The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  66. NA, ADM 1/5279: evidence of Milbourne Marsh; A Narrative of the Proceedings of His Majesty’s Fleet (1744), p.63.

  67. M. Hunt, ‘Women and the Fiscal-Imperial State in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in K. Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), pp.29–47.

  68. NA, ADM 106/938, fol. 236; I am inferring that EM’s two brothers were born at sea, since they seem not to be registered in any land parish.

  69. Quoted in C. Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford, CA, 1998), p.143; for MM’s wages at Chatham dockyard during this period, see NA, ADM 42/42 and 43.

  70. FB, entries for February 1737 and May 1744; GM’s account of his own early career differs in some details from that given in J.M. Collinge, Navy Board Officials, 1660–1832 (1978), p.121.

  71. FB, entry for 10 October 1745.

  72. D.M. Peers, ‘Between Mars and Mammon: The East India Company and Efforts to Reform its Army, 1796–1832’, Historical Journal 33 (1990), p.389.

  73. George Marsh MSS. (unsorted).

  74. J.B. Hattendorf et al. (eds), British Naval Documents, 1204–1940, Navy Records Society (1993), p.461

  75. GM, ‘Rough memorandum book’, c.1799, included in FB, at pages at the back of the volume.

  76. CB, fols 47, 79, and prayer at the back of the volume; FB, fol. 78. For a characteristic example of GM’s unctuousness, see his letter to Lord Sandwich, 13 May 1785: ‘It will ever give me the utmost pleasure to shew by my actions, my sense of your truly great and noble turn of mind in all situations, who always am, with the greatest veneration, My Lord, Your Lordship’s most obedient and most devoted, humble servant’, NMM, SAN/F/40/27. By this stage, Sandwich owed GM money.

  77. FB, entry for 1755; NA, ADM 6/18, fol. 120.

  78. NA, ADM 7/813, fol. 25.

  CHAPTER 2: Taken to Africa, Encountering Islam

  1. For the British presence on the island, see D. Gregory, Minorca, the Illusory Prize (1990).

  2. FC, p.43, and see pp.78 and 109 for EM’s riding clothes and capacity to read music by 1756; Hospital Island (aka Bloody Island), where the Marsh family lived in Menorca, is described in The Importance of the Island of Minorca and Harbour of Port-Mahon (1756), pp.25–6 and 60.

  3. Importance of the Island, p.26; J.G. Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Sailing Navy (Aldershot, 1989), pp.329–40.

  4. Importance of the Island, p.40.

  5. Quoted in Gregory, Minorca, p.108.

  6. The Royal Navy began seizing French ships in the Mediterranean in early September 1755, having learnt of General Braddock’s defeat at Monongahela in North America: D. Syrett, ‘A Study of Peacetime Operations: The Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, 1752–5’, Mariner’s Mirror 90 (2004), pp.42–50; P. Gould, ‘Lisbon 1755: Enlightenment, Catastrophe, and Communication’, in D. Livingstone and C.W.J. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, 1999).

  7. H.W. Richmond, Papers Relating to the Loss of Minorca in 1756, Navy Records Society (1913), pp.208–9; Desmond, Minorca, pp.172–8.

  8. Richmond, Papers Relating to the Loss of Minorca, pp.xxxi and xxxiv.

  9. NA, ADM 1/383, fol. 335; Desmond, Minorca, pp.168–78.

  10. ‘Boscawen’s Letters to his Wife, 1755–1756’, in The Naval Miscellany, 4, ed. C. Lloyd (1952), p.214. GM claimed in his Family Book that EM escaped first to Barcelona when the French landed in Menorca. Here I follow her own version of events.

  11. NMM, ADM B/153, letter of 11 June 1756.

  12. NMM, MRF/14: Journal of the siege of Menorca (microfilm) and ADM/L/P/327: Log of Princess Louisa.

  13. NA, ADM 1/383, fol. 388; MM’s report is quoted in The Trial of the Honourable Admiral John Byng (1757), p.9.

  14. James Lind, Three Letters Relating to the Navy, Gibraltar, and Port Mahon (1757), p.115.

  15. See, for instance, BL, Add.MS 35895, fol. 252.

  16. NA, ADM 1/383, fol. 388.

  17. Ibid., fol. 473; for the Marsh family salaries, see NA, ADM 7/813, fol. 25 and 7/814, fol. 29.

  18. The passengers and Master of the Ann are listed in NA, ADM 1/2108.

  19. Logbooks for Gosport from Plymouth and on from Gibraltar: NA, ADM 51/406, and NMM, ADM/L/G/77.

  20. FC, p.44.

  21. FC, pp.45–7.

  22. NA, SP 71/20, fol. 183.

  23. FC, pp.47–53.

  24. For copies of some of these early letters from Morocco by JC and Joseph Popham, see NA, SP 71/20, Part I, fols 65, 67 and 69; FB, fol. 21.

  25. In mid-eighteenth-century English usage, ‘dark’ as a description of complexion, like ‘black’, possessed no necessary racial connotations; FC, p.54.

  26. Intermediaries of this sort, who were selected and trained so that they could move easily between the Maghreb and various Christian powers and lobbies, together with Sidi Muhammad’s recruitment and employment of them, merit more attention.

  27. FC, pp.59–60.

  28. NA, SP 71/20, Part I, fols 183, 187.

  29. On the impact of this on English, and subsequently British, shipping and religious and political attitudes, see my Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (2002), pp.23–134.

  30. See the sources listed in ibid., p.391, and R.C. Davis, ‘Counting European Slaves on the Barbary Coast’, Past and Present 172 (2001), pp.87–124.

  31. ‘Boscawen’s Letters to his Wife’, p.236.

  32. Colley, Captives, pp.65–72.

  33. General Thomas Fowke, Governor of Gibraltar, to London, 2 January 1756: NA, CO 91/12 (unfol.).

  34. NA, ADM 1/383, fol. 279; for Arvona, see Fowke to Henry Fox, 12 March 1756: NA, CO 91/2 (unfol.).

  35. NA, ADM 1/383, fol. 279.

  36. Höst is quoted by Khalid Bekkaoui in FC, p.8; P.G. Rogers, A History of Anglo-Moroccan Relations to 1900 (1970), pp.95–104.

  37. FC, pp.65–73.

  38. FC, pp.68–9, 72.

  39. FC, p.73.

  40. FC, pp.73–4.

  41. The classic account is E.P. Thompson, ‘Rough Music’, in Cultures in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (1991), pp.467–538; FC, pp.74–5.

  42. On Moroccan imperial ritual at this time, see A. El Moudden, ‘Sharifs and Padishahs: Moroccan–Ottoman Relations from the Sixteenth Through the Eighteenth Centuries’, Princeton University Ph.D diss., 1992; FC, pp.75–7.

  43. John Stimson, ‘Misfortunes that Befell HMS Lichfield on the Coast of Barbary’, a naïve but extraordinary slave account: NMM, JOD/7 (unfol.); for another European comment on Sidi Muhammad’s striking appearance, see FC, p.87n.

  44. Stimson’s account of the Sultan’s daily routine: NMM, JOD/7; F. Harrak, ‘State and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Morocco: The Religious Policy of Sidi Muhammad B’Abd Allâh 1757–1790’, London University Ph.D diss., 1989, pp.231–4.

  45. A.K. Bennison, ‘Muslim Universalism and Western Globalization’, in A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (2002), p.84; and see El Moudden, ‘Sharifs and Padishahs’, pp.224–300.

  46. See the report in NA, SP 71/19, fol. 251; Bennison, ‘Muslim Universalism’, pp.74–97.

  47. FC, p.77; R.L. Diaz, ‘El sultán ‘Alawi Sîdi Muhammad … y sus suenos de hegemonía sobre el Islam Occidental’, in J.M. Barral (ed.), Orientalia Hispanica (Leiden, 1974).

  48. See J. Caillé, Les Accords internationaux du sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah (Paris, 1960).

  49. P.H. Roberts and J.N. Tull, ‘Moroccan Sultan Sidi Muhammad Ibn Abdallah’s Diplomatic Initiatives Towards the United States, 1777–1786’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 143 (1999), pp.233–65; NA, FO 52/1, fol. 47.

  50. I am indebted here to a lecture delivered at Princeton University in 2005 by Professor Frank Stewart on ‘The Tribal Background to the Contemporary Arab World’; FC, p.66.

  51. Harrak, ‘State and Religion’, p.287.
<
br />   52. NMM, JOD/157/1–3, fol. 2; Bennison, ‘Muslim Universalism’, p.93.

  53. E.R. Gottreich, ‘Jewish Space in the Moroccan City: A History of the Mellah of Marrakech, 1550–1930’, Harvard University Ph.D diss., 1999; FC, pp.77, 113.

  54. FC, p.78.

  55. See infra, pp.134–60.

  56. FC, pp.78–80; EM’s reaction to the bracelets is recorded in FB, fol. 26.

  57. FC, pp.81–3.

  58. FC, pp.83–4.

  59. FC, p.84.

  60. John Stimson’s slave’s-eye view of the palace interior: NMM, JOD/7; for other comments on Sidi Muhammad’s taste for Western exports and re-exports, see Bennison, ‘Muslim Universalism’, p.85.

  61. FC, pp.87 and note, and 88.

  62. FC, p.89.

  63. NMM, JOD/7 (unfol.); FC, p.89.

  64. FC, pp.90–3.

  65. See my ‘The Narrative of Elizabeth Marsh: Barbary, Sex and Power’, in F. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2003), pp.140–1.

  66. W. Lempriere, A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Sallee, Mogodore, Santa Cruz, and Tarudant (3rd edn, Richmond, 1800), p.259; the factual accuracy of this (undoubtedly biased) account has been questioned: A. Farouk, ‘Critique du livre de Lempriere par un temoin de l’epoque’, Hésperis-Tamuda (1988–89), pp.105–37.

  67. FC, p.92; for British captives’ treatment in Morocco, and the varied length of their stays there, see my Captives, pp.48–72, 88–98.

  68. Professor Madeline Zilfi’s forthcoming book on female slavery in the Ottoman Middle East will open up this subject, and I have learned much from conversations with her. In the interim, see the essays in C.C. Robertson and M.A. Klein (eds), Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, Wisc., 1983), and J.O. Hunwick, ‘Black Slaves in the Mediterranean World’, in E. Savage (ed.), The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (1992).

  69. FC, p.91.

  70. I am grateful to Madeline Zilfi for clarifying this point. For examples of Arvona’s restraint, see NA, ADM 1/383, fols 510 and 512.

  71. EM seems to be recording her gratitude to Arvona, in FC, p.94.

  72. FC, pp.95–6.

  73. The order, dated 7 October 1756, is at NMM, HWK/4 (unfol.).

  74. Logs of the Portland, at NA, ADM 51/3941, and NMM, ADM/L/P/205.

  75. NA, ADM 1/383, fols 508, 512.

  76. See its log: NA, ADM 51/3941; and for Sidi Muhammad’s communication, NA, ADM 1/383, fol. 514.

  77. FC, pp.112, 116, 118.

  78. FC, p.117.

  79. FC, p. 103.

  80. FC, pp.83, 104.

  81. FC, p.105.

  CHAPTER 3: Trading from London, Looking to America

  1. FC, pp. 119–20.

  2. FB, fol. 20; FC, pp.43 and 120.

  3. L. Namier and J. Brooke (eds), The House of Commons 1754–1790 (3 vols, 1964), II, pp.220–1; NA, PROB 11/829.

  4. FC, p. 120.

  5. FB, fol. 20.

  6. FC, pp. 43–4, 120.

  7. R. Porter, ‘The Crispe Family and the African Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of African History 9 (1968), pp.57–77; P.E.H. Hair and R. Law, ‘The English in Western Africa to 1700’: N. Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol I: The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998), pp. 241–63.

  8. For some of the complexities and the diaspora of this clan, see F.A. Crisp, Collections relating to the family of Crispe … 1510–1760 (1882), pp. 1–76.

  9. A. Farrington et al. (eds), The English Factory in Taiwan 1670–1685 (Taipei, 1995), pp.3–16, 50–118.

  10. For the Burrish connection (which JC and EM honoured in the naming of their son) see NA, PROB 11/958; there were Crisp relations in Menorca: John Crisp’s letter from Mahón to John Russell, 12 January 1734: NMM, MS 83/135 (unfol.).

  11. M. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York, 1998), p.20.

  12. P. Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 2001), p.74. Other valuable discussions of mercantile life and working assumptions at this time include J.M. Price, ‘What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660–1790’, Journal of Economic History 49 (1989), pp. 267–84, and D. Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995).

  13. FB, fol. 97; NA, PROB 11/1053.

  14. FC, p.120; the Elizabeth entered Bristol from Gibraltar on 26 February 1757.I owe this information to Professor Kenneth Morgan.

  15. NA, ADM 1/3833, fols 97 and 252.

  16. FB, fol. 20; K. Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century (1958), pp.34–6; Postal Museum and Archive, POST 103/5 and 1/8.

  17. C.J. French, ‘London’s Overseas Trade with Europe 1700–1775’, Journal of European Economic History 23 (1994), pp. 475–501.

  18. J.K.J. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona, 1728–1832 (Cambridge, 1992); for Lavalée, see AHPB, Sebastià Prats, 272v.

  19. For British traders in Livorno and elsewhere in Italy at this time, see the diplomatic reports contained in G. Pagano de Divitiis and V. Giura (eds), L’Italia del secondo settecento nelle relazioni segrete di William Hamilton, Horace Mann e John Murray (Naples, 1997).

  20. K. Newman, ‘Hamburg in the European Economy, 1660–1750’, Journal of European Economic History 14 (1985), pp.57–93. Little is known about JC’s trade in Hamburg, but in a memorandum in 1766 he described it as one of his main markets: NA, T1/453, fol. 304.

  21. D.J. Withrington, Shetland and the Outside World 1469–1969 (Oxford, 1983).

  22. Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq. on American Taxation (2nd edn, 1775), p.34; R.H. Kinvig, The Isle of Man: A Social, Cultural, and Political History (Liverpool, 1975).

  23. NA, T1/434, Pt 2, fol. 60.

  24. AHPB, Sebastià Prats, 32 r–v, 35 r–v, 67r–68r, 440r–441r.

  25. See, for instance, the references to Rowland Crisp’s voyages in NA, CO 142/18; and Boston Evening Post, 31 December 1759.

  26. Lloyd’s Register 1764 (1963 repr.), unpag. Where a ship was formally declared to be bound was not necessarily the sum total of the ports it visited.

  27. AHPB, Sebastià Prats, 135, 8 April 1763; and see the other wartime letters in these papers of the Crisps’ Barcelona notary.

  28. AHPB, Sebastià Prats, 21, 343v–345v.

  29. Divitiis and Giura, L’Italia del secondo settecento, pp. 285 and 288; F. Trivellato, ‘Trading Diasporas and Trading Networks in the Early Modern Period: A Sephardic Partnership of Livorno in the Mediterranean, Europe and Portuguese India c.1700–1750’, Brown University Ph.D. diss., 2004.

  30. It is suggestive that these three men went bankrupt shortly after JC: see London Gazette, 7–11 July 1767.

  31. See George Moore’s letters to James and Samuel Crisp, e.g. 4 October 1752: MNHL, MSS 501C; and F. Wilkins, George Moore and Friends: The Letters from a Manx Merchant (1750–1760) (Kidderminster, 1994).

  32. MNHL, Acc no.MS 09591: letters from JC and Jacob Emery to John Taubman, 1760–1765; and John Taubman’s accounts for 1764 and 1765.

  33. F. Wilkins, The Smuggling Trade Revisited (Kidderminster, 2004), p.14.

  34. F. Wilkins, Manx Slave Traders (Kidderminster, 1999).

  35. The Duke of Atholl later claimed that it was the geographical and economic scale of Taubman’s ‘extensive smuggling’ that had chiefly persuaded London to impose its control on the island: Wilkins, Smuggling Trade, p.22.

  36. FB, fol. 28.

  37. I am grateful to Professors Michela D’Angelo and Gigliola Pagano de Divitiis for this information.

  38. Egmont to J. Grant, 1 Sept. 1768, LC, microfilm 22671, box 16.

  39. I am grateful to Professor Derek Keene for supplying me with an expert analysis of this part of London; for its extreme diversity, see the poor relief books for St Botolph Without Bishopsgate: GL, MS. 5419, vols 262–5.

  40. She is listed among the subscribers t
o EM’s The Female Captive in 1769: BL, 1417.a.5; for the Jewsons and Crisps as neighbours: GL MS 5419, vols 262–4.

  41. GL, MS. 05038, vol.4.

  42. I am assuming that this is the Dr Orme listed as a subscriber to The Female Captive: BL, 1417.a.5.

  43. London Evening Post, 28 February–3 March 1767.

  44. FB, fol. 28, and concluding jottings.

  45. FB, fol. 153.

  46. Ibid., fol. 189.

  47. In 1763, JC was offering £100 per annum to a clerk who could ‘write French & Italian letters’: Liverpool R.O., D/Earle/3/3/5; for the linguistic range that British merchants were ideally expected to command, and the expectation that French, Spanish, German and Italian would ease their business far beyond Europe, see W. Beawes, Lex mercatoria rediviva: Or, the Merchant’s Directory (2nd edn, 1761), pp.30–1.

  48. FCMS (unfol.).

  49. A.S. Skinner and R.H. Campbell (eds), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (2 vols, Oxford, 1976), I, p.426.

  50. For some of these debates, see P.N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp.88–213.

  51. Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History (1788 edn, 8 vols.), VIII, pp.195–6.

  52. For the effects of this on another London merchant at this time, see A.H. John, ‘Miles Nightingale – Drysalter’, Economic History Review 18 (1965), pp.152–63.

  53. Speech of Edmund Burke, p.34; NA, T1/434, fols 65 and 67.

  54. Wilkins, Smuggling Trade Revisited, p.149.

  55. NA, T1/453, fol. 302 et seq.; Wilkins, Smuggling Trade, p.149.

  56. NA, T1/453, fols 302–4, 310.

  57. NA, T1/442, fol. 25.

  58. NA, T1/453, fols 302–4.

  59. This episode in JC’s career can be followed in detail in NA, SP 79/23 (unfol.), especially in his memorial dated 13 June 1764.

  60. Ibid., translation of statement by Genoa’s magistrates, 7 July 1764; NA, SP 44/138, fol.267.

  61. NA, SP 79/23 (unfol.): Lord Halifax to the British Consul in Genoa, 25 September 1764, enclosing JC’s reply.

  62. JC to William Burke, 10 January 1766: NA, SP 46/151, fol. 5.