It may have been before or after this scientific mission that he, in his turn, had an affair with an Indian woman whose name has also been lost. They had a child, a girl. In due course, she was given over to the care of the Madras orphanage for ‘illegitimate children of European officers and soldiers of the King’s and Company’s service’. Before abandoning her there, John Henry Crisp bestowed on this daughter the married name of Burrish Crisp’s mother, the remarkable grandmother whom he had never met. The girl, however, proved restless. At some point between 1829 and 1838, the archives reveal, she absconded.25 Thus it was that a new and now almost entirely Indian Elizabeth Crisp one day opened the door of the Madras orphanage that was confining her, and set out on her own journey in the streets of Chennai.
FAMILY TREES
These are streamlined genealogical tables. For more details about members of these families, see the website: http://www.jjhc.info/ Individuals discussed in detail in this book are given in bold print and with such dates as are available. The fact that the dates of several of these characters are unknown reflects in some cases their race, gender, or poverty. In other cases, their omission from known official records is due to their own or their parents’ transnational and transcontinental journeyings.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations are employed in the notes:
a) INDIVIDUALS
EM – Elizabeth Marsh
GM – George Marsh
GS – George Shee
JC – James Crisp
JM – John Marsh
MM – Milbourne Marsh
b) FAMILY WRITINGS
CB – Commonplace Book
A two-volume commonplace book and scrapbook compiled by Elizabeth Marsh’s uncle, George Marsh. It contains notes on a wide variety of topics and various literary and newspaper extracts, and is held by the Wellcome Library, London (MSS.7628–9).
FB – Family Book
This is an unevenly-paginated compilation of Marsh family histories, contemporary observations and autobiographical notes compiled, again by George Marsh, in the 1790s. The original manuscript, which is a volume half bound in white leather with marbled covers, and containing almost two hundred pages, remains in private ownership. An online version is available at www.jjhc.info/marshgeorge1800diary.htm.
FC – The Female Captive
Page references to this work, published anonymously by EM in 1769, are taken from the edited version produced by Khalid Bekkaoui (Moroccan Cultural Studies, Casablanca, 2003). Professors Bekkaoui and Felicity Nussbaum are currently at work on a new edition of this book together with EM’s Indian Journal.
FCMS – Manuscript draft of The Female Captive
The provenance of this manuscript is unknown. Although its manuscript title is ‘Narrative of her Captivity in Barbary’, it is not in EM’s handwriting. It appears to be a copy of an early version of The Female Captive which EM wrote in Chatham, England, in 1769, not in Morocco in 1756, and it contains factual errors but also some material not repeated in the published work. It is held by the Special Collections department of the Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles (Bound Manuscript 170/604).
IJ – Indian Journal
This was compiled by EM during her progress in eastern and southern regions of the Indian subcontinent between December 1774 and July 1776. For a description of this manuscript, see infra, pp.187–8, 203. It is bound together with FCMS, and held at the Charles E. Young Library as above.
c) ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES
AHPB – Arxiu Històric de Protocols, Barcelona, Spain
BL – British Library, London, England
GL – Guildhall Library, London, England
IOL – India Office Library in the British Library, London, England
IRO – Island Record Office, Twickenham, Jamaica
JA – Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica
LC – Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA
MNHL – Manx National Heritage Library, Douglas, Isle of Man
NA – National Archives, Kew, England
NAS – National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland
NMM – National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England
RO – Record Office
d) PRINTED WORKS
HMC – Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts
ODNB – Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online version)
Parl. Hist. – William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to 1803 (36 vols, 1816)
INTRODUCTION
1. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (4th edn, 1774), p.272.
2. See V. Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2006).
3. Quoted in P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), p.27.
4. J.L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, 1989); D.O. Flynn and A. Giráldez, ‘Born With a “Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History 6 (1995), pp.201–21.
5. For an elegant argument about the importance of this mid-eighteenth-century period for belief in global connections, see R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J.O. Justamond (6 vols, 1798 edn), I, p.2; T.W. Copeland et al. (eds), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 10 vols, 1958–78), III, pp.350–1.
6. The Pacific Ocean basin ‘was the site of frequent interaction well before modern times’, but in the main only among non-European sailors: see E. Manke, ‘Early Modern Globalization and the Politicization of Oceanic Space’, Geographical Review 89 (1999), pp.225–36; The Universal Pocket Companion (1760), p.3.
7. C. Tang, ‘Writing World History: The Emergence of a Modern Global Consciousness in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Columbia University Ph.D. diss., 2000, p.102.
8. Thomas Salmon, A New Geographical and Historical Grammar: Wherein the Geographical Part is Truly Modern (12th edn, Dublin, 1766), preface.
9. My appreciation of this point was much enhanced by Emma Rothschild’s Tanner Lectures on ‘The Inner Life of Empires’ at Princeton University in April 2006.
10. For two recent surveys of the enormous amount of work now in progress, see R. Grew, ‘Expanding Worlds of World History’, and M. Lang, ‘Globalization and its History’, Journal of Modern History 78 (2006), pp.878–98 and 899–931. The argument that global history tends only to universalize Western experience – something that EM’s own experience challenges – is made powerfully in F. Cooper, ‘What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective’, African Affairs 100 (2001), pp.189–213.
11. C. Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), pp.68–9.
12. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York, 1959), pp.4–5, 7.
CHAPTER 1: Out of the Caribbean
1. See the Lieutenant’s log: NMM, ADM/L/K 40A.
2. ‘State of Jamaica’, c.1735: NA, PC 1/58/3. For the shifts in land ownership and sugar production on the island, see B.W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston, 1988); and R.S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972).
3. For the Caribbean region as ‘precociously modern’ see, for instance, P.D. Morgan, ‘The Caribbean Islands in Atlantic Context, circa 1500–1800’, F. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD, 2003), pp.52–64, and R. Drayton, ‘The Collaboration of Labour: Slaves, Empires and Globalization in the Atlantic World, c.1600–1850’, in A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (2002), pp.98–114.
4. D. Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambr
idge, 2000), p.136; T. Burnard and K. Morgan, ‘The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788’, William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001), pp.205–28.
5. M. Pawson and D. Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica (Oxford, 1975), pp.98–9 and passim; and see N. Zahedieh, ‘Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica, 1655–89’, Economic History Review 39 (1986), pp.205–22; and her ‘The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692’, William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986), pp.570–93. There is a need for a new survey history that will locate Port Royal firmly in its broader American, African, European and Asian contexts.
6. A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans, trans. J.O. Justamond (6 vols, 1788 edn), VI, pp.340–1.
7. C. Leslie, A New History of Jamaica (1740), p.25.
8. A.D. Meyers, ‘Ethnic Distinctions and Wealth Among Colonial Jamaican Merchants, 1685–1716’, Social Science History 22 (1998), pp.47–81.
9. Quoted in Morgan, ‘Caribbean Islands’, p.63; H.C. De Wolf, ‘Chinese Porcelain and Seventeenth-Century Port Royal, Jamaica’, Texas A & M University Ph.D. diss., 1998.
10. T. Burnard, ‘European Migration to Jamaica, 1655–1780’, William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1996), pp.769–96.
11. For the pervasiveness of death in early modern Jamaica, see V.A. Brown, ‘Slavery and the Spirits of the Dead: Mortuary Politics in Jamaica, 1740–1834’, Duke University Ph.D diss., 2002.
12. NMM, ADM/L/K 40A: entry for 22 July 1732; Edward Long subsequently claimed that a total of 4570 slaves were unloaded at Port Royal during 1734: BL Add.MS 12435, fol. 17.
13. Quoted in K. Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Kingston, 2005 edn), p.223.
14. The human damage can be tracked in the Kingston muster book for 1732–33: NA, ADM 36/1662; BL Add.MS 12427, fol. 102.
15. N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (1986), pp.98–9.
16. Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea (1746 edn), p.113; and see Rodger, The Wooden World, pp.20–1, 39, 66.
17. NA, ADM 36/727 and ADM 36/3166: muster books of Deal Castle and Rupert.
18. IRO, Kingston copy register 1721–1825: Marriages, I, fol. 9. On her church monument, MM claimed that his first wife was sixty-eight when she died in 1776. This is not corroborated by any other known source.
19. IRO, Court wills, Liber 19, Part 2, fol. 188. The will was entered into the record on 4 December 1734, so Evans would have died at least several weeks before then; T. Burnard, ‘Inheritance and Independence: Women’s Status in Early Colonial Jamaica’, William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991), pp.95–6.
20. JA, 2/19/1–4 (unfol.): permission recorded 13 August 1734.
21. See T. Burnard, ‘Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31 (2001), pp.325–46; Evans’ inventory is at JA, 1B/11/3/17, fols 132–3.
22. ‘A list taken … of all and every negro slave’, JA, 2/19/1–4 (unfol.).
23. JA, Letters Testamentary, 1B/11/18/4, fol. 91; IRO, Kingston Copy Register 1721–1825: Marriages, I, fol. 91.
24. She is not listed for instance in J. and M. Kaminkow, A List of Emigrants from England to America, 1718–1759 (Baltimore, MD, 1964); or in David Galenson’s addendum: ‘Agreements to Serve in America and the West Indies, 1727–31’, Genealogists’ Magazine 19 (1977), pp.40–4.
25. FB (unfol.).
26. This may or may not be significant. As John Gillis writes, in early modern England ‘the epitaph was not meant to remember the person but to remind everyone of a certain type of person’: A World of Their Own Making (New York, 1996), p.35.
27. JA 2/19/1–4: ‘A list of the white inhabitants of this parish’; widow Boucher is also listed in Port Royal’s poll tax lists for 1739, 1740 and 1741.
28. In 1678, a Jane Bourchier is listed as owning 1020 acres on the island: JA, 1B/11/1, index to patents; for Charles Bourchier, whose land was in St Catharine’s parish, see IRO, Court wills, Liber 17, Part I, fol. 60.
29. Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society, p.301.
30. Sir John Fielding quoted in P. Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650–1775 (1998), preface.
31. P. Wright, Monumental Inscriptions of Jamaica (1966), p.vi. For a classic account of sailors’ lives, stressing their distinctiveness, see M. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987).
32. Raynal, Philosophical and Political History (4 vols, 1776, Dublin edn), IV, p.464.
33. For one of the best-known beneficiaries of the Royal Navy’s relative openness, see V. Carretta, Equiano the African (2006); and W.J. Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
34. NA, ADM 33/342: pay book of Rupert.
35. H. Lee, Body Parts: Essays in Life-Writing (2005), p.6; the original image is Julian Barnes’s.
36. K. Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2003), p.148.
37. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (rev. edn, 1991), p.166.
38. See T. Burnard, ‘A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica’, Journal of Social History 28 (1994), pp.63–82; IRO, Port Royal copy register, 1725–1835, I: entry for 2 July 1730.
39. JA, House of Assembly journals, 1B/5/1//10, fols 197 and 204; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (New York, 1982).
40. For Cudjoe’s departure, see the muster book of the Rupert: NA, ADM 36/3167. By 1738, a ‘John Cudjoe’, still a slave, was working as a caulker for the navy at Port Royal: NA, ADM 106/901, fol. 22.
41. See Calendar of State Papers Colonial Series; America and West Indies … 1734–1735 (1953), pp.32, 49–51, 91, 102–3, 188–90, 257–8, 321–2, and 407–9 for growing expressions of anxiety on the part of Jamaica’s settler elite.
42. It is possible that MM retained some property in Port Royal for a while. A friend was still paying local taxes on his behalf there in 1737: ‘A list of the deficiency tax for the parish and precincts of Port Royal’, JA, 2/19/1–4 (unfol.).
43. Log of the Kingston, NMM, ADM L/K 40A; for women voyaging in Royal Navy warships, see Rodger, The Wooden World, pp.67–76.
44. Here and throughout – unless otherwise stated – I am relying on the Familysearch.org website for details of births, christenings, marriages, deaths and burials.
45. NA, ADM 6/14, fol. 221; MM’s presence on the Deal Castle and Cambridge can be tracked in NA, ADM 36/730, 736, and 437.
46. C.R. Markham (ed.), Life of Captain Stephen Martin 1666–1740, Navy Records Society (1895), p.210.
47. D.A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, NJ, 1965), pp.262–340; J. Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Royal Navy (Aldershot, 1989), pp.1–13.
48. Quoted in J.H. Thomas, Portsmouth and the East India Company 1700–1815 (1999), p.34.
49. Coad, Royal Dockyards, p.3.
50. See Thomas, Portsmouth and the East India Company, passim; the pagodas, booty from Anson’s circumnavigation of the world, are noted in J.J. Cartwright (ed.), The Travels Through England of Dr. Richard Pococke, Camden Society (2 vols, 1888–89), II, p.115.
51. FC, p.43.
52. This and successive paragraphs draw on ‘Memorandums that I have heard of father’s and mother’s families’ in FB; for George Marsh senior, see NA, ADM 7/810, fol. 15.
53. There may have been some truth to this. In John Milbourne’s will, in which he refers to himself as a ‘gentleman’, MM’s mother was left only five shillings: Hampshire RO, 1722, A 56.
54. In 1749 he was listed as one of the Portsmouth shipwrights who ‘appear to be worn out’: NA, ADM 7/658, fol. 49.
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br /> 55. For Jean Duval, see NA, PROB 11/844; EM comments on her French in FC, p.90.
56. J. DeVries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 54 (1994), pp.249–70.
57. MM to Navy Board, 30 May 1765 (copy), NMM ADM/B/177.
58. Regulations and Instructions, pp.113–14.
59. R. Campbell, The London Tradesman (1747), p.299.
60. IJ, p.3.
61. NA, ADM 106/938, fols 222, 234–8.
62. MM’s answer to the allegation, ibid., fol. 236.
63. Ibid.
64. For MM’s work in advance of Toulon, see his reports in NA, ADM 1/381; and ADM 36/2098: muster book of Namur.
65. Minutes of court martial of Admiral Thomas Mathews, 1746, evidence of Milbourne Marsh: NA, ADM 1/5279; for the background to and debate over Toulon, see N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (2004), pp.242–5.
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh Page 33