victuallers, naval officers and all this pen and ink branch’, who were provided with tied houses of this sort, could end up ‘better lodged than … persons of birth and quality and every way their superior’. This indeed was part of the allure of a senior job in naval administration, especially for those born ambitious and property-less.15 But the spacious Queen Anne and Georgian residences made available at taxpayers’ expense to senior employees at Chatham and the navy’s other dockyards were more than perquisites. Like the dockyards as a whole, they demonstrated in brick and mortar and stone the growing power and wealth of the British state. They also signalled that ‘pen and ink’ men, administrators, accountants, makers of lists and archives and plans, were becoming increasingly important here, as in other states. The management and supervision of victualling, which preoccupied both Marsh brothers after 1765, was not the most heroic branch of the navy, but it was the most vital. Far more than improved ship design, or acts of individual heroism, it was the growing capacity to provision ships, which might remain out of reach of land for months on end, in such a way that sailors kept healthy and active, that most underpinned the Royal Navy’s growing effectiveness and global reach at this time. As James Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific in 1768–71, 1772–75 and 1776–80 demonstrated, more efficient naval victualling was also making possible increasingly ambitious voyages of maritime exploration. As one circumnavigator remarked in the 1760s: ‘Discovering new worlds … depends on the men’s health.’16

  Elizabeth Marsh was never in a position to forget that her refuge in Chatham was also a vital site of industry. She was more spaciously accommodated than she had been in London. She had a room of her own in which to write, and a garden in which the children could play. Her mother was on hand to supervise them while she worked, and at intervals she could walk or ride to view the yellowing waters of the Medway. But, whatever she did, she was surrounded by activity and noise. From the windows at the front of the house she could see the coopers’ shop, the place where wooden casks were made, and the pickle store, since pickling, along with drying, smoking and salting, were the only available means of preserving food for long voyages. The storehouses for meat and beer, and the bakehouse where they made ships’ biscuits and the two-pound brown loaves ‘commonly call’d by the sailors Negroe heads’, were located a little further away. So were the slaughterhouse and the cutting house, though this scarcely mattered. Almost every day, oxen, sheep, pigs and cows arrived on the hoof in the street outside the Agent Victualler’s house, and were driven through the entrance of the yard into a pound where they were left to cool down for twenty-four hours. She would hear the sound of them. Their time elapsed, the animals woul
d be ‘examined by a master butcher, and by the officer of the cutting-house; and then if the master butcher and the officer of the cutting-house approve, they kill the beasts’. The carcasses were promptly hacked into quarters, weighed in special scales, and then hurried to the yard’s boiling, salting and pickling houses, while the pound was swept and got ready for the next batch of short-term occupants.17 The title Elizabeth selected for her book can possibly be understood as an allusion not simply to her time in Morocco, but also to her compulsory stay in Chatham for months on end, with no husband, only solicitous, anxious parents and bewildered children, and outside, scenes of incessant work and the cries of imprisoned animals.

  The Female Captive was also explicitly an assertion of exceptionality. As with Henry Fielding’s satire The Female Husband (1746), or the story of Hannah Snell’s reputed actions in the ranks and in drag, The Female Soldier, a semi-fictional work that had been a runaway success in 1750, the title of Elizabeth’s book announced that the experiences contained in its pages were unusual, even aberrant as far as a woman was concerned. This was a legitimate claim. Substantial numbers of European women, and far more women who were black, had of course been held captive over the centuries, in the Maghreb as in other regions of the world. But it was almost unknown for a woman who had been held against her will in an Islamic polity subsequently to admit to her experiences at length in print. As far as Morocco was concerned, the only precedent for The Female Captive was an account by a Dutch Catholic, Maria Ter Meetelen, of her twelve-year captivity there, which was published in Holland in 1748 and which Elizabeth Marsh can never have seen. Apart from being far more protracted, Meetelen’s captivity had been significantly different in another respect. When Moroccan corsairs captured her ship in 1731, she was a twenty-seven-year-old matron, and her first husband was seized alongside her.18