The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  5

  An Asiatic Progress

  SHE WAS SICK, ‘very ill indeed’. ‘In a very languid state’, she complained, and experiencing ‘much pain in my side’. As in Gibraltar in 1756, pressures that were to some degree real – the risk of invasion then, illness now – became a rationalization for abrupt departure and extensive movement: ‘My extreme ill health obliged me to undertake a journey to the coast.’ She left Dhaka for Calcutta on 13 December 1774, and from there took ship for Madras (Chennai). A century later, incomers to the subcontinent who were unwell and sufficiently moneyed normally sought refuge in one of the hill stations, Almora, or Simla, or Darjeeling in the east, or Ooty in the south, convalescing in their cooler climates, and in the secure, well-regimented society of other Britons. But in Elizabeth Marsh’s lifetime, more than usually ailing Europeans in northern India who were unable or unwilling to voyage home had few options but to sail southwards in the hope that fresher coastal breezes might effect a recovery. One of her fellow passengers for part of the voyage to Madras was John Shore, at this time a twenty-four-year-old Writer (a junior civil servant) with the East India Company, and a future Governor General of India. ‘Troubled with a severe disorder’, he too was setting out ‘to try the sea air’, just as, ostensibly, she was.1 Invalids rarely stayed away from their families or their posts out of choice, however, for as long as Elizabeth Marsh. Nor did they usually employ their time like her: for while she followed custom in sailing to Madras, she did not stay there. Instead, she spent over a year moving between different settlements in what are now Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, ultimately exploring some of their most significant religious, urban and economic sites. When she finally returned to Dhaka in July 1776, by way of an arduous overland route along the subcontinent’s eastern coastline and through Orissa, she had been away and often in motion for over eighteen months.

  By all accounts this was an extraordinary progress. Although the frequency with which individuals from outside the subcontinent travelled within it had been increasing exponentially since the fifteenth century, it was still unusual for white civilian males – and exceptional for women of any kind – to undertake protracted overland journeys here, unless they were driven to do so by religion, commerce, or in order to accompany a spouse.2 James Crisp seems never to have ventured southwards out of Bengal after 1774. Nor, at a very different level of the East India Company food chain, did Philip Francis, for instance, after taking up his position on Calcutta’s Supreme Council that same year. The pressure of business, fear of disease, intense heat and saturating monsoons were all powerful disincentives to non-essential long-distance travel. So were the practical challenges of journeying inland. Europeans remained largely ignorant of such indigenous maps as existed; and although the Company possessed good surveys of Indian coastlines, it was only in 1767 that James Rennell was appointed as its Surveyor General to oversee the internal mapping of parts of the subcontinent. Even where moderately accurate surveys were available, overland travel was often slow and physically arduous. ‘The roads are at best, little better than paths,’ claimed Rennell:

  and whenever deep rivers (which in that country are frequent, and without bridges) morasses, chains of mountains, or other obstacles, oppose themselves to the line of direction of the road, it is carried round, so as to effect the easiest passage; and for this reason the roads there, have a degree of crookedness, much beyond what we meet with in European countries.

  Since tracks were rough and circuitous, ‘an ordinary traveller’ in India, he suggested, was unlikely to cover more than twenty-two miles in a day.3

  By no means an ordinary traveller, Elizabeth Marsh carried out her own protracted Asiatic journey in the company mainly of indigenous soldiers, guides and servants, but in the absence of James Crisp. In this respect, too, the circumstances of this journey mirrored her behaviour in 1756. Then she had set out from Gibraltar leaving her parents and brothers behind. Now she embarked on her progress without her husband or son; and, as in 1756, she travelled in close companionship with an unmarried man. The individual concerned on this occasion was a Captain George Smith, whom Elizabeth referred to as her ‘cousin’. Smith and she were in daily contact from their joint departure from Dhaka in December 1774 to her return to the borders of Bengal in June 1776. This, but also much more, sets her apart from other early foreign female travellers in the subcontinent, such as Jemima Kindersley, who visited Madras and northern India in the 1760s, or Sophia Plowden, who travelled from Calcutta to Lucknow in 1777–78, or Eliza Fay, who wrote about her adventures in southern India in the 1780s.4 These women travelled overwhelmingly by water, in a budgerow (a sort of keel-less river barge), or along the coast. When they did venture overland, it was usually in order to accompany their spouses. And in writing about their travels, Kindersley, Plowden, and even Fay were careful to stress how bound up they remained in structures of family and social obligation. Kindersley, for instance, begins her Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (1777) with an allusion to a possibly fictional friend in England, and to ‘the promise I made, of giving you a particular account’.5

  Elizabeth Marsh’s description of her Asiatic progress was very different. She had not been able to make notes during her Mediterranean and Moroccan experiences in 1756, and had bitterly regretted having to rely only on memory when drafting The Female Captive thirteen years later. It may have been in part so as to leave open the possibility of publishing some version of this new journey that she embarked on a diary now. The snippets of sometimes overconfident information she includes (‘a coss is two English miles and half’) suggest that she had a future audience in mind; but she also had more immediate reasons for writing. The experience of serious illness, or fear of it, can often prompt a resort to some kind of autobiographical testimony.6 So can the consciousness that middle or old age has irremediably set in. When she embarked on this Indian journey, Elizabeth Marsh was less than a year away from her fortieth birthday, and she had already struggled through the two monsoons that were all that many incomers to the subcontinent could hope to survive. The diary was a way of taking stock of what she had become, and of how far she still possessed opportunities to change. As the months went by, it also became a chronicle of exhilaration and perplexity in the face of multiple discoveries.

  Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian journey

  This was no purely introspective document, however. Nor was hers simply a private progress. She could not have travelled within the subcontinent as ambitiously as she did without the East India Company’s much increased and unevenly expanding military and political reach. It was this epochal shift in imperial and transcontinental history that made up the background to her progress and the stuff of much of her journal. In retrospect, the Company’s takeover of Bengal by way of the diwani in 1765 represented the first of a succession of European conquests of substantial Asian territories, a coup that ultimately provided ‘a platform – of men, money and matériel – for the subjugation of the entire region from the eastern Mediterranean to the South China Sea’, and consequently for the temporary emergence of a more Western-dominated world.7 Like most of her contemporaries, Elizabeth Marsh had only a glimmer of foreknowledge of this. But she did observe and describe some of the alterations in power taking place about her, as well as the limits of these changes, and signs of resistance to them. That she should have set out on, and documented, by far the most exploratory journey in the subcontinent known to have been attempted by a woman in the aftermath of the diwani seems in keeping with her strange, recurrent role as a kind of female Candide. Once again she blundered into the path of momentous events and transitions, coming in contact with individuals who were infinitely more powerful than herself. Once again she brought to bear on these encounters an uninformed, not unperceptive gaze.

  A page from Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian Journal.

  To begin with, perhaps because she is ill and afraid, she scans the physical and social landsc
ape less with curiosity about what is new and difficult, than for scenes she can choose to view as familiar in some way. Jotting down notes almost every day that she and George Smith are in motion is itself a way of seeking reassurance, a ritual that supplies a modicum of continuity. Whenever they are stationary and she feels more secure, staying in a fort, or a Company cantonment or house, or a choultry (a travellers’ resting place), she indicatively stops writing. But otherwise she scribbles impressions and encounters as they go along in her clear, spiky hand, conveying the movement she is involved in by employing dashes in place of full stops.

  Having completed the trip from Dhaka to Calcutta, 380 miles as the river systems in the Ganges delta run at this time, and said farewell to those whom she still describes as ‘my dear Crisp and sweet boy’, Elizabeth Marsh and George Smith embark on a storeship. This is the Goodwill, commanded by a Captain Burford, ‘a good, plain character’, she quickly decides, ‘but by no means an entertaining one’. The Goodwill is a privately owned ‘large stout ship in good condition, well manned with European seamen and lascars with guns and ammunition for defence’, regularly leased out, as on this occasion, to the Royal Navy, but even this does not immediately reassure her.8 She spends much of the day after they set sail from Calcutta not conversing with Smith or any of the other passengers, but standing on deck, staring at the passing Garden Houses to the south of the city, the one- and two-storey buildings to which its more affluent residents escape during the hottest summer months. From her viewpoint, these seem as elegant as ‘the most noble houses in any of the large squares in England’, by which she means, she immediately clarifies, London. As they sail on, she takes note of ‘a Point called Melancholy, so named on account of the first English lady that ever came to Bengal being buried there’. And when the Goodwill has passed Baj Baj, Phalta and Kulpi, and is lying ‘off the dreary island of Sagar’, seventy miles downriver from Calcutta, she observes ‘on the other side, a flat country, where many of my poor countrymen are deposited, as numbers of sailors and soldiers are there buried’.9

  As well as suggesting the scale of her despondency at this time, these are some of the most forthright statements she supplies about certain strands of her identity. Elizabeth Marsh aspired, though not invariably, to be viewed as an English lady. She was also minded to regard men wearing British military uniform, and especially Royal Navy uniform, as her countrymen, as ‘us’. And she still missed London, the elegant squares that she had walked through but never lived in, and the social opportunities and style the city had briefly given her. All of these ties of nation, place and culture, which she was sometimes anxious to acknowledge, emerge from her description of the Goodwill’s encounter with the Royal Navy’s East Indian squadron in the Bay of Bengal in late January 1775. She watched from on deck as Captain Burford’s crew loaded fresh stores onto the Salisbury, the flagship of the squadron’s Commodore, Sir Edward Hughes, and recorded, at the end, a significant passage: ‘The men of war saluted, and then all the ships were in motion, the Commodore bound to Madras, Sir John Clerke to the China Seas, the Swallow sloop, Captain Pigot, for Ganjam.’ Clerke’s ship, that same Dolphin which had brought her to India, was now engaged in transporting eight hundred chests of opium to the free port of Balambangan in easternmost Java. As for Hughes’ ship, the Salisbury, while en route for the Indian Ocean in 1772 it had anchored in Table Bay off the Cape of Good Hope next to the Adventure and to James Cook’s ship, the Resolution.10 These two latter vessels were in transit for the Antarctic and the Pacific, in Cook’s second circumnavigation of the world. Being acted out in the Bay of Bengal, as Elizabeth Marsh partly understood, was a scene of the Royal Navy’s increased presence in Asian waters, and also an illustration of its growing capacity to connect different sites of empire, commercial effort and exploration across the globe.

  For her, though, this nautical encounter chiefly signified an opportunity to rehearse again some of the modes of politeness she had grown used to in London. As long as the Goodwill remained moored close to the East Indian squadron, she made a point of dressing for dinner. She unearthed her tea caddy and teaware from her ‘very comfortable, excellent’ cabin, and made tea on one occasion for ‘a large company’ of navy officers; and she received other visits. Sir John Clerke was rowed over from the Dolphin to pay his respects. Sir Edward Hughes’ son-in-law and his secretary also called on her. The Commodore himself did not visit, but he sent her ‘a polite note’ and ‘a number of refreshments’, she recorded proudly, including three dozen bottles of English spa water, warm and stale in its glass.11

  However physically reduced she was, Elizabeth Marsh always seems to have behaved like a woman who knows herself to be attractive and winning. Yet, as she acknowledged in the diary, it was not just her residual allure that prompted these flattering attentions, or even the simple absence of alternative female company on offer in the Bay of Bengal. The men who visited the Goodwill and bestowed courtesies on her were also ‘well acquainted with most of my family’. Sir Edward Hughes’ secretary, Arthur Cuthbert, for instance, was a close friend and business associate of her uncle George Marsh; and, in addition to the Royal Navy networks she was always able to exploit, there was another connection of her family who was bound to secure her official notice and attention within the East India Company’s sphere of authority.12

  Richard Smith (1734–1803), a Londoner ‘of very obscure origin’ but ‘great ambition to command’, had started out as a purser’s mate in the Company’s fleet. As proved possible for a minority of men, he had used the physical mobility afforded by ships and the sea, and the opportunities on offer from war and empire, as a springboard to power, wealth and vertiginous social mobility. Soon switching to the Company’s army, and fighting its battles, Smith rose swiftly through the ranks, and in 1767 was appointed Commander-in-Chief in Bengal. In the process he also made a fortune, in part by lending money at exorbitant rates of interest to Muhammad Ali Khan Walajah, the Nawab of the British-‘protected’ province of Arcot, near Madras. On his return to Britain in 1770, Smith claimed to be worth £200,000–£300,000, which in present-day values meant that he was a millionaire more than twenty times over. In Samuel Foote’s highly successful play The Nabob, which opened in London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1772, General Richard Smith, as he now was, appeared in the guise of ‘Sir Matthew Mite’, as the archetypal East India Company capitalist-cum-military adventurer, whose complexion had ‘been tinged by the East’, who had ‘risen to uncontrolled power abroad’, and who had returned to Britain, ‘thundering amongst us, and profusely scattering the spoils of ruined [Asian] provinces’.13 In reality, Richard Smith was not without perceptiveness, or a capacity to criticize some of the military and commercial projects in which he acted, which was why he subsequently became a political ally of Edmund Burke in his parliamentary campaigns to reform the East India Company. It was contrary to common sense, Smith himself would tell Parliament in 1781 in regard to the Company’s takeover of Bengal, ‘that 5000 men should force a system upon ten millions’, especially as those intruding themselves amongst the indigenous peoples of ‘that vast territory’ were ‘but men like themselves, or very little better’.14

  The links between this sharply intelligent, aggressive and corrupt man and the Marsh family were intricate. At least one male ‘cousin’ of Milbourne Marsh seems to have married a Smith in the early 1700s; and in his will Richard Smith would claim to be the real father of the woman to whom George Marsh later married his eldest son (netting in the process a dowry of £40,000).15 As far as Elizabeth Marsh was concerned, it was the existence of her family’s links with Smith, not their precise nature, that mattered. Men and women who migrate over extensive distances, especially those with limited resources, tend to make the most of any kin or contacts who can ease their progress in a new land; and it is clear that Elizabeth capitalized on her relationship with Richard Smith as greedily and as purposefully as James Crisp sought out help from his boyhood friend, Eyre Coote. She seems to have dine
d with Smith, Captain Digby Dent and the Company’s historiographer, Robert Orme, shortly before embarking on the Dolphin and sailing to Madras in 1770. Once established in Bengal, the closest friend she went on to cultivate in Calcutta was a wealthy widow named Johanna Ross, who was also the aunt of Richard Smith’s wife. Johanna Ross subsequently became one of James Crisp’s most valuable business creditors.16

  It was Elizabeth Marsh’s known relationship to Richard Smith, a former commander-in-chief of the East India Company’s legions, and still a powerful figure in its affairs, to which she owed some of the attentions she received from the likes of Sir John Clerke and Sir Edward Hughes; but the more significant benefits of her connection with him only became apparent once she made landfall.

  The further south the Goodwill sailed, the harder she initially found it to banish strangeness simply by a resort to dress, or manners, or food, or language. Resorting to stock phrases in her diary like ‘the country charming – and weather delightful’ scarcely comprehended all that she was now seeing every day from the decks of the Goodwill. It was predictably the sea and a ship that drove this point home to her. When, on 14 February 1775, they finally moored off Madras, which possessed no natural harbour, the state mussoola was sent to convey her ashore: ‘formed of a particular construction, being sewed together, with packthread, and not any iron work about it, extremely high at the sides, and very roomy’. Deliberately without the fixed beams or metal fastenings Elizabeth Marsh was used to in Royal Navy vessels, a mussoola was designed to bend and adjust in response to the fierce surf off Madras, ‘which made so horrible an appearance, that the idea of going through it was dreadful’. Unable, once she was in the boat, to see far above its sides, and feeling its wood and skins rippling around her, she was ‘almost sick, and frightened to death’. ‘Supped in heaven,’ she records, quite atypically, that evening, ‘being on shore.’17