The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  Continental Europe, the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia, Western and Northern Africa, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, North America: locations in all of these were caught up in the texture of George Marsh’s memories. In the early eighteenth century, his parents too had carefully preserved significant emblems of family history: their print of the Marquess of Montrose, for instance, and the Bible that Francis Marsh had clung to when he was shipwrecked off the coast of the Isle of Wight. But their horizons, like the objects they cherished, had remained bounded by the island of Great Britain and its adjacent seas. For all that he had hardly ever travelled, George Marsh’s horizons by contrast incorporated by the 1790s every continent of the globe.

  Elizabeth Marsh, who was in motion for most of her life, was shaped and ravaged far more intimately by contact with different continents and oceans. Although she was unlike her uncle in temperament, as in her travels, she cannot be understood in isolation from him, which is why their stories have intertwined so frequently in this book. Both of them lacked formal education. Yet both compiled narratives as a way of trying to understand the shocks and transitions through which they were living, and to help them work out who they were becoming in the face of them. Niece and uncle possessed something else in common. George Marsh was able to encompass large stretches of the world in his imagination and possessions, thanks to his close association with an aggressively expansionist British state. The same was true of Elizabeth Marsh, though it was not the whole truth.

  Without Britain’s empire, maritime reach, and slave trade, she would never have been conceived. And without the resources of the British imperial state to which her uncle and other male relations afforded her repeated access – its warships and naval bases, its consuls and ports, its expanding colonial territories, and the East India Company – her career would never have unfolded as it did. Empire continued to preoccupy many members of her family after her death. Some of them, her surviving brother John Marsh for instance, participated in its business only on paper. In recognition of his work in Spain and Ireland during the American War, he was appointed to the five-man commission set up in London in 1783 to investigate the claims of loyalist refugees from the former colonies. Over the next seven years, John Marsh interviewed almost three thousand white and black American loyalists, familiarizing himself in extraordinary detail with the lives of some of empire’s losers. ‘It was a rule with him, on enquiries of this kind,’ he later remarked, ‘to make himself master of every thing relative to the main subject.’ So conscientious was he that, at the end of this commission, John Marsh was promptly switched to another. He was ordered to inquire into the losses of those Britons who had been evacuated in 1787 from the Mosquito Shore, a four-hundred-mile stretch of land from Cape Gracias a Dios in the north to the San Juan River in what is now Costa Rica, that had been ‘transferred’ to Spain.8

  Other Marsh family members became directly involved in Britain’s imperial diaspora. This was true of several of George Marsh’s grandsons. One of them, another George Marsh (1790–1868), emigrated to the Cape of Good Hope, where he lent his surname to a street in Mossel Bay, married a Dutch woman, and seems to have given refuge to a black American sailor called John Washington, who had been discharged from his ship and wanted to settle in his ancestral continent.9 It was an illegitimate grandson, ‘a very bad youth’, though, who travelled farthest. The Marsh family got rid of him by securing him a place as a seaman on the First Fleet that set out from Portsmouth for New South Wales in May 1787, with 750 convicts. So it was that a member of their clan, albeit an unwanted one, reached Australia. Making landfall there was only the beginning of this young man’s journeying. In August 1788 his ship, the Scarborough, set out from Port Jackson (the site of what is now Sydney) for China, and he sailed with it. He made ‘several other voyages without the least amendment’, recorded George Marsh dolefully in the Family Book, and at ‘last entered for a soldier in the East India Company’s service’. Before disappearing in the Indian subcontinent, this unwelcome, unauthorized grandson changed his name from Marsh to George Smith.10 It illustrates the point that ‘George Smith’ – the name, apparently, of Elizabeth Marsh’s escort during her Asiatic progress – was not simply common. It was also commonly employed as a pseudonym.

  Elizabeth’s daughter, Elizabeth Maria, and her husband George Shee secured the most conspicuous advantages from servicing state and empire. Along with their young son, they left Bengal for Britain in 1788, which was when Elizabeth Maria passed on to John Marsh some of her mother’s manuscripts, a draft in another’s hand of her Moroccan experiences, and her Indian journal.11 Shee was now rich, and he acted the part of returning nabob with conviction. He secured a baronetcy in 1794, spent over £1300 on a rotten Irish borough in 1797, and supported the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain in 1800, which he viewed as ‘advantageous … to the empire at large’. Shee seems to have believed (‘I never was more certain of any truth in my life’) that union would benefit Ireland and his fellow Catholics: but his enthusiastic advocacy of the measure also benefited him. He received £8000 of secret-service money for his pains, plus a succession of minor government posts, including the Under Secretaryship for War and the Colonies in 1806.12

  ‘A chart of the track of the Scarborough, on her homeward passage, from Port Jackson, on the E. Coast of New South Wales, towards China’, by Captain John Marshall. Engraving, 1789.

  As a result, Elizabeth Marsh’s daughter acquired a lifestyle that her mother, for all the ambitions she entertained for her, can never have envisaged. There was a house in Galway, Ireland, and a much bigger house, Lockleys, in Hertfordshire in England. It boasted a ‘handsome principal stair-case … a library 20 feet by 16, and a dining parlour 24 feet by 16 wainscotted’. There were eight bedrooms (and four more dormitories for the servants), a schoolroom and nursery for the children, a double coach-house, a gravelled terrace and a pleasure garden.13 When the Shees tore themselves away from this residence, they could take refuge in yet another house in London, which held many of their prints and paintings, as well as Elizabeth Maria’s range of musical instruments. Their eldest son, George Shee junior, went to St John’s College, Cambridge. One of the closest friends he made there was Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, the future British Prime Minister. This second George Shee, great-grandson of Milbourne Marsh, a shipwright, would become – in part through Palmerston’s patronage – a Member of Parliament, a career diplomat, an art collector and a hopeless rake.14

  Elizabeth Marsh’s own story however is more than an imperial one. Britain’s empire provided for her birth and for much of her mobility, to be sure, but it made up only a sub-set of the geographical range of her experience and influences. Nor were the multifarious changes and cultural shifts that this woman lived through an outcrop only of an ‘omnipotent West as the main locus of historical initiative’.15 From the outset, people who were not European determined key stages of her life. It was fear of African slaves on the run from sugar plantations that worked to persuade her parents to leave Jamaica, thus ensuring that she was born in Portsmouth, England. Had the family remained in the Caribbean, it is unlikely that Elizabeth Marsh would have grown up with the physical hardiness she was able to draw on so often. She might not have grown up at all.

  Nor was the impact on her of peoples and societies beyond Europe only serendipitous. By ordering his corsair ships to seize British vessels in 1756, Sidi Muhammad set in motion a sequence of events that ended Elizabeth Marsh’s first engagement, and drove her into a different marriage and a different future. The significance of this remarkable ruler for the story of this book, however, is far more extensive than this. Sidi Muhammad’s reign in Morocco illustrates how in this period – the middle decades of the eighteenth century – the work of forging economic and cultural connections across very long distances was not only carried out by Western powers. Nor was it carried out just in the West’s image. The Sultan’s world-view was pan-Islamic and broadly African, t
hough it also made room for exchanges of goods, services and knowledge between Morocco and sites in Western and Eastern Europe, and ultimately in the United States. Settling in Bengal in 1774 allowed Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp contact with a still more significant extra-European centre of enterprise. For a time, and in different ways – he through trade, and she by drawing on his earnings to travel – husband and wife both profited from Dhaka’s textile manufacturing, and from the global extent of its markets.

  In retrospect, it is possible to view Elizabeth Marsh’s life as poised on a cusp between phases in world history. On the one hand, she was involved in some of the key developments that are traditionally viewed as bringing into being, for a while, a more Western-dominated world: the rise of British naval power, the territorial transformations of the Seven Years War, the American Revolution and the making of the United States, and the more concerted European invasion of the Pacific after 1750. On the other hand, her story also makes clear some of the limitations on Western power during her lifetime, and the continuing creativity of non-Western centres of initiative, innovation and communication.

  By 1800, many of these non-Western dynamic centres were fading. Even before Sidi Muhammad’s death in 1790, European trading houses and diplomats had begun to subvert his campaign to exert decisive control over Morocco’s overseas trade. Dhaka’s weavers and Bengal’s cotton trade, too, were in the doldrums by the end of the century (though how much is still in dispute).16 Bengal’s textiles were under pressure both from Britain’s own mechanizing cotton industry, and from the scale of exterminatory warfare between imperial Britain and Napoleon’s French empire, which badly disrupted overseas markets. There were many other casualties. In the 1750s and ’60s, James Crisp had been able to work profitably with Sephardic Jewish merchants and bankers, taking advantage of their business and family networks that spanned parts of Asia, North Africa, the Caribbean and European free ports such as Livorno and Hamburg. But the Sephardim, who had flourished during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries because of their capacity and willingness to bridge different societies and cultures, were also in evident commercial decline by 1800. With a few conspicuous exceptions, their role as intermediaries was no longer so valued – or so possible – in a world characterized by more bureaucratic, and more aggressive, imperial and nation states.17

  One of the underlying themes in this book, indeed (and this would scarcely have surprised Adam Smith), has been the uncomfortable relationship that could exist between imperial ambitions on the one hand, and transcontinental commercial enterprise on the other. Empire is about exercising and extending power across oceanic and territorial space. So it is hardly surprising that the British Empire has been credited (not without some justice) with fostering worldwide economic connections and proto-globalization.18 Yet, in practice, and as the dual stages of James Crisp’s commercial ruin illustrate, the disruptions and wars that accompanied empire could also sabotage international trade, even for the British themselves. Empire, both the British and the Spanish varieties, gave to James Crisp. It afforded him access to Caribbean products and ultimately African slaves. It gave him markets for his salted fish, a brief prospect of an estate in East Florida, and for a while profitable access to Bengal’s textiles. But empire, and the changes it imposed on the world, also took away. Crisp’s bankruptcy in 1767 was due in part to the economic dislocations caused by the Seven Years War, and to a more aggressively imperial British state’s determination to clamp down on the Isle of Man’s flexible and extensive trade. The disruptions caused by another imperial war after 1775, along with the East India Company’s determination to safeguard its monopolies, helped to kill him.

  This, too, has been a recurrent theme of this book: the enhanced opportunities that increasing connections and exchanges between continents and distant societies made available to some individuals, but also the terrible risks. In 1824, William Marsh, George Marsh’s eldest son, was ruined along with his banking house, Marsh, Stacey, Fauntleroy & Graham of Berners Street, London. The collapse was partly the result of acts of forgery by one of William Marsh’s partners. It was made worse, however, by the strains caused to the British banking system at this time by a rash of loans to the newly independent Latin American states that were emerging from the ruins of the Spanish Empire. As William wrote, his father had made a fortune: he had lost it. George Marsh had risen from mariner to riches through servicing for over sixty years the world’s most powerful navy. William Marsh came to grief through dealing in the world’s biggest and most outward-looking capital market.19

  As the novelist John Galsworthy recognized, tracing the fortunes of a family’s multiple members over time can be a good way of compressing and rendering history.20 This micro strategy – using the perspectives on the past afforded by a family – becomes paradoxically more, and not less, valuable when dealing with historical developments that extend over vast territorial and oceanic spaces. Some of the changes in which Elizabeth Marsh was involved were so large, so momentous and far-reaching, that they can seem hard to grasp except in anonymous and abstract terms. Yet adopting a purely abstract approach to changes and influences that transcend continents means that we understand them only imperfectly. There can and should be no Olympian version of world history, and there is always a human and individual dimension. In this book I have been concerned to examine how a momentous and disruptive period of global history was experienced by one extended family. I have sought to reveal the many and diverse connections that existed between ‘impersonal and remote transformations’ on the one hand and, on the other, ‘the most intimate features of the human self’.21

  This has also been the story of a woman who was more, of course, than the puppet of impersonal forces. For all of her ordeals, Elizabeth Marsh cannot plausibly be viewed as a victim. She was often endangered and challenged by external events, but she also made a succession of choices that took her across boundaries, and into danger. And although her existence was sometimes harsh, and she knew terror and persistent insecurity, she also knew discovery and exhilaration: ‘the life was new and by no means unpleasant’. It was an infinitely more diverse life than would have been her lot had she stayed in England; and hers was a more privileged existence than that enjoyed by those slaves whom she and James Crisp owned at intervals, or by the slaves she might have joined inside Sidi Muhammad’s palace.

  I have sought to extract Elizabeth Marsh’s mixed qualities, which reflect her fractured origins and life, from her extraordinary actions and from her writings. She was highly courageous and enterprising, and often ignorant; intensely curious, shrewd and enquiring, and simultaneously prejudiced; socially insecure and avid for approval, but willing to disregard the bonds of polite womanhood when it suited her; devoted to the interests of her birth family and offspring, and sporadically eager to get away from them; at once selfish and ruthless, and possessed always of a capacity to pick herself up in the wake of crisis and disaster, and to try something new. There remain two significant gaps in our knowledge about her private world. One is the birth identity of her mother, and the other is the quality of her own marriage. Her growing alienation from James Crisp can be charted and speculated about, but it cannot be fully explained. Nor is it knowable whether she absented herself from him so often in part as a rudimentary but very effective means of birth control. Their two children represented a very small family by eighteenth-century standards.

  The powerful influence that this ‘very engaging woman with great abilities’ exercised over others, however, is clear. Her encounters with Sidi Muhammad (for all her literary embellishments) suggest this, and so do her dealings with various Royal Navy admirals and captains. The force of her personality and her capacity to inspire attachment are also evident in the behaviour of her male relations. Elizabeth Marsh was always economically dependent: but far from confining her, her male kin frequently went out of their way to assist her enterprises. George Marsh disapproved of her, but gave her money and access to s
hips. John Marsh ensured the survival of some of her writings, while possibly also censoring them. General Richard Smith used his influence to ease her Asiatic progress. So, even to the extent of defying military orders, did Captain George Smith. Milbourne Marsh aided his daughter repeatedly, and even compromised his career for her, just as James Crisp compromised his mercantile prospects by renewing his proposal to Elizabeth in December 1756.

  There was another man who was devoted to Elizabeth Marsh and who was profoundly damaged on her account, and that was her son Burrish Crisp, who purchased the burial site adjacent to hers. In 1779, he had been obliged to give up the chance of working in Warren Hastings’ powerful orbit, so as to return to Dhaka and look after his dying father in the absence of his mother. A comparable chance for his marked linguistic skills to win recognition from the Company’s hierarchy never came again. Burrish Crisp became a founding member of the Asiatic Society, the leading European intellectual club in Calcutta, and he produced learned translations of some important texts; but he remained for the rest of his life a merchant, and a minor judicial official in Dhaka.22 He also fathered two children, a boy and a girl, on an Indian companion of whom we know nothing.

  To end Elizabeth Marsh’s story with this lost woman seems appropriate, because her own life had begun with another ghost in the family tree. Her mother Elizabeth Bouchier (or Boucher, or Bourchier) may have been African in ancestry, or as conventionally English as her daughter chose on occasions to proclaim herself to be. Burrish Crisp’s Indian companion is an even more elusive character, because in her case we do not even know her name. As was often the case in relationships of this sort, Burrish made no mention of the mother of his son when he had him baptized in Calcutta in 1794, and named John Henry Crisp.23 This other, half-Indian, grandson of Elizabeth Marsh grew up very differently from the younger George Shee. Although Eurasians were officially excluded after 1791 from positions in the East India Company’s service, John Henry Crisp went on to become a Captain in the Madras army. Like his father (and perhaps his Indian mother), he was naturally studious and highly intelligent, ‘particularly assiduous in the study of the Hindoostanee language’ and ‘distinguished … by his scientific acquirements’. It was this scientific ability that led him to be put in charge of a special mission to Sumatra in 1822. Combining Western and Indian astronomical techniques that he had acquired at the Madras Observatory, John Henry Crisp carried out eight hundred experiments on Sumatra, and subsequently published a dense treatise on determining ‘terrestrial longitudes by the moon’s right ascension’.24