The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  There were other ways in which Elizabeth Marsh departed from convention, and more alert readers noticed this at the time. ‘I have always imagined that nowhere do the arbitrary will and passion of the Prince bear so unlimited sway as in the states of Barbary,’ wrote Thomas Shadwell to Elizabeth’s younger brother, John Marsh, after reading The Female Captive, ‘and I was really surprised to find in your sister’s narrative such an instance of the Emperor of Morocco’s command over his own passions as is therein related.’ Shadwell was the secretary to the British Ambassador at Madrid. He and John Marsh, who was British Consul at Málaga by this stage, were both self-consciously self-improving men, who corresponded regularly about the latest books, pamphlets and literary reviews. Marsh had sent his friend a copy of The Female Captive out of fraternal pride, and because Shadwell possessed first-hand experience of an Islamic society. He was an intimate of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s son, Edward Wortley Montagu, a strange, intelligent individual who claimed (among other things) to have converted to Islam. It was Wortley Montagu’s ‘great encomiums of the government of the country’ that had encouraged Shadwell himself to travel in the Ottoman Empire ‘to examine it with what judgement and capacity I was able’, and he had lived in Istanbul for some time. He discovered there, he told Marsh: ‘a purity of morals and simplicity of manners … which I have not found amongst the inhabitants of any other country’. Nor did he think the heartland of the Ottoman Empire any ‘worse administered’ than the Christian polities he knew. Like many other Turkophiles, however, Shadwell drew the line at the Ottomans’ North African provinces, and at Morocco. For him, this region was barbarous and peculiarly subject to capricious, oppressive rulers, and he took it for granted that tyranny within a state was naturally ‘conjoined to the servitude of women’.42 Political despotism by its very nature, Shadwell believed, in accordance with the writings of Montesquieu and others, must also foster acts of male despotism against the weaker sex. The coercion and passivity that were believed to exist within the harem only mirrored a more profound absence of liberty outside its luxurious, imprisoning walls. Thomas Shadwell was consequently perplexed by Elizabeth Marsh’s account of Sidi Muhammad’s behaviour in The Female Captive. She herself had described him as ‘an absolute Prince’.43 What did it mean, then, that such a ruler, in such a place, had exhibited chivalry and restraint in the face of a young, helpless and desirable female?

  Of course, Elizabeth Marsh was not versed in abstract political theories: she was just a reader of novels. She described Sidi Muhammad’s sexual advances and his ultimate mercy as she did, partly out of a recognition that he had indeed been generous ‘in permitting me to leave him, when it was in his power to detain me’. But her memory and interpretation of events are likely once again to have been influenced by Samuel Richardson, and especially by his most popular work, Pamela (1740–41). The young heroine of this novel is a servant, impoverished but deserving, possessed of ‘qualifications above my degree’ and ‘always scribbling’ (rather like Elizabeth Marsh). Pamela’s parents have been financially ruined, caught up in the pernicious web of credit and bankruptcy (rather like James Crisp), but ‘They are honest: They are good: it is no crime to be poor.’ And Pamela is also a captive of sorts, confined to the secluded rural estate of her employer, the wealthy ‘Mr B’, who lusts after her and tries to seduce her with lavish gifts (just as Sidi Muhammad had tried to tempt Elizabeth). At the end of Richardson’s novel, however, Mr B refrains from ravishing the eponymous heroine because he is overwhelmed by her innocence and her wholly exceptional qualities.44 Elizabeth Marsh seems to have wanted to alert readers of The Female Captive to the parallels between her situation and that of the virtuous Pamela. In the process, she made Sidi Muhammad appear rather less an alien despot, and rather more a recognizable and sympathetic figure who was amenable to conscience and ultimately responsive to a woman in distress.

  This may indeed have been deliberate on her part, because she seems to have censored the record in order to soften the Sultan’s image. During her last visit to his palace, Elizabeth told her parents on one occasion, she had witnessed ‘a young European slave’ being abruptly decapitated for insolence. True or no, this incident was suppressed when she came to publish. So the impression she gives of Sidi Muhammad is in the end deeply fractured. There are instances of his ‘despotic power’, but these are mingled with evidence that he was actually ‘a tender hearted man’.45 There are other fractures. Elizabeth Marsh wanted to appear in print as virtuous, Christian and wronged. Yet she was also willing to admit to her ambivalent responses to attempted seduction, and eager to remind herself and to inform others of the existence of her lost fiancé, and of John Court’s doting attachment in Morocco. And even as she sought to defend and champion her husband James Crisp, she also wanted – or so it seems – to belittle him. Like her desire to appear simultaneously as frail and as physically resilient, her treatment of these four men suggests not only uncertainty over how best to present herself, but also splits and divisions within her mind and her emotions.

  These four male actors, Sidi Muhammad, Towry, Court and Crisp, serve another function in Elizabeth Marsh’s book. At times when the world seems dangerously open, men and women often try to close and contain it through stories. Usually such stories are private, the stuff of imagination only. Occasionally, though, they are committed to paper. This was the deeper function of The Female Captive. As is often the case with individual and family sagas that are composed in periods of crisis or extreme change, the book is in part an allegory.46 Telling a story of her encounters with four different men allowed Elizabeth to imagine other life-choices than the one she had been obliged to make in 1756 and was now beginning to resent. This plot line also translated the changing world she was conspicuously exposed to into a more human, more comprehensible form. A Royal Navy captain who is familiar with the world’s oceans, a Muslim prince with international commercial and diplomatic ambitions, a Barbary trader who has also ‘resided in the southern parts of Africa’, and a merchant trading across the continents: these are the male characters who chiefly circle around Elizabeth Marsh as she tells her story. The Female Captive can thus be seen, along with so much else, as a book by which she sought to represent her world.

  Writing as she did was a cruel, even brutal act in regard to her absent husband, who was doing his best, as it turned out, to restore their fortunes in Bengal and Madras. Especially as copies of her book were bound to circulate among those relations, friends, neighbours and former business associates of Crisp who had subscribed to its publication. Exactly what it says about the state of their marriage and her own mind that Elizabeth Marsh was willing to commit these mixed messages about her husband to print, while also publishing compromising material about her relations with other men, is not clear. She undoubtedly felt angry and humiliated in the aftermath of Crisp’s business failures and flight. She may conceivably also have felt something more.

  The list of eighty-three subscribers at the front of The Female Captive provides an optic into the range of the couple’s contacts by this stage. It includes some of her women friends about whom we otherwise know little: a Miss Franks, a Mrs Kettle, Mrs Batt, and Mrs Jewson, her former neighbour from Camomile Street. Then there are the London traders and professionals with whom the Crisps had done business in their early, prosperous days in the capital, and who were still prepared out of charity to subsidize Elizabeth’s book: Walter Cope, James Crisp’s insurance broker in Cornhill; Alexander Allan, a Scottish wine merchant in Mark Lane, who may have purchased some of Crisp’s Spanish brandy, or catered to the couple’s joint and growing taste for alcohol; and Ralph Fresselicque, a Huguenot attorney who had acted for Crisp during his bankruptcy in 1767.47 There is predictably a smattering of navy names, too, including some that reveal how the Crisps, in their London heyday, had been able and eager (as George Marsh grumbled) to forge contacts with people of a much higher social position. Knowing Captain Matthew Whitwell RN and his wife, who each subs
cribed to a copy of The Female Captive, evidently also won them the acquaintance of Whitwell’s elder brother, John. The latter had changed his name on inheriting the great house and estate of Audley End near Saffron Walden in Essex.48 Sir John Griffin Griffin, as John Whitwell had now become, and Lady Griffin both subscribed in 1769 so that Elizabeth Marsh could publish.

  There is another prominent group among the book’s subscribers. It includes Charles Pinfold, who had been Governor of Barbados since 1761, and William Rufane, a former Governor of Martinique. Then there is Ralph Payne, born on the tiny Caribbean island of St Kitts, and a future Captain General and Governor-in-Chief of the Leeward Islands. And there is Sir John Boyd, who owned plantations in the Windward Islands and Grenada, as well as a share of Bance Island, which is situated twenty miles upriver from modern-day Freetown in Sierra Leone and is now called Bunce Island. An English fort and factory had existed on Bance Island since the 1670s, for while it was very small – only fifteen acres – its location made it highly profitable. At the limits of navigability for early modern European ocean-going ships, Bance Island was a natural meeting place for incoming slave purchasers and African slave traders bringing their human wares with them on the river routes down from the interior. In the two decades before the publication of The Female Captive, ten thousand African slaves are known to have passed through and been exported from Bance Island by British traders.49

  Members of the Crisp family had been involved in the transatlantic slave trade since the mid-seventeenth century; and like most substantial London merchants, James Crisp had relations and business contacts who had some connection with the slave trade and the Caribbean. A John Crisp, who was kin to James Crisp in some way, was active in London in the 1750s and ’60s, recruiting indentured labourers to be sent out to the mainland American colonies and the Caribbean islands.50 But while James Crisp dealt occasionally in plantation products in the 1750s and early ’60s, for as long as his company, Crisp Brothers, continued to flourish, he appears to have remained aloof from the purchase, sale and enforced transport overseas of other human beings. Like so much else, this changed after his bankruptcy in 1767.

  Becoming involved in the Earl of Egmont’s colonizing projects in East Florida, in the hope of replenishing his fortunes, also brought James Crisp into direct contact with issues of forced labour and its supply. From the outset, James Grant, the British Governor of East Florida, had advised investors in the new colony that white voluntary immigrants alone were unlikely to be sufficient to cultivate it and make it pay, and that – as in neighbouring Georgia – importing unfree black and possibly Native American labour was going to be essential. By the time James Crisp and the other ‘Adventurers’ joined his East Florida project, this was also the Earl of Egmont’s view. Egmont was eager to recruit cheap white labour and settlers from the Mediterranean, but he also urged each man in the consortium to provide ten black slaves for the land granted them in East Florida during the first year of their investment, ten more in the second year, and twenty more within six years.51 Part of Crisp’s attractiveness to Egmont as a business partner may indeed have been the combination he offered of a wide range of contacts in the Mediterranean, and long-established family links with the Caribbean and the slave trade. By the same token, one of Crisp’s fellow middle-class ‘Adventurers’ in Egmont’s East Florida schemes was James Anderson, a nephew of Richard Oswald, an immensely rich Scottish merchant who was by far the main share-owner on Bance Island.52

  Richard Oswald is known to have sent slave families from here to his own East Florida plantations in the 1760s, just as the Earl of Egmont is known to have spent over £3700 purchasing and bringing over ninety-five black slaves to East Florida between 1767 and 1770. How many African slaves James Crisp himself was responsible for organizing through his London, Caribbean and shipping contacts, and ultimately laid claim to in East Florida, is not known, but there were certainly some. In December 1768, still hoping for a last-minute miracle that would retrieve his affairs, he had leased his estates of Upper and Lower Crisp in East Florida back to Egmont for a year. The legal documents involved describe these lands as coming complete with all their ‘Negro houses’ and ‘Negro and other slaves of both sexes’.53 The plethora of major Caribbean and slave-trade players included in Elizabeth Marsh’s subscription list was thus a testimony to how, in the wake of bankruptcy, James Crisp had reverted to his family’s ancestral links with West Africa and with the slave trade.

  And Elizabeth Marsh herself? Like most people at this time, in all continents, she took the existence of slavery for granted; and for better reasons than most, because she knew about the phenomenon in diverse settings, and in diverse forms. She had listened to her parents’ stories of how the maroon risings in Jamaica had led to their departure from the island in 1735, and to the fact that she had been born in England. She must have encountered free black sailors, and possibly also enslaved blacks, while sailing aboard Royal Navy ships. In Morocco she had come very close to enslavement herself, and had seen and conversed with black household and military slaves, and with white slaves. In the 1770s she would take advantage of the system whereby the very poor in Dhaka, then part of Bengal, sometimes out of necessity became slaves to the more prosperous, a system in existence before the British arrived there. About the transatlantic trade in slaves, however, her sentiments are unknown. By the early nineteenth century the Marsh family had connected itself by marriage and friendship to some leading abolitionist dynasties, such as the Roscoes of Liverpool; and George Marsh at least appears to have collected material on the slave trade, and to have gone out of his way in the 1780s to assist poor blacks in London.54 So it is possible that, like others in Britain, Elizabeth Marsh was beginning by the 1760s to feel some scruples about the slave trade, even as she was obliged to seek out and accept charity from individuals who were vitally connected with it.

  There is a further possibility that can only be touched on. If her mother was indeed a mulatto, a former slave herself, or a descendant of someone seized in West Africa and shipped to Jamaica, Elizabeth Marsh’s reactions to her husband involving himself in the slave trade in order to keep the family solvent may have been disordered and confused. Those ‘unacquainted’ with Morocco, she wrote inaccurately but pointedly in The Female Captive, would find it strange that ‘Mahometans’ held their Christian slaves ‘as sacred as the tombs of their saints, from the ill usage of any but their master, the Prince’.55 The treatment of non-Christian slaves shipped out of West Africa, she would have known, was not like this. Some of the ambivalence and occasional cruelty she displays towards her husband in the book, which would become more pronounced in the future, may conceivably have been deepened by these tensions. By her knowledge that, for all her insistence in print that he was ‘a man of honour and a Christian’, James Crisp had also become entangled in the trade in slaves. For a married woman, publishing anonymously could be a declaration of independence, and not simply an act of modesty and decorum. Elizabeth Marsh’s book is explicitly and only by ‘HERSELF’. For whatever reason, she chose not to appear in print as Mrs Crisp.56

  Yet in August 1770, the month before her thirty-fifth birthday, she left England with her daughter Elizabeth Maria and sailed to join James Crisp in Madras. ‘Nature is turn’d upside down,’ the novelist Laurence Sterne had written some years earlier in regard to another woman setting sail to the subcontinent in order to rejoin a less than satisfactory husband: ‘for wives go to visit husbands, at greater perils, and take longer journeys to pay them this civility now-a-days out of ill-will than good … How far are you going to see your helpmate – and at such hazards to your life.’57 As Sterne knew full well, the options available to married women in this position were in reality very limited, especially if they were not affluent. Elizabeth Marsh might have chosen to remain with her parents in their large, subsidized house at Chatham. But this would have been to close down any prospect of a rapprochement with her husband, and would have left her in legal limbo; and w
hile her attachment to her family of birth was immensely strong, so – judging by her actions – was her desire repeatedly to get away from it. This restlessness, as well as residual affection for Crisp and a wish that her children should have the prospect of growing up with their father, seems to have influenced her determination to set out. Sir William Musgrave noted down her public rationale for leaving: that ‘on her husband’s success in India she went thither to him’, but this was hardly the case.58 At this stage, neither James Crisp nor Elizabeth Marsh was in a position to have a confident expectation of prosperity in the subcontinent. She embarked for India because it seemed the right and the only thing to do, and because she felt most at home when in motion.

  Her petition ‘to proceed to her husband in the Company’s military service at Bengal, [and] also to take her daughter Elizabeth with her’ was approved by the Court of Directors of the East India Company in London in June 1770. Recognizing her poverty, the directors excused her from ‘paying the customary sum for permission’.59 No Company ships were available at this point, since East Indiamen normally only set out from England in the autumn and the spring. So she opted to travel on the Dolphin, an extremely fast, three-masted Royal Navy sloop, built in 1751 and with room for thirty-two guns. As Milbourne and George Marsh would have known, this was one of the first navy vessels to have its bottom sheathed with copper, a powerful barrier against the weeds and sea worms that accumulated on wooden-hulled ships and slowed them down. The Dolphin’s copper sheathing had been renewed in 1770, so it was a highly desirable vessel, sailing at a time when no other ships to India were available, and holding out the promise of a more rapid voyage than the usual six or seven months. If he accepted ‘one third’ of the civilians clamouring for a passage on the Dolphin, its captain, Digby Dent, complained that summer, ‘he ought to have the command of a First Rate instead of a sloop’. In the event Dent turned down most of the would-be passengers petitioning for a berth, since ‘there was not a single inch unoccupied’.60 But he agreed to take Elizabeth Marsh and her daughter. Of course he did. Both her uncle and her father now played vital roles in navy victualling, and were therefore in a position to repay Captain Dent a favour. Moreover, Dent knew Milbourne Marsh from Gibraltar, and his father had served with him in Jamaica, while the Dolphin’s own ship’s master was a Joseph Milbourne, one of Elizabeth’s vast network of maritime ‘cousins’.61 It was a classic example of how her travels were facilitated by her family’s multifarious naval contacts.