The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  For a while, Madras allowed her a cocoon in which to retire and pretend again. Although this was emphatically an Asian city, a sprawling composite of agricultural and fishing villages, of the so-called ‘Black Town’, which contained Portuguese and Armenian merchants as well as indigenous residents, and of the Company’s own heavily fortified settlement, Madras could still appear in parts, to those who wished to view it in such terms, as quasi-English, even classically European. Laid out in streets and squares, with an Anglican church, St Mary’s, the Company sector of the city held some ‘neat and pretty’ houses, equipped with chaste verandas, and its few public buildings gleamed with a kind of white plaster, chunam, that was made out of crushed seashells.18 Elizabeth Marsh’s first serious venture beyond the city’s boundaries in early April seems to have brought on panic (‘my disorder seemed to increase’), and it was not until 16 June 1775 that she finally made the break with counterfeit familiarity and began the second phase of her journey. This was when being able to lay claim to family ties with General Richard Smith, and having as her companion Captain George Smith (who may also have been related to him), became vital.19

  When the artist William Hodges subsequently travelled through parts of the subcontinent between 1780 and 1784, seeking out scenes and buildings to paint and engrave, he was only able to secure a substantial military escort to protect and guide him along the way because his patron happened to be Warren Hastings, the Governor General, who made sure he was provided with the necessary armed followers.20 Elizabeth Marsh was a mere woman, with no officially recognized purpose for travelling, the absentee wife of a private merchant and minor official who was not even a covenanted servant of the East India Company. Yet, by way of Richard Smith and George Smith, she gained access to a substantial militarized retinue, without which she could never have ventured as far, or as riskily, as she ultimately did.

  Until April 1776 she was usually accompanied on her various excursions by European as well as indigenous troops. Even after she finally left the boundaries of the Madras Presidency, the region the British laid claim to on the subcontinent’s eastern, Coromandel coast, and started moving northwards again, her travelling party included at its smallest ‘about 40 coolees … with peons, debashes etc’, and eight sepoys and a havildar, native infantry of the Company. She herself travelled for much of the time, though not all of the time, in considerable style. While she was in Madras, the Company’s Commander-in-Chief allotted her one of his own houses close to the fort; and when she finally committed herself to leaving the city, she did so reclining in a state palanquin, a box-litter with a pole projecting before and behind, carried along in her case by four bearers. The vehicle ‘was greatly admired’, she recorded complacently, ‘being extremely high finished’.21

  Here was one of the paradoxes of Elizabeth Marsh’s progress. That she was at once ill, of no social or political significance, and sporadically very frightened, and, simultaneously, profoundly privileged. An outsider in multiple respects, she travelled nonetheless with some of the perquisites normally attached to wealth, status and power.

  Over the next eleven months Elizabeth Marsh spends time in various settlements in the Madras Presidency, most of them places where Company troops are stationed: in Vellore, Ellore, Pulicat, an important cloth-producing centre that was still controlled by the Dutch, and in Machilipatnam, Ganjam, Aska and more. At first glance, the strictly selective account of these excursions she commits to her diary suggests only a continued, solipsistic clinging to European conventions and European people. Yet even a superficial reading makes clear the startling resurgence of her energy and confidence over this period. Whatever had been the source of her ill health in Dhaka, acute depression, or – since she was now forty – an early menopause, or, as some of her symptoms suggest, an attack of gallstones, she now cast it off, or made herself disregard it. Most of the Company officers she mentions encountering at this stage were younger than she, yet several of these men died during or shortly after her progress, not from war, but from heat or disease. Captain John Candler, for instance, whom she meets at Ichapur, and Captain Francis Bandinel, her host at Aska, will both be dead by the end of 1776.22 Elizabeth Marsh, however, for the rest of a journey in which she is rarely in a bed – or trying to sleep in a palanquin or a tent – before 2 a.m., and in which she is alternately drenched by rain and sunburnt, appears to suffer nothing worse than occasional colds, and bouts of indigestion brought on by the oysters and Madeira she consumes at every opportunity.

  She invests some of this renewed energy in hectic socializing that signifies much more than that. Like her contemporary James Boswell, an infinitely more distinguished diarist who, as a Scot in London, was also an outsider of sorts, Marsh seems to have accepted the possibility of being ‘in some degree whatever character we choose’.23 The self was malleable, and could be acted out and written up in multiple versions. As a recent migrant to the subcontinent, and as a woman who was travelling in extraordinary circumstances, Elizabeth Marsh was at one level obliged to try out new roles. But she seems always to have felt the need to do this; and what preoccupied her for much of this middle part of her journey, to a degree that seems, and sometimes was, intensely self-indulgent, was this persistent enterprise of refashioning herself, and of striving to secure respect and attention. ‘However low rated in England,’ an Englishwoman in Calcutta remarks in Phebe Gibbes’ novel Hartly House (1789), ‘I am a sovereign princess here.’ This character is referring to the indigenous servants, colonial airs and conspicuous consumption that living in Bengal allows her, and which she has never known at home. Elizabeth Marsh would have understood the desire to become someone different, and to clutch hold of something better in India. In her case, though, this appears to have involved less extracting deference from its native inhabitants than securing respect from the British themselves, specifically Britons of a certain sort. More than anything else, she seems to have been searching in this middle, Madras segment of her progress for ‘a society’ that would accord her some recognition, one that ‘studied to make me happy’.24

  So she lingers in her diary over every courteous gesture and sign of approval, especially from influential males. Virtually her only comment about her stay in the city of Madras is that she ‘saw much company’, just as her sole farewell comment on Dhaka had been how ‘the company of the settlement … parted with me in the most friendly manner possible’. Arriving on her second visit to Machilipatnam, she records glowingly how ‘My company [was] daily solicited … my tea table was the resort of all the sensible and polite, and crowded every evening.’ In Ichapur, she reports being able to dine ‘with a very large company all cheerful and well-bred’, and that the conversation was ‘lively yet delicate’. And then there is the music, as at Aska, where she is requested to sing ‘many songs with the head violin-player’. Above all, there is the dancing. In Ganjam, the local Company chief gives a ball ‘in compliment to me: I opened it with a minuet’: that is, with a dance in which by convention the leading couple performed initially alone on the dance floor, being watched by everyone else in the room. A week later, Robert Maunsell (‘second in Council’) arranges a supper party where she finds ‘all the company ready for me to open the Ball, which I did’.25

  This rather poignant litany of minor social successes underlines of course how cliquish prosperous and would-be prosperous Britons in India could be even at this early stage. How much polite rituals and conventions from home like tea-making ceremonies, calling and playing cards, the formalities of the minuet, and the habit of Company army officers like George Smith of buttoning their woollen uniform jackets close to the throat whatever the heat, were drawn on in order to display and cement together a tiny minority whose authority in the subcontinent was still very patchy and at times uncertain. Such rituals could also weld together rich and moderately affluent whites from different parts of Europe, not just British and Irish servants of the Company and their womenfolk, but also stray Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Swiss
and German players in India (though only occasionally individuals who were French, and therefore still deemed to be threatening). As a former Company official wrote in 1780:

  On account of the small number of European ladies in India, a constant intercourse between families is more encouraged there than in any other part of the world … The Europeans all mutually receive and pay visits; and from this practice they all become personally acquainted.26

  But the politics of Elizabeth Marsh’s own socializing were more complicated than this. The people whom she conversed and danced with, sang to and played at cards with while journeying around the Madras region were certainly European in many of their cultural practices, but by no means all of them were European in terms of their place of origin or upbringing. At this time, a proportion of the East India Company’s army officers were – as she may have been herself – of mixed racial descent. Because white women were so sparse, some of the wives of Company civilian and military officers were also of necessity, as well as for reasons of desire, what was termed ‘country born’. And those Company army officers who had been born in India of British parents might well – as seems to have been the case with George Smith – never themselves have spent any time in Britain at all.27 It was the actual heterogeneity of the ‘British’ presence in India at this time, and not just its self-consciousness, which lay behind the feverish succession of balls, card parties, ornate suppers and decorous picnics of the sort in which Elizabeth Marsh rapturously took part. Such ‘elegant’ socializing did not provide for racial equality (a phrase and a concept which would anyway have meant very little at this time) in the subcontinent, any more than similar rituals made for social equality within Britain itself. But, in India as in Britain, these performances of politeness could provide for ‘access of different kinds of people to the same places and allowed interaction among different groups on the basis of a shared set of manners’. Learning to dance the minuet could be a way of deftly concealing and counterfeiting one’s origins, as distinct from simply displaying and celebrating them.28

  This may well have been one reason why Elizabeth Marsh found this interlude in her life so exhilarating. In the Madras region, where the British were far less powerfully entrenched than in Bengal, and less hidebound than they were in the most affluent neighbourhoods of Calcutta, her uncertain origins, her riven past and her only moderate sophistication simply did not matter so much. Her bankrupted husband was far away in Dhaka. Her childhood in a Portsmouth tenement was not known. And if she retained any self-consciousness on account of what her mother was or was not, this too could be overlaid with displays of her own hard-won accomplishments – just as participation in an agreed set of social rituals, in certain forms of dress, and speech, and behaviour, successfully overlaid the mixed backgrounds and origins of some of her companions. There was a degree to which, at this stage of her Asiatic progress, Elizabeth Marsh was able to become a Cinderella allowed metaphorically, and not just in reality, to go to the ball. Although Captain George Smith seems only to have joined the Company’s military in 1765, the death rate amongst its officers in this region was such that he was often the most senior commissioned man present in the various settlements and assemblies the couple visited. In which case he – and therefore she – would make their entrance amidst ‘all the customary compliments … all the drums and fifes … and every honor which possibly could be shown us’, ‘every mark of attention, and real hospitality’.29 For the daughter of a shipwright, who was compromised in different ways by her past, these were ravishingly flattering experiences, and the portions of her diary devoted to them are dizzy with exultation.

  Since she travelled through two late Indian springs and summers, there was often intense heat that split her hair, and made her sometimes cry with fatigue, because she ‘could only sleep upon a fine mat, which was constantly wetted, and dried up as fast, and was too hot to admit of my lying down’. But she did not slow down. She was ‘gasping for air’, she writes, ‘yet in spirits’. ‘I,’ she boasts on another occasion – unnecessarily – ‘was amongst the number of restless beings.’ A British visitor to eastern India at this time remarked wryly how dancing in such temperatures, as Elizabeth Marsh regularly did when staying in Company settlements into the early hours of the morning, converted makeshift ballrooms into something closer to swimming baths, saturated not only with the dancers’ sweat (and their stench), but also with water that had regularly to be poured on the floor in order to keep feet bearably cool and the wood from cracking.30 She, though, was too euphoric by now to acknowledge such inconveniences, ‘for when the weather was so hot as to oblige the floors to be kept continually wet, yet at times we could not resist dancing’. And when, on the hottest days, the thermometer climbed above 115 degrees, there was always ‘delightful night’:

  The tablecloth spread as usual on the grass, cold fowl and oysters were our repast – sung some songs, danced a reel, and again seated ourselves in our palanquins – the moon was clear, and the gentlemen preferred walking some miles at the side of my palanquin – We chatted the night away.31

  Reading such passages, one has to remind oneself not only that she was supposed to be ill, but also that Elizabeth Marsh was by law Elizabeth Crisp.

  In this respect too, more was happening than her diary made explicit. Although she moved on occasions between different villages, army camps and ports in the Madras region, for much of the time between late June 1775 and February 1776 she was based at Ellore, a military settlement three hundred miles from Madras, where about a thousand of the Company’s sepoys and seven hundred European troops were stationed. She did not live there on her own. Captain Smith commanded a regiment at Ellore, and she stayed with him in his house at the settlement, ‘that most agreeable spot’.32

  This is the second obvious paradox of her Asiatic progress: that, for all the stress in portions of her diary on modes of politeness and social conventions, there were crucial respects in which Elizabeth Marsh was living and travelling in defiance of both.

  Who was George Smith? He was possibly the individual of that name who was born in Madras of English parents in 1746, and probably the George Smith who became an ensign in the East India Company’s army there in 1765 and a lieutenant a year later, and who was promoted captain in 1772. This particular Captain Smith, who may also have been related to General Richard Smith, did indeed command a regiment at Ellore.33 But since ‘George Smith’ was one of the most common pairings of names in English, it is just possible that Elizabeth Marsh employed it in her journal as a pseudonym for another man, of whom we know nothing.

  An officer of the Madras army, possibly by Tilly Kettle, c.1770.

  Certainly, she severely rationed what she wrote in her diary about George Smith, whoever he was. She does not reveal how exactly he was connected to her other than by calling him a ‘cousin’, a term that in the eighteenth century was used to signify kinship of some kind, but did not necessarily imply a blood relationship. She says nothing about the man’s appearance, or about any of their conversations during the journey, though it is sometimes possible to infer the content of what they said to each other. And she only touches in any detail on their joint sleeping arrangements once, near the end. She and Smith had been travelling back to Bengal through Orissa slowly and in torrential monsoon rain, and by the time they found a river low enough to cross, it was night:

  Our people again lost their way, therefore [I] was obliged to remain up on the beach till day-break, and though that part of the country was greatly infested with tigers, sleep overcame all considerations, and I never enjoyed a sweeter rest – My cousin kept his palanquin near mine.

  Immediately, she corrects herself. There were, she adds, ‘besides all our servants’.34

  Her family also tampered with the record of this part of her life, as with much of the rest. Her Indian travel journal, which may once have been part of a longer diary, only survived because in 1788 her daughter, Elizabeth Maria, gave the volume to John Marsh, Elizabeth Mars
h’s younger and always doting brother. He had it bound together with a draft account of her Moroccan travels in red and gold-tooled leather, with marbled endpapers. He also prefaced the volume with his own bookplate, bearing the bogus coat of arms and motto that the more successful males of the family had adopted by this point. Posthumously, the record of Elizabeth Marsh’s Asiatic progress was absorbed into the family archive, decently bound and contained, apparently rendered respectable. One of its pages seems to have been razored out. Two more pages are stuck together.35

  Yet the censorship (if that is what it was) that she imposed on her own references to George Smith, and what seems to have been a weeding of her papers by her descendants, are in a vital sense beside the point. By abandoning her husband and her son for over eighteen months, by travelling in constant companionship with a younger man who was not a member of her immediate family, and by living in his house for more than half a year, Elizabeth Marsh had incontestably passed outside the conventions of proper female behaviour that pertained in her lifetime and after. And, for all her caution, she still writes enough to show how she was able to exert emotional power over George Smith, and to reveal her own pleasure at this. Thus, on one occasion when they were staying together in Ganjam, she records how Smith left her one evening to dine with the settlement’s Company chief, and underlines in her diary that this was ‘by my desire’. To be sure, the impression that her relationship with Smith may have been more than cousinly is deepened, and conceivably distorted, by the lack of any surviving letters between Elizabeth and her husband. But if she did manage to maintain a correspondence with James Crisp throughout the course of her progress, her diary makes no mention of this. After 23 January 1775, when she records him dispatching her a boat ‘with a fresh supply of necessaries’ at the start of her voyage to Madras, there is no further allusion, until the very end of her progress and the last surviving page, to the man she refers to only as ‘my dear Crisp’.36