The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  In the same way, the American Revolution was partly (and notoriously) caused by Britain’s attempts to tax its colonists more rigorously, so as to cover its debts from the Seven Years War and underpin its vastly expanded imperial role. Similarly, it was the huge costs of building new fortifications in Calcutta and Madras, of rapidly inflating its armies, and of fighting wars with Mysore and the Marathas in the 1760s and ’70s that drove the East India Company to try imposing new taxes on land in northern India at this time, and to increase its profits from the manufacture and sale of salt and opium.16 Indeed, these revenue-raising initiatives on different sides of the world were not just comparable in type, but also interwoven in practice. It was in order to ease the East India Company’s financial difficulties in the subcontinent that the British Parliament passed the Tea Act in April 1773. This allowed the Company to export its surplus Chinese tea for the first time, in its own ships, directly to four ports in Britain’s American colonies. It was because they viewed this, rightly, as a threat to their own private smuggling, and ‘as a badge’ of imperial sovereignty over them, that angry citizens in one of these ports, Boston, threw ninety thousand pounds of East India Company tea into their harbour in November 1774.17

  As far as his salt agency in Bhulua, and many of the difficulties he encountered there, were concerned, then, James Crisp was very much a man of his time. He was one of a multitude of agents, active in widely different parts of the world, who were seeking to extract extra revenue for their respective cash-hungry and authority-hungry political masters, and – in the process – were provoking haggling, obstruction and occasionally violent protest. Crisp was not tarred and feathered or beaten up as he went about his salt agent’s duties in Bhulua. But, like those customs officers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts who did experience such treatment at the hands of irate American colonists, he suffered personally on account of his revenue-raising work, even as he tried to extricate himself from it.

  Just as customs officers in the American colonies had been wont to do, Crisp frequently complained that opposition to the East India Company’s salt monopoly in Bhulua cried out for more coercive power. As early as 1775, he warned the Provincial Council at Dhaka that he needed at least three more sepoys to aid him, ‘which the duty I am upon absolutely requires’. A year later, he was requesting ‘a reinforcement of about 12 sepoys’.18 As on this last occasion, his demands for extra military support were usually rejected. Under economic pressure, and faced with the prospect of an already international war soon seeping into the subcontinent, Crisp’s superiors in Dhaka and Calcutta preferred to believe that all would be well if only he intensified his own efforts and application. From early on, they urged him to spend more time on-site and on duty in Bhulua: ‘It is only you that can be called upon to answer … and therefore if you have not hitherto, you must now take charge of the Company’s salt and be careful that there be no delay in the delivery thereof.’19 To the extent that James Crisp was being asked to administer a system that was structurally flawed, insufficiently supported, and deficient in legitimacy, this was unfair. But the Company was right in thinking that he was often absent from his post. His letters to his superiors during the course of Elizabeth Marsh’s leisurely journeying with George Smith show that Crisp spent more and more of his time in Lakshmipur: ‘Luckipore’, as the British commonly referred to it. This town was about sixty-eight miles by river from Dhaka, close to the junction of the Meghna and the Ganges, and it was not a centre of salt production. Lakshmipur was supremely a place of cloth-making. Its weavers enjoyed an illustrious reputation for producing fine-quality textiles both for elite consumption within the subcontinent and for markets overseas.20

  It was to this place and its commercial potential that James Crisp was increasingly drawn in preference to his Company salt duties in Bhulua. He was not a natural bureaucrat, or a man who enjoyed working to others. Nor, as he had already shown in Barcelona and London, was he someone who willingly accepted the confines of a single empire. Necessity had driven him, as a new migrant, to seek employment with the East India Company, just as bankruptcy had earlier tempted him to become involved in colonial projects in East Florida. But quintessentially James Crisp was a merchant: ‘that is to say, a man whose operations are not confined within any region but spread over the whole globe and who constantly behaves as if he regards himself as a burgher of the whole world’.21 True to such an outlook, his interests and aspirations extended far beyond damp Bhulua. Even before he arrived in Dhaka and became a salt agent, Crisp had begun trading with Persia. This was traditionally an important market for Bengal cloth both in its own right, and because of the access it afforded to Ottoman territories. By 1774, East India Company records show Crisp importing raw materials into Calcutta from England for cloth production and finishing, cases of starch, soap, oil and the like. And about this time he found himself a new business partner, joining up with Henry Lodge, a Company servant who was then secretary to the Provincial Council in Dhaka. Their joint business was sufficiently well known for the two men to be asked in 1775 to give evidence on the state of Dhaka’s textile industry in a case brought by indigenous weavers in Calcutta’s Supreme Court.22

  Thus far, there was nothing in any of this that was unusual, or to which the East India Company could reasonably object. Its senior officials took it for granted that full-time employees in the subcontinent, men like Henry Lodge, would supplement their salaries by trading on their own account. And while James Crisp was not a covenanted servant of the Company, he was known to possess a licence from its directors allowing him to engage in private trade in Bengal and off its coast. That he was combining his work as a salt agent on the Company’s payroll with trading in Bengal textiles to Persia and elsewhere in Asia was therefore understood and accepted. But in 1775–76, while Elizabeth Marsh was away travelling, James Crisp crossed an important line. He started spending conspicuous amounts of time in Lakshmipur, where the East India Company itself controlled a substantial textile manufactory. He also appears to have begun competing with the Company’s agents to purchase high-quality fabric from Lakshmipur’s weavers, exactly the sort of cloth that the Company relied on to meet its export targets for markets beyond Asia. In short, and just as he had in Barcelona and London, James Crisp began pressing against the rules, and testing the barriers on free trade.

  A single building in Lakshmipur became the physical embodiment of these barriers, and the site for struggle between Crisp and the Company’s powerful and disapproving local factory chief, one Henry Goodwin. The building was an unprepossessing bungalow, ‘with a small veranda round it closed in with old mats’, and with a surrounding open ditch its only gesture to sanitation. Its attraction lay in its location. It was just 250 yards from the entrance to the East India Company’s cloth factory. Whoever occupied this Lakshmipur bungalow was in a position to watch the daily stream of indigenous weavers and cloth-traders entering and leaving the Company’s factory – and to intercept any of them and try to cut his own commercial deals. As Henry Goodwin told the tale, the first time James Crisp had visited Lakshmipur, there was nowhere for him to sleep except his budgerow, the covered boat that served as his mobile home as he travelled Bengal’s river system carrying out his salt duties. He, Goodwin, had generously offered him the loan of the bungalow, which was then standing empty, ‘for the short time he should stay at Lakshmipur which he supposed would not exceed a month’. But no sooner had Crisp returned to Dhaka than he had fired off a letter to Goodwin setting out a claim to live in the bungalow permanently, ‘as he found … [it] was at the disposal of the Dhaka Council, and he wished to make such alterations in it as would render it a comfortable dwelling’.23

  Goodwin reacted with fury. This was no mere bungalow, he insisted. It was a cutcherry, an office. Dhaka’s Provincial Council had no rights over it, because it belonged to the East India Company’s commercial department, and was intended for Company servants employed in collecting revenue in Lakshmipur. As for James Crisp, wh
o was he, and what claim could he conceivably have on the Company’s accommodation? He was ‘a person who is not in the service and no ways entitled to an habitation from the Company by being salt agent’. Spurred on by Crisp’s new business partner, Henry Lodge, Dhaka’s Provincial Council initially swept Goodwin’s objections aside. The bungalow was situated within the Dhaka district. It was accordingly the Council’s right to allocate it as they saw fit, and their wish was for James Crisp to occupy it whenever his salt duties took him to Lakshmipur. It followed that no one else could live there. The correspondence over this matter became increasingly bad-tempered, went on for over a year, and reached the desk of Warren Hastings several times over. To begin with, he came down on the side of James Crisp.24

  Yet Henry Goodwin was right to insist that far more was at stake than a mere bungalow. At a personal level, this protracted tussle over an ‘uncomfortable habitation … made entirely of mats’ illustrates the resentment and suspicion that Elizabeth Marsh’s husband seems often to have provoked by his brand of impatient, improvisory enterprise.25 To some he came in contact with – and especially to those of a more conventional and pompous disposition, like George Marsh in London or Henry Goodwin in Bengal – James Crisp’s business style, which was an outcrop of his intense ambition and his lack of secure capital, could seem mere ruthless opportunism, arrant rule-breaking, even dishonesty. He ‘had not been genteely treated’ by Crisp, Goodwin complained. Part of what he meant by this was that Elizabeth Marsh’s husband was not a gentleman. Crisp, he wrote, had ‘acted a very disingenuous part’. A Company revenue officer who had been hoping to move into the Lakshmipur bungalow himself was just as scathing: ‘It appears to me Mr. Crisp does not like to put himself to any expense when it can be done at another’s cost.’ The revenue officer and Goodwin did not send these accusations directly to James Crisp, since to do so would have been to invite a duel. But, almost as dangerously, his accusers did send copies of their letters of complaint to the Board of Trade in Calcutta, the body that was responsible for overseeing the Company’s commercial ventures and investments.26

  Neither Henry Goodwin nor the disgruntled and homeless revenue officer was in any doubt as to why James Crisp wanted the bungalow so badly – wanted indeed, so they claimed, to move to Lakshmipur permanently, even if he had to build himself a new house there in order to do so. As Goodwin wrote, nastily, to the Board of Trade in May 1776:

  I cannot help adding … with respect to Mr. Crisp’s residing at Lakshmipur, that this appears to me incompatible with the duty of the salt agent’s office, and contrary to the meaning of his appointment which I think requires his residing at, or near the places where the salt is made, that it may be under his immediate superintendancy, whereas I do not see for my part the use he can be of to the Company if the business which he should look after himself is delegated to others, and he might as well reside altogether at Dhaka, or even in Calcutta as at Lakshmipur. Indeed … [for] fourteen months, the salt agent has not to my knowledge once visited the places where the salt is manufactured.

  As a coup de grâce, Goodwin included with this letter the revenue officer’s own essentially accurate assessment of James Crisp’s behaviour: ‘it is more for the sake of carrying on his own private trade than any real service he can render to the Company, that induces him to reside here’.27

  As it happened, the prospect of expanding his private trade in new directions may not have been all that was enticing James Crisp in the direction of Lakshmipur. If Henry Goodwin and the revenue officer were correct, and he did contemplate moving there permanently, and abandoning the elegant house in Dhaka, Crisp may have had other, more personal incentives. By this stage, the early summer of 1776, Elizabeth Marsh had been absent travelling with George Smith for almost eighteen months; this after having also been apart from her husband for most of 1769, 1770 and early 1771. James Crisp may have had enough. He may have looked for and found female companionship and sexual consolation in Lakshmipur, as well as a rich source of luxury fabrics, though this can be no more than speculation. What is certain is that he was pulled in this new direction not simply by a variety of pressures and temptations, but also by his instinct for potentially lucrative ventures that came freighted with risk.

  By the early 1770s, East India Company officials in the subcontinent were finding it increasingly difficult to meet their export targets for textiles, particularly in regard to the finer varieties of cloth on which profits in Europe, North America, the Caribbean and elsewhere were highest.28 Despite the Company’s considerable capacity for harassment and coercion, there were frequent complaints from its agents throughout Bengal that native weavers were defying them, and choosing to sell their cloth to rival Asian merchants, or to European private traders. Some Bengal weavers simply refused to work for the Company any more. Others reportedly cut back on the quality of the cloth they were producing for the Company, and many weavers complained that the prices it was offering were no longer sufficient to cover their costs for yarn and food, which had risen since a terrible famine in Bengal in 1769–70. The fact that large numbers of weavers had starved to death in this famine may have increased for a while the bargaining power of those who remained healthy and at work. At the same time as the East India Company was confronted in Bengal with these challenges from native textile workers and rival merchants, there were signs that consumer demand for its exports in Britain and elsewhere was flattening off. Quantities of unwanted goods began to pile up ominously in the Company’s warehouses.29

  One of the places where anxiety over these developments was felt acutely was Lakshmipur, with its Company factory and its tradition of producing superlative, brilliantly coloured cloth for Western markets. In April 1776, a month before he composed his character assassination of James Crisp, Henry Goodwin had written to the Board of Trade in Calcutta warning that the Company’s hold on Lakshmipur’s weavers was slipping. He could no longer guarantee to procure the requisite quota of fine textiles, since the prices the Company was offering had fallen below the ‘real cost of cloth to the weavers’.30 Some of Lakshmipur’s traditionally independent weavers, Goodwin reported, were making up for their losses in regard to the Company by selling their cloth to private traders – to men like James Crisp. In this year of revolutions, Crisp was seemingly no longer content to confine himself to trading within Asia. He also wanted – and perhaps needed – to win access to the overseas export trade in top-quality Bengal cloth. Dissatisfied with his situation in Dhaka, with his difficult and disputatious work as a salt agent, and with his long-absent wife, he wanted the bungalow in Lakshmipur, or at least a house of his own there, among other things so as to be within easy reach of the best textiles that its rebellious weavers could produce.

  Hindu weavers. Anonymous watercolour, c.1798–1804.

  Later in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith would famously urge the desirability of such challenges to the East India Company’s commercial grip on sectors of the Indian subcontinent, for the sake of their inhabitants, and for the sake of freer trade. The Company and its servants were ‘plunderers’, Smith wrote. Their ‘perpetual monopoly’ on so much British trade around Calcutta, Madras and Bombay was unnecessary and commercially iniquitous. ‘That a joint stock company should be able to carry on successfully any branch of foreign trade,’ he insisted, ‘when private adventurers can come into any sort of open and fair competition with them seems contrary to all experience.’31 Adam Smith had little to say, however, about the sort of risks such ‘private adventurers’ might incur if they tried competing against the East India Company on territory that it regarded as its own. Given James Crisp’s temperament and business style, his earlier involvement in smuggling on the Isle of Man, and the varied pressures he was under in Dhaka as a bankrupted newcomer with no permanent position and with a family to support, it was less than surprising that he should have chosen to venture himself this way.32 Working as a salt agent, and observing how often the Company’s authority was flouted in Bhu
lua by native inhabitants and by some of its own officials, may also have encouraged Crisp to attempt defying the rules himself, and to believe that he could get away with it. He had already witnessed at close quarters some of the Company’s weaknesses and inefficiencies. In late autumn 1776, he experienced the power of the Company’s displeasure.

  Although Warren Hastings concluded, after surveying some of the complaints against him, that James Crisp’s conduct as a salt agent did ‘not appear culpable’, the Board of Trade in Calcutta insisted on his dismissal.33 Not, in reality, on the grounds of incompetence, or even his intermittent absenteeism, but rather because Crisp had been caught out in commercial poaching. It was not his failure fully to implement the Company’s salt monopoly (something he shared with every other salt agent) that earned him the sack, but his attempts to succeed as an interloper in Lakshmipur. For some months Crisp managed to keep the man appointed as his replacement at Bhulua, William Justice, at bay by refusing to yield up his accounts or any of the salt he had already collected from the region’s golas, but this could be no more than a delaying tactic. ‘Your agency with the allowances annexed thereto will expire the last day of March,’ Crisp was reminded sternly in February 1777, so ‘you will see the necessity of using dispatch’. When he persisted in holding out into March, he was dispatched a more explicit warning: ‘no delay in this business will occasion a continuance of your salary after the 31st of this month’.34 After that, from 1 April 1777, James Crisp’s only source of income became whatever he could make from trading in textiles on his own account, in parts of the world he was in no position fully to understand, and at a time of contagious warfare.