The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  And, in career terms, the enormous gamble that the Crisps took with their son’s life paid off. In March 1774 Bengal’s Governor, Warren Hastings, and his Council in Calcutta informed the East India Company’s directors in London that, while they had ‘hitherto been extremely cautious in troubling you with any recommendations’, they felt obliged to make an exception in the case of Burrish Crisp:

  He is a youth of about 15 [he was in fact twelve] and educated to accounts, of a very promising genius and has already made so remarkable a progress in learning the Persian, Bengal and Moors languages and acquiring a knowledge of the business and customs of the country that we really think he will be a credit to the Hon’ble Company’s employ and therefore take the liberty to recommend him.

  They included with this letter ‘a specimen of his [Burrish’s] writing in Persian’.80 That so much trouble was taken on the boy’s behalf probably owed something to his father’s known connection with Eyre Coote. It also reflected the fact that by 1774 the Crisps themselves were in a stronger position. That year, six provincial councils were established throughout Bengal as part of a campaign to make the Company’s administration at once more entrenched and less corrupt. Each of these provincial councils consisted of five senior Company officials, plus a secretary, a Persian translator, an accountant and three assistants; and, as a friend of James Crisp reported, ‘the revenue, the internal police, and civil judicature were all under their control’. ‘An appointment under either [sic] of these boards,’ he went on, ‘was considered a certain promotion.’ This was what Crisp now secured. He was appointed one of the salt agents working for the provincial council of Dhaka, helping to administer the Company’s monopoly on the sale of salt there. The move took him back into the civilian sphere where he belonged, and out of penury in Madras to an annual salary in Bengal at the Company’s pleasure of £450.81 It also brought him and Elizabeth Marsh once again into contact with one of the main sites of an increasingly global economy.

  The city of Dhaka stretches along the northern shore of a tributary of the Ganges, and is close to the Meghna River, which itself runs into the mighty Brahmaputra.82 Every summer, when the monsoon arrives, parts of the surrounding countryside are flooded; when the Crisps lived here, it was common for the water level in the region to rise between May and August by as much as fourteen feet. For about seventy miles around Dhaka, towns and villages became for a while ‘so many small islands’, which could only communicate with each other by boat. The ubiquity of water was one reason why salt production flourished. The region’s rivers flowed into and mingled with the waters of the Bay of Bengal. Every spring, seawater would be collected and processed in clay-bottomed salt ponds. The resulting lye was then boiled into salt in earthen pots, using wood from the dense local forests as fuel. Omnipresent water also made for fertility and abundance.83 The four miles over which the city of Dhaka straggled, and its outlying regions, produced quantities of fine-quality rice, and the city’s traders also exported betel leaf and nuts, sugar, cumin seed, fish and wooden furniture. And virtually every substantial resident established a garden, taking advantage of the climate to grow fruit and vegetables as well as vivid plants. For all its natural beauty, and its ‘bridges, decayed porticos, and columns, some of them of no mean architecture’, Dhaka could strike newly arrived and uninformed Westerners as a place in decline. Yet there was an important sense in which, as other, more percipient Europeans acknowledged, this was ‘one of the richest [cities] in the world’.84

  Waterland: ‘A plan of the Environs of the City of Dacca’ by James Rennell, c.1781.

  The reason was cotton, another outcrop of the ubiquity of water. The superiority of the cotton grown on lands around Dhaka, wrote an East India Company official later, could be attributed to

  their vicinity to the sea, the water of which mixing, as the tide rolls it in, with the other water of the Meghna, which overflows that part of the country, during three months of the year, deposits as it subsides, sand, and saline particles, which very considerably improve and fertilise the soil.85

  Cotton is the only natural textile plant that is not grown in Europe, and it has the supreme advantage of being able to be made into a fabric suitable for all climates. In locations where the weather is very hot, it can serve to make up an entire wardrobe. In colder regions it is perfect for layers or underclothes, because it is easy to launder and dry. It also holds colours well. Even in the Crisps’ lifetime, when only vegetable dyes were available, cotton could be intricately patterned in brilliant or subtle shades, while still remaining colourfast. And it was cheap – much cheaper than wool or linen, the standard fabrics produced in Britain and Ireland.

  For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the cotton grown and woven in the Indian subcontinent offered these practical advantages, and much more besides. India offered a deep reservoir of particular skills that were passed down over the generations, and labour costs were very low. This was vital, given that the work of planting cotton seeds every autumn, of picking the grown cotton in the spring, and then of cleaning, spinning, weaving and embroidering all demanded a very large number of hands.86 According to one estimate, of the roughly 450,000 people living in the Dhaka region in the 1770s, 147,000 were involved in some aspect of the manufacture of cotton. There were over twenty-five thousand weavers, all men. In addition, thirty thousand women worked as cotton spinners and cleaners. A further five thousand, it was claimed, were employed embroidering the most luxurious and expensive fabrics, especially Dhaka’s muslins, which were so fine and delicate that a length of this fabric could, it was said, pass easily through a woman’s ring.87

  This burgeoning indigenous economy influenced how James Crisp perceived and interacted with his new environment. Most white civilian incomers to the subcontinent settled in Calcutta, or Madras, or Bombay, places where Europeans had played a major role since the seventeenth century, and which they could therefore choose to view as substantially their creations. But while stray Europeans had been coming to Dhaka for centuries to trade, it was still visibly a Mughal city, full of splendid buildings, and with an affluence and an international significance that considerably predated the East India Company’s coup d’état in Bengal. In 1610, the then Mughal viceroy of Bengal had made Dhaka his capital and headquarters, and this had transformed its size and building stock. The city lost its high political status in the early eighteenth century, but its cotton and its commerce had continued to attract Armenian, Arabian, Persian, Pathan and Bengali traders, and a medley of Europeans, Dutch, French, Portuguese, as well as British merchants. When the Crisps arrived in Dhaka in 1774, most of the textiles produced there and in the rest of Bengal were still consumed locally, or traded elsewhere in the subcontinent. Nonetheless, Indian cotton had already become ‘the only textile that can be said to have been integral to the global trading system’.88

  Asian traders had long been exporting cotton textiles to West, Central and South-East Asia, and to East Africa; Indian cotton had also traditionally penetrated the Ottoman Empire by way of Cairo; and a growing amount went to Europe, and from there on to other continents. In 1665 the East India Company had exported seven thousand pieces of cloth from Bengal to Britain. By the time James Crisp arrived in Dhaka, 650,000 pieces were being shipped from Bengal to London every year. Some of this fabric was subsequently re-exported to North America and the Caribbean. Indian cotton was also traded to Spanish-controlled Manila, and passed from there into Latin America. And Indian textiles were an integral part of the transatlantic slave trade. As far as British slave traders were concerned, textiles from the subcontinent seem to have made up at least a third of the barter they offered in return for slaves on the West African coast during the eighteenth century, so some of these cotton goods also passed inexorably into the interior of Africa.89

  By the early nineteenth century, most – not all – incoming Westerners had come to view India as entangled in all sorts of ways in an archaic past, and consequently in need of advan
cement and modernization from without. By contrast, James Crisp was able to view Dhaka, with its abundant, high-quality cotton industry, almost as a traditional site of economic modernity. As another recently-arrived Briton wrote in 1776:

  The consumption of foreign commodities by the natives of Bengal is very inconsiderable … But the productions of Bengal have been in request, in almost every part of the world … [If] selling be the essential property of commerce, Bengal was a commercial nation of the first order.90

  To a degree, indeed, Crisp could view his new surroundings in Dhaka, over-confidently, less as a breach with his previous existence than as a continuation of it. He was used to international cities engaged in transcontinental trade. Now, after Barcelona, and London, and Hamburg, and Livorno, and the rest, he was in yet another dynamic centre of this sort, which just happened to be located in the subcontinent. In his European ventures he had been involved in the salt trade. Now, in Dhaka, part – though only part – of his business was once again dealing in salt. He was already familiar with Indian textiles from working as a merchant in Britain and Spain. Now the move to Dhaka placed him, a supremely entrepreneurial man who was accustomed to dealing with different cultures and languages, in one of the great centres of the textile industry, in daily reach of a commodity that was in growing demand across the world. Dhaka’s high-grade cotton would be the means, then, of rebuilding his reputation and restoring his family’s fortunes.

  And, as even George Marsh was prepared to concede, once settled in Dhaka, James Crisp ‘flourished in trade there very fast’.91 Just how fast is suggested by an inventory, compiled in 1780, of the house in which he and Elizabeth Marsh intermittently lived. It helped that living stylishly in Dhaka was relatively cheap. The difference in outlay for a European resident between there and Calcutta, one visitor calculated in 1765, bore the ‘same proportion as between country and city in England’. Maintaining a suitably fashionable house in Calcutta could cost a merchant up to £1000 every year. But the substantial house that the Crisps acquired in Dhaka, together with its compound, was valued at 9010 rupees, the equivalent at the time of about £900.92 With less need to sink money into accommodation, the Crisps were able to invest more in consumer goods. The inventory suggests that they lived for a while in a higher style than most Europeans were able to do in the subcontinent. It also suggests that, as in London, the couple indulged themselves, and seized upon objects as a means of redefining themselves in a new environment.

  Less than half of the tiny European civilian population in Madras at this time, for instance, seem to have been able to afford their own household palanquin. But the Crisps made a point of owning one, complete with ‘bamboo tassels’, presumably also paying the four to eight bearers who were needed to carry it. The couple adopted other artifacts and emblems that were traditionally associated with the Mughal elite. A morchal, a flywhisk or fan made of peacock feathers, was an Indo-Persian symbol of power. The Crisps acquired four of them. They genuflected to their new environment, too, by adopting a more minimalist style of décor than they would have been accustomed to in Europe. Their Dhaka house seems to have possessed no curtains or carpets, though they may have covered its floors with locally produced or Chinese rattan mats. Their couches, beds and chairs were made of blackwood, an indigenous hardwood much used by native carpenters; while their lacquered card tables and two ‘japanned’ (painted and gilded) cabinets were probably East India Company imports from Canton. James Crisp also introduced cross-cultural borrowings into his own wardrobe. He continued to wear his wig for formal meetings with other Europeans (just as Elizabeth continued to use curling irons on her fraying hair). And Crisp owned four European-style suits, albeit made of buff, black and blue Indian silk. But in his own house, and when travelling Dhaka’s interminable waterways, he wore ‘Banyan’ coats and shirts, loose, Indian-style cotton garments; and by now he had acquired at least twenty-five ‘pairs of short drawers’ and fifty-nine pairs of cotton stockings.93 The extreme heat, and abundant indigenous servants to do laundry, meant that like other Europeans in Asia, he was much cleaner than was customary in his home continent.

  Historians disagree about the deeper significance of these kinds of cultural and material borrowings by invading Britons in India. For some, they are evidence of the fact that for much of the eighteenth century there was a greater willingness than would exist later to forge connections and understandings of different kinds across religious and racial lines. For others, it is axiomatic that ‘the appropriation of Indian habits or the use of Indian objects did not affect the identity of the British in India’, and that everyday contact with difference only amplified the intruders’ self-consciousness.94 Yet this sort of polarized position-taking is not the best way to unpick the complexities and inconsistencies of past individual lives and mentalities. Elizabeth Marsh and her husband had come to India out of desperation and for selfish reasons, and they were attached to and ultimately dependent on – though crucially not of – a paramilitary trading company that had usurped fiscal, commercial and legal authority in Bengal. Part of the story from now on must be concerned with establishing how far each of them was corrupted by all of this. But it was intrinsically unlikely that the already mongrel identities of Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp would remain unaffected by this further violent migration, and by exposure to a very different life in Dhaka.

  This was not simply because the city’s landscape, climate, wildlife, bodily practices and cuisine were so unfamiliar, but also because coming to South Asia, and living where they did, stripped the couple of all formal contact with their religion, still the bedrock of most people’s identity at this time. In London the Crisps seem to have attended Church of England worship regularly, and naturally they had their two children christened. But at Dhaka, no Protestant place of worship of any kind was available to offer an alternative to the region’s more than 230 mosques and fifty-two Hindu temples. The Crisps did keep a Bible in their Dhaka house, but its position in the inventory seems eloquent of the diminished role that religion, any religion, now played in the couple’s lives. ‘One Bible,’ wrote the inventory’s compiler, ‘and 12 packs of cards.’95 Elizabeth Marsh had referred to God regularly in The Female Captive. After she arrives in the subcontinent, she writes of God no more. The Crisps’ capacity to use their birth language, or any other European language, and to be easily understood by those around them, was now anyway inevitably very circumscribed. According to a ‘List of Europeans in this province’ compiled by the East India Company in 1778, there were just forty-eight white males of any description living in Dhaka that year, including James Crisp and, by now, Burrish Crisp. Thirty of these men were formally attached to the Company as civil or military servants, while the rest were either private merchants, like James Crisp, or individuals ‘with no visible means of livelihood’.96

  No woman was included in this list, because European females exercised no formal public function in the subcontinent in the Company’s eyes, and there were anyway very few of them. In 1785 there were just three married women in Dhaka who were accounted white. ‘They live all very retired,’ reported one resident at that time, ‘and though the ladies seem very good friends they meet very seldom.’97 For Elizabeth Marsh, who was at least nominally white, there was therefore little to do, and few of what passed for her own kind to socialize or converse with. For ambitious, energetic and greedy white males, Dhaka could be a rich, demanding place, a frontier environment, replete with opportunities. It catered to those in search of another chance like James Crisp. It provided for men who were well-born but with inadequate incomes, like the Honourable Robert Lindsay, the son of a Scottish peer with eleven children, and only £1000 per annum to raise them on, who arrived in Dhaka on the make in 1776 and who knew the Crisps. It suited the politically driven, since partisan rivalries among the tiny British community were fierce and bitter. And Dhaka’s relative cheapness and isolation made it a haven for male loners and eccentrics of various kinds.

  Ev
en though they could not assemble at Protestant worship, ways existed for the few British men living here to express their solidarity. There was already a Masonic lodge in Dhaka in which they, and other European males, could observe the newer rituals of the Enlightenment. As for the ‘unmarried gentlemen’, it was their custom to go together ‘every Friday at about 20 miles from the town, to hunt wild boars and deer, where we remain to the Monday in tents. There we ride morning & evening on horseback or upon elephants which are here in plenty; almost every gentleman here keeps one or two of these large animals.’98 Whether married or unmarried, all European males in Dhaka, as elsewhere in the subcontinent, could also seek out and forge relationships with indigenous women, learning in the process more about local cultures, while still carefully vaunting their superiority if they chose to do so. But these options and occupations were not available to Elizabeth Marsh.

  She benefited of course from the material luxuries of her position, while participating in some of the risks, living as a highly privileged intruder in a waterworld where there were half a million indigenous inhabitants and scarcely more than fifty white civilians. Not for nothing did she and James Crisp equip their Dhaka household with guns and bows and arrows. But, with one child in Persia, and the other in Chatham, and with her husband absent on his salt and textile business for much of the time, she had very little to do. She could easily have escaped to Calcutta, the Company’s power centre and the showpiece of British society in India, and sought distraction in its theatres, music societies and abundant bazaars, its stuccoed classical buildings and steepled churches, and its deliberately ornate and time-consuming social life. It was a mark of Elizabeth Marsh’s quality and distinctiveness, though also of her perversity, that she went instead a great deal further, and looked for other things.