The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  An individual’s decision to migrate, John Berger has written, is often ‘permeated by historical necessities of which neither he nor anybody he meets is aware’, and to a degree this was true in Elizabeth Marsh’s case.62 She had her own distinctive reasons for leaving when and as she did, but she was also part of what has been called ‘a world in motion’: the appreciable rise after the Seven Years War in the number of people involved in long-distance overseas migration. As had been the case before the war, most of those migrating over extensive distances after 1763 were Africans sailing into slavery. More than 70 per cent of the slaves traded across the Atlantic by France during the entire course of the eighteenth century, for instance, were forced to make this passage in the three decades after 1762. The scale and range of white diaspora also mushroomed at this time. Between 1760 and 1775, some 125,000 individuals left Britain and Ireland for different locations in North America, encouraged – as the Crisps had been in regard to East Florida – by the availability of so much new conquered land there. Simultaneously, those European powers that had lost rather than gained territory in the Seven Years War now sought out new extra-European lands in compensation, and migrants who might inhabit them. Between 1763 and 1765, over thirteen thousand men, women and children set out from France and the German states for ‘Kourou’, a new settlement in Guyana designed on Enlightenment principles. This did not prevent most of them speedily dying from disease and starvation.63

  Sketch of the Dolphin made by Captain Samuel Wallis on his voyage around the world, 1766–68.

  Overseas migration to the Indian subcontinent in the aftermath of the Seven Years War is rarely considered in tandem with these other long-distance movements of black and white human beings, in part because the numbers involved were so much smaller. Unless they were Crown or East India Company officials, Britons were forbidden – at least in theory – to travel to India without a licence. Because of this, and the dangers and huge distances involved, the British male population in the subcontinent remained very sparse, and the total number of ‘white’ women was minute. When Elizabeth Marsh and her daughter arrived in Madras in 1771, only eighty-five women and children classified as European were listed as residing there.64 Nonetheless, and as suggested by the Crisps’ own progress from favouring East Florida to migrating to India, there were ways in which British voyagers to the East after 1763 resembled their counterparts who were voyaging westwards. Their numbers too expanded after the ending of the Seven Years War. Before 1756, it is unlikely that there were ever at any time more than a thousand nominal Britons in the subcontinent. By contrast, 6500 men who were originally from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Caribbean or mainland North America are known to have left Britain for India in the ten years after 1762, and the real total must have been higher. Those leaving Britain for India, like those departing for America, came disproportionately from the towns, and were mostly male and mostly young. The majority had either been born in very modest circumstances, like Elizabeth Marsh, or, like James Crisp, they had undergone some kind of economic crisis in adulthood. And whether they were setting out for North America or for the Indian subcontinent, most migrants were at some level ‘lured … by their own ambitions’, not simply acting out of desperation.65 Elizabeth Marsh did not embark on the Dolphin with any firm expectation that she, her husband and her children would soon return prosperously to Britain. Some of James Crisp’s creditors were still trying to recover their debts, so remaining overseas was his only real safety. But this did not mean that she – or he – migrated without hope or plans for the future.

  There were other ways, and Elizabeth Marsh was conscious of some of them, in which this, her first journey to India, was freighted with a wider significance. As she had cause to know, the Dolphin was the only vessel at this time to have circumnavigated the world twice over. Between July 1764 and May 1766, the ship had sailed to the Pacific and back under the command of Commodore the Hon. John Byron in twenty-two months, and at the cost of only seven men’s lives, a faster speed and a lower death rate than any of James Cook’s three Pacific voyages achieved. During his own circumnavigation, Byron laid claim to the Falkland Islands for the British, an acquisition which the then First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Egmont, viewed as key to ‘the whole Pacific Ocean … the ports & trade of Chile, Peru, Panama, [and] Acapulco’. In 1766–68, Captain Samuel Wallis had taken the Dolphin to the Pacific again, under orders this time to locate ‘a continent of great extent never yet explored or seen between the straits of Magellan and New Zealand’.66 In the event, Wallis ‘discovered’ Tahiti and fourteen other islands, but not the great south land. Elizabeth Marsh knew a great deal about the Dolphin’s voyages of exploration and empire, because her uncle George Marsh had been involved in planning them while working for Egmont at the Admiralty. ‘When Admiral Byron went the voyage round the world,’ George Marsh later recorded, ‘he asked me … if I could recommend any gentleman to go with him as his secretary.’ Naturally, Elizabeth’s uncle immediately located ‘a very proper fit person’ to sail alongside Byron and to compile a record of his circumnavigation, and ‘recommended … him accordingly’.67

  As was true of these earlier, more ambitious voyages, the Dolphin’s mission to the Indian subcontinent in 1770 was bound up with an increasingly confident sense of imperial entitlement on the part of the rulers of the British state. Living in London in the late 1750s and ’60s, just streets away from East India House, with Parliament close by, and with the capital’s newsprint at their disposal, James Crisp and Elizabeth Marsh had been well placed to keep abreast of how rapidly the East India Company’s role was evolving. The couple were in London when the news arrived of the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and of the Company’s defeat of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. They were there in 1765, when the Mughal Emperor was forced to grant the Company revenue-raising powers, the diwani, over the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in northern India. And they were there in 1767, when Parliament embarked on its first full-scale inquiry into the Company’s affairs in the subcontinent. The corruption, violence and incompetence revealed in this inquiry, and in a flood of pamphlets and books published at this time, deepened the conviction that the East India Company’s affairs were now ‘much too big for the management of a body of merchants’. For commercial, fiscal, humanitarian and imperial reasons, it was increasingly argued, the British state needed to assume a greater supervisory role over the Company, and over those sectors of the subcontinent it was seeking to rule.68 This new voyage of the Dolphin, already a vessel with a reputation for extending British power over distance, was part of a range of official initiatives intended to achieve exactly this.

  Along with Elizabeth Marsh and her daughter and its 150-man international crew, the ship was transporting to the subcontinent two sets of the insignia and ribbons of the Order of the Bath. The intended recipients were Sir John Lindsey, a Scottish naval officer, and an experienced Irish soldier, General Eyre Coote, who had been ordered to Bengal and Madras to monitor and report on the East India Company’s performance there. The Order of the Bath is awarded only at the pleasure of the British monarch, and it was being shipped out to Lindsey and Coote in 1770 so as to underscore their role and authority as agents of the Crown. ‘We fear the worst,’ an East India Company official wrote on hearing the news of the Dolphin’s arrival in Madras in late February 1771: ‘… that the [British] Government are about to interfere with the Company in the management of affairs in India.’69

  The ship’s imperial and global portentousness affected even Elizabeth Marsh and her six-year-old daughter in their damp, crowded cabin. They and the crew of the Dolphin kept remarkably healthy during the early stages of the voyage, but the ship ‘strained much in the weather we met with’; and in October 1770 it had to veer away from its planned route and schedule and moor off Rio de Janeiro, then part of the Portuguese empire. Captain Dent hoped ‘to have got the ship caulked’ here, and to reprovision with the sugar, coffee, rum, tobacco,
limes and cheap vegetables that the new capital of the Brazils famously afforded. This project, and Elizabeth Marsh’s own plans to spend days exploring the city, were aborted when Rio’s Viceroy refused to grant the Dolphin ‘any assistance’, and they were forced to set sail almost immediately. The Dolphin was all too evidently a ship redolent of transoceanic ambitions, and the Portuguese authorities were nervous that the British might be seeking to encroach on their own colonial space in South America.70

  ‘A View of the Town of Rio Janeiro’. Pencil drawing by Alexander Buchan, 1768.

  Because of the bad weather it had suffered, and of not being able to refit and reprovision at Rio de Janeiro, the Dolphin’s timbers and shipboard discipline both came under strain during the twenty-nine days it took Digby Dent to sail across the South Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope. One sailor died, another fell overboard, and Elizabeth Marsh quarrelled with the ship’s surgeon, a Mr Davis, because he ‘behaved extremely disrespectful to the young lady and myself’. For whatever reason, she always bridled quickly if anyone treated her with condescension or discourtesy. By the time the Dolphin finally made landfall at the Cape on 18 November, the mixture of euphoria, inadequate diet and long-suppressed anger among the crew was so volatile that five seamen and two marines had been flogged, the latter for defying the ship’s officers. For Elizabeth, however, who was not afraid of rough weather at sea, and was used to scant rations and witnessing navy floggings, these last phases of the journey were refreshing, and even restful. The ship moored off the Cape for four weeks, and she was able to pay visits to the settlement and meet its Dutch Governor when he came aboard for a ceremonial visit. They set sail again on 18 December, and because the Dolphin was fast, saw the coastline of Ceylon on 17 February 1771, reaching Madras road three days later.71 Her real challenges and revelations began then, when she disembarked from familiar naval space, and left her chosen medium, the sea.

  In one respect, James Crisp – and therefore indirectly Elizabeth Marsh – entered this new terrain and phase of their lives possessed of a distinct advantage. The Crisp family’s commercial connections with South and South-East Asia went back to the early seventeenth century. Sir Nicholas Crisp, his father and his wife had all invested in the East India Company; in the early 1700s, various members of the extended Crisp clan were among regular purchasers of goods from Asia at the Company’s London auctions; and by now there were also Crisps active in parts of the subcontinent. In the 1740s, for instance, a Phesaunt Crisp was working as a merchant in Bombay.72 James Crisp’s own point of contact with the subcontinent was more than simply commercial and familial. In his childhood he ‘had been a playfellow of Eyre Coote’, and the two men had renewed their friendship in Menorca in 1753 when Coote ‘was a subaltern officer there, and he [Crisp] was Captain of the pacquet’. As with his association with the Earl of Egmont, this capacity to attract and hold the attention of Eyre Coote, a notoriously difficult and haughty man, suggests charm on James Crisp’s part and an ability to impress. It may also suggest that he had Irish links somewhere in his immediate family background, for while the Percevals, Earls of Egmont, hailed from County Cork, Eyre Coote was from Limerick. Coote had developed into a very powerful friend. He had been second in command to Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassey, and had subsequently won significant victories against French-led armies at Wandiwash (Vandavasi) and Pondicherry in southern India.73

  In the wake of his bankruptcy, James Crisp had made contact with Eyre Coote again, who was by then back in London. It may have been Coote’s support that helped Crisp to secure the East India Company’s permission to leave for the subcontinent and reside there as a private individual, trading ‘in the seafaring way’, concessions that were by no means easily obtained.74 Coote and his wife also subscribed generously to the publication of The Female Captive in 1769. That same year, Coote returned to India as Commander-in-Chief of the Company’s armed forces in Madras. So, in the immediate aftermath of his own migration, James Crisp possessed an extremely powerful patron in the subcontinent, who is known to have recommended him to senior Company officials and to useful commercial contacts. Even before he set out, Crisp’s intention was to break into private trade in Asia, focusing on some of the commodities he knew best, textiles, salt and precious stones. ‘My sufferings thank God seem to be coming to a happy conclusion,’ he had written to a friend in November 1768, and he was ‘actually preparing for the voyage full of hopes that (if please God) in a few years I shall be able to … [make] a provision for my family’. Once arrived, it took time for him to build up the necessary networks and indigenous auxiliaries, so in the interim Coote secured him a cadetship (the bottom level of the commissioned ranks) in the East India Company’s army as a means of ensuring him a guaranteed salary and some minimum status.75

  Again, this was a considerable favour, since cadetships normally had to be purchased and were expensive, but James Crisp was out of his element. Quintessentially a commercial man, and now probably in his mid- to late thirties, he had to adapt to a uniform and an alien discipline. And initially he and his newly-arrived, culture-shocked and semi-estranged wife and daughter were under economic pressure. Eyre Coote had arranged for Crisp to hold his cadetship in Bengal, where the opportunities for military officers to engage in private trade were extensive. But the Company sent him by mistake to Madras, where the risks of active military service were greater, commercial prospects less, and the pay for junior officers ‘too contemptible to afford the common necessaries of life’. In 1771, some Company cadets in Madras were reportedly living on five pagodas a month (equivalent to less than £2), and ‘unless they are assisted … [or given] advances out of the Company’s cash they must be reduced to very great distress’.76

  The extent of the Crisps’ difficulties at this stage emerges from the fact that for a while the couple were forced to give up both of their children. Elizabeth Maria, who was seven years old in 1771, was quickly shipped back on her own to England, in the hope that she might become ‘well educated and accomplished’ in the care of Milbourne Marsh and his wife at Chatham. By contrast, Burrish Crisp, who had been left behind there, was summoned to join his parents in Madras. Milbourne gave the captain of an East Indiaman over £80 to take the boy on the eastwards passage, and when the ship’s chief mate ran off with the money, paid out a further £50. He even gave the ship’s steward presents in a pitiful attempt to secure some kindness for a nine-year-old child making the six-month voyage to India on his own. As it was, Burrish, ‘a manly beautiful boy’, seems to have been neglected and abused on the voyage. When the ship docked in Madras in 1772, his parents found him in the hold ‘almost destroyed with vermin and filth’. Nor were they able to keep him with them for very long:

  In about a year after his arrival, a Persian merchant who had concerns with his father was so struck with the boy, that he begged he might go with him to Persia and learn the language which he argued would be the means of his making his fortune upon his return.

  ‘With much persuasion’, the Crisps gave Burrish over to this merchant, who may have been British, or Dutch, or Armenian, or Bengali, or Persian. Whoever he was, he took the boy into Persia (Iran) for ‘a considerable time’, and whatever else happened to him there, Burrish Crisp did indeed learn Persian.77 By the time he was twelve, he spoke and wrote the language perfectly.

  This episode makes clear how hard-pressed the Crisps were in the early 1770s, and helps to explain why Burrish Crisp grew up both personally awkward and withdrawn, and intellectually fascinated with the diversity of Asiatic cultures and languages. Being introduced to the interior of Persia, as he seems to have been, was a very rare experience for a Westerner at this time. Since an Afghan invasion in 1720 the country had suffered from political instability, and most European visitors never penetrated further than the coastal towns and ports of the Persian Gulf.78 Having to migrate twice over so early seems however to have inflicted psychological damage on Burrish, and he may have been damaged sexually as well.


  Yet in bringing their son first to Madras, and then letting him go into Persia with only a near stranger for company, his parents demonstrated family ambition and political alertness as well as the extent of their poverty. Already, it seems, they were ceasing to regard themselves as migrants, and thinking seriously of an Asian future. Persian was the language of Mughal scholarship, politics, law and administration; and it remained the official language of the East India Company until the 1830s. Now that the Company was in practical terms the ruler of Bengal, and an encroaching diplomatic and military presence in other parts of the subcontinent, a command of Persian and other indigenous languages was becoming ever more advantageous for access to, and advancement in, its civil and commercial ranks. As Sir William Jones argued pointedly in his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), it was important for the British to study the ‘languages of Asia with uncommon ardour’, so that ‘the limits of our knowledge will be no less extended than the bounds of our empire’.79 Consigning their only son to Persia was therefore a way – among other things – of giving Burrish the skills he would need for future advancement. His parents had no money to give him. Eyre Coote’s favour might not last. The boy’s only hope for a secure future in India had to lie in his own wits, and in his being able to offer something special in the way of attainments. Elizabeth Marsh’s father Milbourne Marsh, his father, George Marsh senior, and James Crisp himself had all, as very young children, been obliged to leave home and parents, to travel long distances, and to learn to survive on their own. Such lonely, perilous apprenticeships were often the only career training open to boys without means. Looked at this way, Burrish Crisp’s lonely voyage to Madras and his subsequent Persian ordeal were particularly stark and transcontinental variations of a customary young male rite of passage.