The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  63. For a good account of bills of exchange in international trade, see L. Neal and S. Quinn, ‘Networks of Information, Markets, and Institutions in the Rise of London as a Financial Centre, 1660–1720’, Financial History Review 8 (2001), pp. 7–26.

  64. Wilkins, Smuggling Trade, p.149; printed delivery notice dated 26 September 1765, MNHL, Acc 09591, James Crisp and Jacob Emery letters.

  65. AHPB, Sebastià Prats, e.g. 26r–v, 10r–v and 406v–407v.

  66. Ibid., 24, 67r–68r, 74v–77r, 115v–116r; James Clegg to JC, 18 May 1764, NA, SP79/23 (unfol.).

  67. London Gazette, 14–17 March 1767; and see the notices on 18–21 April and 28 April–2 May 1767.

  68. NAS, CS/226/5171/7.

  69. See J. Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 1987); and M.C. Finn, ‘Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c.1760–1860’, Historical Journal 39 (1996), pp. 703–22.

  70. See R. Boote, The Solicitor’s Guide, and Tradesman’s Instructor, Concerning Bankrupts (3rd edn, 1768). JC’s assignees in 1767 included John Motteux, a future Director of the East India Company, which suggests that JC was already becoming more involved in Asian trade by this stage: NAS, CS226/5171/3.

  71. London Evening Post, 26–28 May 1767; FB, fol.28.

  72. FB, fols 97–109; for the Victualling Board, see D.A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, NJ, 1965), pp.373–451.

  73. FB, fol. 136; C. Wilkinson, The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century (Rochester, NY, 2004), p.118.

  74. C.L. Mowat, ‘The First Campaign of Publicity for Florida’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 30 (1943), pp.361–2.

  75. FB, fol. 116; D.L. Schafer, ‘Plantation Development in British East Florida: A Case Study of the Earl of Egmont’, Florida Historical Quarterly 63 (1984), p.172.

  76. Letter of JC dated August 1765: MNHL, Acc no. 09591.

  77. For the circumstances of JC’s grant, see the Earl of Egmont’s file in NA, T77/5 (East Florida Claims Commission); C.L. Mowat, East Florida as a British Province 1763–1784 (Berkeley, CA, 1943).

  78. Schafer, ‘Plantation Development’, pp.172–83.

  79. Egmont to J. Grant, 5 January 1767, LC, microfilm 22671, box 13; Schafer, ‘Plantation Development’.

  80. Egmont to J. Grant, 1 September 1768, LC, microfilm 22671, box 16.

  81. To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Memorial of John Earl of Egmont (1764), p.21; Schafer, ‘Plantation Development’.

  82. Egmont to J. Grant, 1 September 1768, LC, microfilm 22671, box 16; for these estate plans, see http://www.floridahistoryonline.com/Plantations. I am grateful to Professor Daniel Schafer for directing me to this site, and for other assistance.

  83. W. Stork, A Description of East Florida (3rd edn, 1769), pp.v–vii, 2, 21.

  84. e.g. NA, T77/5/5, fol.104.

  85. Gentleman’s Magazine 37 (1767), p.21; Francis Warren died in St Augustine in East Florida in late 1769: see NA, ADM B/183.

  86. D. Schafer, “ ‘A Swamp of an Investment”? Richard Oswald’s British East Florida Experiment’, in J.G. Landers (ed.), Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville, FL, 2000); cf. B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1988), pp.430–74.

  87. NA, T77/9, file 7, fol.57; Egmont to J. Grant, 1 September 768, LC, microfilm 22671, box 16.

  88. NA, T77/5/5, fol.88.

  89. FC, p.41.

  90. Ibid.; P. Mathias, ‘Risk, Credit and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise’, in J.J. McCusker and K. Morgan (eds), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, 2000), p.29.

  CHAPTER 4: Writing and Migrating

  1. John Locke’s evocation of travel writing’s appeal as quoted in J. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago, 2001), p.55; for the enhanced vogue for travel writing by the 1750s, see P.J. Marshall and G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (1982).

  2. For Williamson, see L. Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (2002), pp.188–92.

  3. J. Raven, British Fiction 1750–1770 (1987), p.19.

  4. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e written during her travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (3 vols, 1767), I, p.viii; and see I. Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford, 1999), pp.117–78, 625–6.

  5. For Brooke, Kindersley, Parker and Falconbridge, see the articles in ODNB; for Schaw: E.W. Andrews and C. McLean Andrews (eds), Journal of a Lady of Quality (New Haven, CT, 1934).

  6. Sir William Musgrave’s copy of The Female Captive, complete with his manuscript notes, is at BL, 1417.a.5; for the work’s longevity in libraries, see for instance A Catalogue of the Minerva General Library, Leadenhall-Street, London (1795), p.76.

  7. Critical Review 28 (1769), pp.212–17; see too Monthly Review 41 (1769), p.156. A. Forster, Index to Book Reviews in England 1749–1774 (Carbondale, Ill., 1990), p.203.

  8. P. Hulme and T. Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge, 2000), p.6.

  9. This phrase was often used by London publishers to signal the fact that an author was, for some reason, outside the number of those who normally wrote and published.

  10. Navy Board to Philip Stephens, 1 October 1764: NMM, ADM/B/175; for MM’s earlier plans for Gibraltar, see NA, ADM 140/1263 and 140/1264.

  11. Commodore Spry to Navy Board, 5 March 1767, NA, ADM 106/1160/30; J.G. Coad, The Royal Dockyards, 1690–1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Sailing Navy (Aldershot, 1989), pp.331–3.

  12. Coad, Royal Dockyards, p.4.

  13. Ibid., pp.13–17.

  14. NA, ADM 7/660, fol. 55; ‘Plan of the Agent’s dwelling-house and offices’, BL Add.MS 11643.

  15. NA, CO 91/12 (unfol.).

  16. The Master of the Dolphin in 1766, as quoted in R. Cock, ‘Precursors of Cook: The Voyages of the Dolphin, 1764–8’, Mariner’s Mirror 85 (1999), p.42.

  17. This description of storage and slaughtering procedures at Chatham’s victualling yard is based on GM’s notes in CB, I, fols 61–70, and evidence he gave to Parliament in 1779, as reported in T. Baillie, A Solemn Appeal to the Public, from an Injured Officer (1779), pp.30–3.

  18. See Khalid Bekkaoui’s introduction to FC, p.20.

  19. For colonial American captivity narratives by women, see my Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (2002), pp.137–67; FC, p.41.

  20. Epilogue by Aaron Hill to Eliza Haywood’s The Fair Captive (1721), p.xv; for the theme of sexual violation in ‘Barbary’ captivity accounts, see my ‘The Narrative of Elizabeth Marsh: Barbary, Sex and Power’, in F. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD, 2003), pp.138–50.

  21. Critical Review 28 (1769), p.213.

  22. P.M. Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p.72; extract on ‘Woman’, in CB, I, fol. 79

  23. H.R. Plomer et al. (eds), A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (Oxford, 1932), p.20; and see J. Raven, ‘The Book Trades’, in I. Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (Leicester, 2001).

  24. The Female Captive was one of thirty-six books known to have been published by subscription in England in 1769: R.C. Alston et al., Eighteenth-Century Subscription Lists (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1983); for the system, see J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997), p.164.

  25. BL, 1417.a.5.

  26. It is held in the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, and bears the Marsh bookplate.

  27. See J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988)

  28. FC, pp.41–2, 60, 64, 67, 71, 92, 104, 106, 111.

  29. FB, fol. 25.

 
30. FC, p.66.

  31. FC, pp.47, 49 and 93.

  32. FC, pp.49, 83, 121; FCMS (unfol.).

  33. FC, pp.54, 69.

  34. FC, pp.43, 95, 103.

  35. FC, 109; Spacks, Imagining a Self, p.58.

  36. FC, pp.108–9, 118.

  37. FC, pp.118–19; Charles Bathurst, EM’s publisher, had been one of the printers involved in issuing a nine-volume edition of Pope’s works in 1757–60.

  38. FC, p.108.

  39. List of subscribers included at the beginning of The Female Captive at BL, 1417.a.5; for Court, see NA, PROB 11/1183.

  40. FC, p.103 (my italics).

  41. FCMS (unfol.); FC, p.88.

  42. T. Shadwell to J. Marsh, 5 April 1774, William L. Clements Library, Thomas Shadwell letterbook. I am grateful to Maya Jasanoff for transcribing this letter for me. F. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD, 1995), pp.11–12.

  43. FC, p.103; S. Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop Journal 20 (1985), pp.101–24.

  44. On Pamela, credit and debt, see M.C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), pp.26–34; and C. Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford, CA, 1998), pp.171–80.

  45. FB, fols 24–5.

  46. I have benefited in my thoughts on this point from discussions with Jonathan Spence.

  47. Kent’s Directory for 1766, pp.7, 34 and 54.

  48. I am grateful to Gareth Hughes of English Heritage for this information.

  49. D. Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), pp.144, 213; for these Caribbean players, see the entries in ODNB.

  50. John Crisp was based near Camomile Street, the last London address of JC and EM; as late as 1770 there are references to a ‘Crisp’s plantation-office, London’: The Massachusetts Spy, 27–30 October 1770.

  51. See http://floridahistoryonline.com/Plantations, under ‘English Plantations on the St. John’s River’.

  52. Hancock, Citizens of the World, pp.68n, 112–13.

  53. NA, T77/5/5, fol. 104; Hancock, Citizens of the World, pp.203–4.

  54. S.J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists (Liverpool, 1994), pp.103–4; GM owned, for instance, the manuscript of Nicholas Owen’s slave-trading journal: see E. Martin (ed.), Nicholas Owen: Journal of a Slave-Dealer (Boston, Mass., 1930).

  55. FC, p.60.

  56. C. Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, NJ, 2001), p.76.

  57. L. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey … to which are added the Journal to Eliza, ed. I. Jack (Oxford, 1968), p.167.

  58. His notes on his copy of The Female Captive: BL, 1417.a.5.

  59. IOL, B/86, fol. 53.

  60. William Hickey’s account of Digby Dent and the Dolphin: IOL, Photo Eur 175/1, fol. 369; R.F. Mackay (ed.), The Hawke Papers … 1743–1771, Navy Records Society (1990), pp.441 and 447n.

  61. NA, ADM 36/7581.

  62. Quoted in N. Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration (2000), p.21.

  63. E. Rothschild, ‘A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic’, unpublished paper; for two rather different approaches to the ‘world in motion’ after 1763, see B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1988); and R. Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (1997).

  64. IOL, O/5/29, Pt II, fols 119 et seq. Attitudes to race and skin colour are always subjective, and – as contemporaries perceived – they were markedly so in the subcontinent at this time: see D. Ghosh, ‘Who Counts as “Native”?: Gender, Race, and Subjectivity in Colonial India’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6 (2005).

  65. Bailyn, Voyages to the West, pp.126–203; N. Canny, Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), p.274.

  66. Cock, ‘Precursors of Cook’, pp.30–52; A. Frost, The Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 1764–1815 (Carlton, VA, 2003), pp.51–9.

  67. FB, entry for March 1770.

  68. P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), pp.119–228; and see R. Travers’ forthcoming Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal, 1757–93.

  69. HMC: Report on the Palk Manuscripts (1922), p.158; James Rennell writing 31 March 1771: IOL, MSS Eur D.1073 (unfol).

  70. D. Dent to P. Stephens, 17 December 1771, NA, SP 89/71, fols 92 and 94.

  71. NA, ADM 51/259: Captain’s log of the Dolphin; IJ, p.5.

  72. For Crisp family members’ dealings with the Company in London in the early eighteenth century, see for instance IOL, L/AG/1/1/8, fols 76, 85, 379 and 427; and L/AG/1/1/10, fol. 352. I am grateful to Anthony Farrington for these references; for Phesaunt Crisp: NA, PROB 11/739.

  73. ODNB (Eyre Coote); FB, fol. 28.

  74. IOL, G/15/20, fol. 74, and B/84, fols 262–3, 318 and 326.

  75. JC to John Taubman, 15 November 1768, MNHL, Acc. no. MS.09591; R.P. Patwardhan (ed.), Fort William–India House Correspondence … 1773–1776 (New Delhi, 1971), p.38.

  76. IOL, Photo Eur 175/1, fol. 277; IOL, E/4/304, fol. 31.

  77. FB, fols 29–30.

  78. See L. Lockhart, ‘European Contacts with Persia, 1350–1736’, in his and P. Jackson (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran: The Timurid and Safavid periods (Cambridge, 1986).

  79. W. Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (2nd edn, 1775), p.x.

  80. Patwardhan, Fort William–India House Correspondence, pp.274–5.

  81. Hon. Robert Lindsay as quoted in Lives of the Lindsays; or, A Memoir of the Houses of Crawford and Balcarres by Lord Lindsay (2nd edn, 3 vols, 1858), III, p.159. These provincial councils, at Calcutta, Burdwan, Murshidabad, Dhaka, Dinajpur and Patna, were intended as a temporary measure.

  82. Recent useful surveys include S.U. Ahmed, Dacca: A Study in Urban History and Development (1986), and N.K. Singh (ed.), Dhaka: The Capital of Bangladesh (Delhi, 2003); the most detailed British account of Dhaka as the Crisps would have known it is by John Taylor, the commercial resident there in 1800: IOL, H/456f.

  83. James Rennell describing Dhaka, 3 August 1765: IOL, MSS Eur D 1073 (unfol.); B. Barui, The Salt Industry of Bengal, 1757–1800 (Calcutta, 1985).

  84. A. Prasad (ed.), Fort William–India House Correspondence … 1752–81 (Delhi, 1985), p.104; Lives of the Lindsays (2nd edn, 3 vols, 1858), III, p.160.

  85. IOL, H/456f, fol. 121.

  86. For the global significance of cotton at this time, see the invaluable ‘Cotton Textiles as a Global Industry’ section of the London School of Economics online Global Economic History Network (GEHN). I am grateful to Dr Giorgio Riello for referring me to this site.

  87. IOL, E/1/60, fols 420–34; see also R. Datta, Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c.1760–1800 (Delhi, 2000).

  88. Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Cotton Textile Exports from the Indian Subcontinent, 1680–1780’, on the GEHN ‘Cotton Textiles as a Global Industry’ website; A. Karim, Dacca: The Mughal Capital (Dhaka, 1964), pp.1–108. An appendix in this book, an inventory of the house of one of Dhaka’s local zamindars in 1774, suggests the wealth and eclectic consumerism of its indigenous elite (ibid., pp.487–94).

  89. O. Prakash and D. Lombard (eds), Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1800 (New Delhi, 1999); P. Parthasarathi, ‘Global Trade and Textile Workers, 1650–2000’, on the GEHN ‘Cotton Textiles as a Global Industry’ website.

  90. Philip Francis in 1776: IOL, L/MAR/C/891, fols 37–8.

  91. FB, fol. 29.

  92. These and the following details about the Crisps’ Dhaka house and wardrobes are taken from the inventory at sale 6–8 March 1780: IOL, L/AG
/34/27/2, fol. 51 et seq.; for Calcutta rents, see P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976), p.159.

  93. IOL, L/AG/34/27/2, fol. 51 et seq.; and see A. Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon (2001), pp.28, 34, 54 and passim.

  94. Jaffer, Furniture from British India, p.40; cf. W. Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002).

  95. IOL, L/AG/34/27/2, fol. 51 et seq.

  96. IOL, G/15/20, fols 67–9.

  97. J.B. Esteve to G. Ducarel, 23 February 1785, Gloucestershire RO, D2091/F14.

  98. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 5: An Asiatic Progress

  1. Indian Journal (subsequently IJ), pp.1, 4, 8; IOL, P/2/9, fol. 32.

  2. See, for instance, A.K. Srivastava, India as Described by the Arab Travellers (Gorakhpur, 1967); and J.P. Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge, 2000).

  3. J. Rennell, Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (1788 edn), pp.5 and 207.

  4. J. Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies (1777); E. Fay, Original Letters from India (Calcutta, 1821); for Plowden’s travel diary, see IOL, MSS Eur F 127/94.

  5. Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, p.1.

  6. On this, see G. Becker, Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World (Berkeley, CA, 1997); IJ, p.38. A coss was normally accounted the equivalent of two miles in Bengal, but (as was true of the mile itself within Europe at this time) interpretations of its length varied in different regions.

  7. D.A. Washbrook, ‘Eighteenth-Century Issues in South Asia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 44 (2001), pp.372–3.

  8. IOL, P/2/11, fol. 161; IJ, pp.1–3.

  9. IJ, pp.2, 4.

  10. IJ, pp.3–5, 13. For the Dolphin’s mission, see IOL, H/122, fol. 5; for the Salisbury: NA, ADM 1/164.

  11. IJ, pp.1, 5.

  12. IJ, p.3.

  13. ‘Nawab’ was originally a Mughal title for a provincial official. It was anglicized as ‘Nabob’ and applied to those British- and Irish-born males who were accused of acquiring ‘oriental’ manners and undue Asian wealth. S. Foote, The Nabob (Dublin, 1778 edn), pp.4 and 31; L. Namier and J. Brooke (eds), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790 (3 vols, 1964), III, pp.449–51.