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The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History
Linda Colley
This edition does not include illustrations.From the author of ‘Britons’, the story of the exceptional life of the intrepid Elizabeth Marsh – an extraordinary woman of her time who was caught up in trade, imperialism, war, exploration, migration, growing maritime reach, and new ideas.This is a book about a world in a life. An individual lost to history, Elizabeth Marsh (1735-85) travelled farther, and was more intimately affected by developments across the globe, than the vast majority of men. Conceived in Jamaica and possibly mixed-race, she was the first woman to publish in English on Morocco, and the first to carry out extensive overland explorations in eastern and southern India, journeying in each case in close companionship with an unmarried man. She spent time in some of the world's biggest ports and naval bases, Portsmouth, Menorca, Gibraltar, London, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta and the Cape. She was damaged by the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War; and linked through her own migrations with voyages of circumnavigation, and as victim and owner, she was involved in three different systems of slavery.But hers is a broadly revealing, not simply an exceptional, life. Marsh's links to the Royal Navy, the East India Company, empire and international trade made these experiences possible. To this extent, her career illumines shifting patterns of British and Western power and overseas aggression. The swift onset of globalization occurring in her lifetime also ensured that her progress, relationships and beliefs were repeatedly shaped and deflected by people and events beyond Europe. While imperial players like Edmund Burke and Eyre Coote form a part of her story, so do African slave sailors, skilled Indian weavers and astronomers, ubiquitous Sephardi Jewish traders, and the great Moroccan Sultan, Sidi Muhammad, who schemed to entrap her.Many modern biographies remain constrained by a national framework, while global histories are generally impersonal. By contrast, in this dazzling and original book, Linda Colley moves repeatedly and questioningly between vast geo-political transformations and the intricate detail of individual lives. This is a global biography for our globalizing times.
LINDA COLLEY
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become a Part of World History
DEDICATION (#ulink_179ede63-10c8-58f7-bba8-4c5a2d060f55)
Jan Colley’s book
CONTENTS
Cover (#u7046799f-6314-54ca-b0c1-d815bb1a1647)
Title Page (#u666996ec-d43f-519c-8f82-3252b0a8113e)
Dedication (#u5c09dfbb-2d6d-5b44-b91e-4177bc9132cd)
Map (#u428565c6-4524-5729-9c67-929e94c90cd1)
Conventions (#uc329269b-27c2-5393-9eeb-0124ef548ce8)
Introduction (#ude7b35b1-6ce0-56f2-b93f-fc7defcbef86)
1: Out of The Caribbean (#u3927c2de-c4ed-53d9-90ee-1383631480e5)
2: Taken to Africa, Encountering Islam (#ue344ffd8-ec7b-50cb-8fea-be7e5214be75)
3: Trading from London, Looking to America (#litres_trial_promo)
4: Writing and Migrating (#litres_trial_promo)
5: An Asiatic Progress (#litres_trial_promo)
6: World War and Family Revolutions (#litres_trial_promo)
Ending – and Continuing (#litres_trial_promo)
Family Trees (#litres_trial_promo)
Manuscript Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
MAP (#ulink_70362966-eae6-51ad-b918-9961bc4d65da)
The world – as Elizabeth Marsh and her extended family experienced it
CONVENTIONS (#ulink_d38d0ade-d814-5cc8-a15f-56dbd653caca)
Place names have changed radically since Elizabeth Marsh’s lifetime, especially in regions of the world that have previously been colonized or fought over by contending states. Many names remain contested. In this book, I generally use the names that are most current today: hence Dhaka and Menorca, rather than Dacca and Minorca. Some now-discarded place names possess so much historical resonance, however, that I have judged it inappropriate to update them. Thus I refer to Calcutta in these pages, not Kolkata.
For the transliteration of Arabic terms and phrases, I have drawn on the Encyclopaedia of Islam and on the advice of expert friends. Making sense of the mangled Anglo-Indian terminology employed in Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian Journal has been made easier by the University of Chicago’s online version of Hobson-Jobson.
In order to convey the fluctuating fortunes of the main characters in this book, I provide estimates at times of what they were worth in terms of today’s purchasing power. I have drawn these estimates from the ‘How much is that?’ site on EH.net.
Before 1752, the British followed the Julian calendar and dated the beginning of the New Year from 25 March, not 1 January. Thus the captain’s log of the Kingston, the ship on which Milbourne Marsh set out from Portsmouth for Jamaica, has it readying for sail in early 1731. But in terms of the modern Gregorian calendar, it was early in 1732 that the Kingston was got ready; and I have used the modern-style year throughout the text and endnotes. When quoting from original manuscripts in the text, I have modernized spelling, extended abbreviations, and altered punctuation whenever the sense has seemed to demand it. Books cited in the endnotes are published in London unless otherwise stated. I describe at the beginning of the notes the other conventions I employ in the course of them.
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_3af78e32-fa51-5239-b923-0f38ef33c8a6)
‘I search for Eliza every where: I discover, I discern some of her
features … But what is become of her who united them all?’
ABBÉ RAYNAL
THIS IS A BIOGRAPHY that crosses boundaries, and it tells three connected stories. The first is the career of a remarkable but barely known woman, Elizabeth Marsh, who lived from 1735 to 1785, and who travelled farther and more dangerously by sea and in four continents than any female contemporary for whom records survive. The second story is concerned with members of her extended family, her parents, uncle, brothers, husband, children, multiple cousins and other, more distant, kin. Because of the nature of their occupations, their migrations and their ideas, these people played vital roles in fostering Elizabeth Marsh’s own conspicuous mobility. They also helped to connect her, in both constructive and traumatic ways, with some of the most transformative forces of her age. For this is not just an account of an individual and a family: it is also, and thirdly, a global story. Elizabeth Marsh’s existence coincided with a distinctive and markedly violent phase of world history, in which connections between continents and oceans broadened and altered in multiple ways. These changes in the global landscape repeatedly shaped and distorted Elizabeth Marsh’s personal progress. So this book charts a world in a life and a life in the world. It is also an argument for re-casting and re-evaluating biography as a way of deepening our understanding of the global past.
Her Life
Elizabeth Marsh’s life is at once startlingly atypical and widely revealing, strange and representative. She was conceived in Jamaica, and may have been of mixed racial parentage. Her voyage in utero across the Atlantic from Kingston to England was the first of many oceanic journeys on her part, and inaugurated a life that was shaped as much by water as dry land, and that even on shore was spent in a succession of cosmopolitan ports and riverside cities. As a child, Elizabeth Marsh moved between Portsmouth and Chatham and the lower decks of Royal Navy warships at sail. Migrating with her family to the Mediterranean in 1755, she lived first in Menorca, and then – after a French invasion drove them out – in Gibraltar. Taken to Morocco in 1756 by force, but also as a consequence of her own actions, she was one of the first nominal Europeans to have a sustained personal encounter with its then acting Sultan, Sidi Muhammad, penetrating to the heart of his palace complex at Marrakech, and barely escaping sexual enslavement. The under-educated daughter of a shipwright, she subsequently became the first woman to write and publish on the Maghreb in English.
Elizabeth Marsh spent the late 1750s, and early and mid ’60s, comparatively becalmed in London by marriage and childbirth, but watching her husband engage in trade with Western and Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, mainland North America and the Caribbean, and parts of South America and Asia. She also plotted with him to emigrate to Florida. Instead, bankruptcy drove him to flee to India; and in 1771 Elizabeth Marsh would join him there, sailing to the subcontinent by way of visits to Rio de Janeiro and the Cape, on the only ship then to have circumnavigated the world twice over. She did not stay in their new house at Dhaka for long, however. After dispatching her young son briefly to Persia, and her daughter back to England, Marsh set out by sea for Madras in December 1774.
She would devote much of the next eighteen months to visiting and exploring settlements, towns and temples in eastern and southern India, composing in the process one of the strangest and most emotive accounts of an overland journey in the subcontinent to be written at this time by anyone, male or female. Her closest companion on this Asiatic progress was an unmarried man; and although Elizabeth Marsh rejoined her husband in Dhaka in mid-1776, it was again not for long. From late 1777 to mid-1780 she was once more on the move, sailing first from Calcutta to England, and then, after more than a year’s intrigue, and a further twelve thousand miles at least in sea distance, returning to the subcontinent. She embarked on these last circuitous voyages in defiance of French and Spanish warships and privateers that were now fighting in support of the new-minted United States, and because some of the long-distance repercussions of the American Revolutionary War were undermining her husband’s business and existence in Asia, and threatening her children and herself.
As this suggests, while Elizabeth Marsh can seem an almost impossibly picaresque figure, viewing her thus would miss what was most arresting about her life, and all that lay behind it. To an almost eerie degree, Marsh was repeatedly caught fast in geographically wide-ranging events and pressures. This was true even of what should have been her intimate rites of passage. The circumstances of her birth (like the meeting and marriage of her parents), the nature of her upbringing, the sabotage of her first engagement, the making of her marriage, and the stages of its unravelling, her response to the advent of middle age, and the manner in which her two children were eventually provided for – all of these, and not just her travels and her writings, were influenced by transcontinental developments. For Elizabeth Marsh, there was scarcely ever a secure divide between her personal life on the one hand, and the wider world and its accelerating changes on the other. This was the nature of her ordeal. The degree to which she was exposed to it throughout the half-century of her existence was due in large part to circumstances beyond her control. It was due to the occupations of her male relations, and to the fact that she herself was a dependent woman without paid employment, and therefore vulnerable. It was due to her own, and her extended family’s, connections with Britain and its tentacular, contested empire. And, crucially, it was due to the global circumstances of her times. But the intensity and relentlessness of Elizabeth Marsh’s ordeal were also a product of the sort of person she was and of the choices she made.
Her Family
Elizabeth Marsh’s father, his father and grandfather, and multiple cousins, were shipbuilders, mariners, and makers of charts and maps. Through these men, she was linked all her life to the Royal Navy, one of the few organizations at this time possessed of something genuinely approaching global reach, and to the sea: ‘the great high road of communication to the different nations of the world’, as Adam Smith styled it.
(#litres_trial_promo) Marsh’s uncle and younger brother were administrators and assemblers of information on behalf of the British state, men employing pen and paper in order to manage distance. Her husband, James Crisp, was a merchant, engaged in both legal and illicit long-distance trade. His dealings encompassed ports and manufacturing centres in the world’s two largest maritime empires, those of Spain and Britain, and some of the commodities most in international demand: salt, sugar, cotton textiles, fish and tea. And he was associated with the British East India Company, the most important transnational trading corporation in existence, as subsequently were Marsh’s son, her son-in-law, yet more ‘cousins’, and ultimately her half-Indian grandson.
Her husband was also involved in colonial land speculation and migration schemes, as was she. Her elder brother and still more ‘cousins’ were army officers, servicing empire and its wars; while the agency that was responsible for driving by far the largest numbers of human beings across oceans and between continents at this time, the transatlantic trade in West African slaves, may have given rise to the woman who became Elizabeth Marsh’s mother. Marsh’s husband certainly was implicated in this slave trade, though it was two other systems of slavery and slave-taking, in Northern Africa and in Asia, in which she herself became directly involved, both as an intended victim and as an owner.
By way of her extended family, then, Elizabeth Marsh was brought into contact with some of the main forces of global change of her time: enhanced maritime reach, transoceanic and transcontinental commerce, a more deliberate mobilization of knowledge and written information in the service of the state, the quickening tempo of imperial aggression and colonization, emigration, war, slavery and the slave trade. Many millions of people were caught up in one or more of these. Elizabeth Marsh was affected and swept into movement by all of them. This owed something to her gender and uncertain status. As a woman who was usually economically dependent, she was often dragged along in the wake of various menfolk. Consequently, their occupations, and their migrations, and their exposure to other societies frequently also entangled her.
In this and other respects, the near contemporary whom Elizabeth Marsh most closely resembles is Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–97), the one-time slave of African descent who, by way of his writings and travels, made himself a ‘citizen of the world’, as well as an African and a Briton.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is telling that both Elizabeth and Olaudah were connected with the Royal Navy, with the slave trade, and with print; and they were alike too in their urge repeatedly to re-invent themselves. Their different, but essentially similar, lives also unfolded across great spaces and in a range of diverse cultural settings because of something else they had in common. Elizabeth Marsh, like Olaudah Equiano, chose to move, and was compelled to move. Avid travellers by instinct, they were each in addition forced into journeying as a result of their subordination to others: Equiano because for part of his life he was a slave, Marsh because she was a woman without independent financial resources.
It is significant, too, that these two self-made travellers and writers overlapped so closely in point of time, and that both of them were connected – though never exclusively – with Britain and its empire.
Her Worlds
Throughout Europe and in parts of the Americas – but also beyond them – the era in which Elizabeth Marsh lived, the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century, witnessed a growing awareness of the connectedness between the world’s different regions and peoples. More informed and classically educated men and women were aware of course that accelerated bursts of what would now be styled globalization had occurred in earlier periods of history. ‘Previously the doings of the world had been, as one might say, dispersed,’ the ancient Greek historian Polybius wrote in regard to the third century BC. But, as a result of the conquests of imperial Rome, he continued, ‘history has come to acquire an organic unity, and the doings of Italy and Libya [i.e. Africa] are woven together with those of Asia and Greece, and the outcome of them all tends toward one end’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Historians since have identified other such ‘global moments’: how, by the end of the thirteenth century, trade was able for a time to link merchants in parts of India and China, the Levant, the Persian Gulf, and various European ports and city states, for instance, and how Spain’s conquest of Manila in 1571 inaugurated new systems of commerce, migration and bullion-exchange between Asia, South-East Asia, the Americas and Europe.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, the rate at which different sorts of global connections evolved during and after the second quarter of the eighteenth century was perceived by observers in the West, but also outside it, as something new. ‘Everything has changed, and must change again,’ insisted Abbé Raynal in his History of the Two Indies (1770), this era’s most influential discussion and denunciation of Europe’s contacts with Asia, Africa and the Americas. Or, as Edmund Burke famously pronounced in 1777: ‘the great map of mankind is unrolled at once’. It was potentially ‘at the same instant under our view’.
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This sense that the world was becoming visibly more compact and connected was pronounced within Britain itself, and for reasons that shaped much of Elizabeth Marsh’s life. The sea was the prime vehicle and emblem of connectivity, ‘a mighty rendezvous’, as one writer expressed it in 1760; and – as she had ample cause to know – it was Britain that possessed both the most powerful navy and the biggest merchant marine. During Marsh’s lifetime, these maritime advantages allowed Britain, along with France and Russia, increasingly to explore and invade the Pacific, an ocean that occupies a third of the globe’s surface, and of which Europeans had previously possessed only limited routine acquaintance.
(#litres_trial_promo) Before, throughout, and after Marsh’s life, Britain was also involved in a succession of wars with France that expanded relentlessly in geographical scale. As a result, London was able to lay claim to the world’s largest and most widely dispersed empire. By 1775, as the German geographer Johann Christoph Gatterer remarked, Britain had become the only power to have intruded decisively, though not always securely or very deeply, into every continent of the globe.
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In addition, Britain’s ambitious commerce, the terrible volume of its slave trading, the growing overseas migration of its own peoples, and its prolific print industry and consumerism – all of which impinged on Elizabeth Marsh’s own experience – encouraged a more vivid consciousness of the world’s expanse and the range of human diversity, which extended well beyond the political class. Had she been more consistently prosperous during her residence in London in the 1760s, Elizabeth might have purchased a pocket globe, an increasingly fashionable accessory at this time, or invested in one of an array of new atlases, encyclopedias, gazettes and children’s books, all promising to unpack the ‘world in miniature’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In more senses than one, the proliferation of such artifacts suggested a more graspable world: one that might even be pocketed.
However, there was more to Elizabeth Marsh’s experiences and shifting identity than this British imperial connection; just as there was always more to the growing interrelationship between continents and peoples and oceans at this time than the exertions and ambitions of Britain and other Western powers. That Marsh was born at all was owing, indirectly, and possibly directly, to the enforced migration of millions of West Africans across the Atlantic; and that she was born in England, and not in Jamaica, was due to rebellion on the part of just some of these people. Her career was shaped throughout by the enhanced capacity on the part of British ships, soldiers and merchants to be present globally. But her life was also vitally changed by a Moroccan ruler’s schemes to construct his own world system that would link together sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Ottoman Empire and merchants in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and ultimately the United States. And if London, Barcelona and Livorno supply backdrops to her story, as centres of transcontinental trade, so also do Basra, and Boston, and Dhaka, and Manila. That Elizabeth Marsh’s life was one of continuous transition was due in part then to a succession of influences and interventions issuing from outside Europe, and to actors who saw the world from different vantage points. Her ordeal was also due to her, to the sort of person she was.
Herself
I first came across Elizabeth Marsh while writing my previous book, Captives. To begin with, I was aware only of the Mediterranean portion of her life; and it was not until I began investigating the background to this that I gradually uncovered the other geographies of her story. I learnt that a Californian library possessed an Indian travel journal in her hand, and an early manuscript version of her book on Morocco. Then I came across archives revealing her links with Jamaica and East Florida. Further searches turned up connections between her and her family and locations in Spain, Italy, the Shetlands, Central America, coastal China, New South Wales, Java, Persia, the Philippines, and more.
That this international paper chase proved possible and profitable was itself, I gradually came to realize, a further indication of some of the changes through which this woman had lived. Elizabeth Marsh was socially obscure, sometimes impoverished, and elusively mobile. In the ancient, medieval and early modern world, such individuals, especially if they were female, rarely left any extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event: a trial for murder or heresy, say, or a major rebellion, or a massacre, or a conspiracy, or a slaver’s voyage. That Elizabeth Marsh and her connections, by contrast, can be tracked in libraries and archives, not just at interludes and in times of crisis, but for most of her life, is due in part to some of the transitions that accompanied it. During her lifetime, states and empires, with their proliferating arrays of consuls, administrators, clerks, diplomats, ships’ captains, interpreters, cartographers, missionaries and spies, together with transcontinental organizations such as the East India Company, became more eager, and more able, to monitor and record the lives of ‘small’ people – even, sometimes, female people – wherever they went.
Recovering the life-parts and body-parts of Elizabeth Marsh has been rendered possible also by the explosion in global communications that is occurring now, in our own lifetimes. The coming of the worldwide web means that historians (and anyone else) can investigate manuscript and library catalogues, online documents and genealogical websites from different parts of the world to an extent that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. At present, this revolution – like so much else – is still biased in favour of the more affluent regions of the world. Even so, it is far easier than it used to be to track down a life of this sort, which repeatedly crossed over different geographical and political boundaries. The ongoing impact of this information explosion on the envisaging of history, and on the nature of biography, will only expand in the future.
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To say that Elizabeth Marsh’s life and ordeal are recoverable, and that this in itself is eloquent about closer global connections in her time and in ours, is not the same as saying that the sources about her are abundant or easily yielding. To be sure, this was a woman who was addicted to writing. Even when (perhaps particularly when) she was confined to the lower decks of a store ship on the Indian Ocean, or in a Moroccan prison, she is known to have busied herself writing letters. Neither these, nor any other letters by her survive. Nor do any personal letters by her husband or parents survive, or any that might compensate for the lack of a portrait of her, by closely detailing her appearance. The colour of Elizabeth Marsh’s eyes and hair, like her height and the timbre of her voice, and the way she moved, remains, at least at present, beyond knowing. So does how she and others perceived exactly the colour of her skin.
This absence of some of the basic information which biographers can normally take for granted is partly why I have chosen to refer to Elizabeth Marsh often by her whole name, and sometimes only by her surname. Mainly for the sake of clarity, but also because of how she lived, I also refer to her only by her unmarried name. So in these pages she is always Elizabeth Marsh, never Elizabeth Crisp. The practice of always referring to female characters in biographies by their first names can have an infantilizing effect. It also suggests a degree of cosy familiarity that – as far as this woman is concerned – would be more than usually spurious. Certain aspects of her life and mind, as of her appearance, are unlikely ever to be properly known; though the impact she was able at intervals to make on others is abundantly clear.
What has survived to convey her quality and her actions over time are a striking set of journals, scrapbooks and sagas, compiled by her and by some members of her family. There are Elizabeth Marsh’s own Moroccan and Indian writings. Her younger brother, John Marsh, produced a memoir of his career. Her uncle, George Marsh, assembled a remarkable two-hundred-page book about himself and his relations and two commonplace books, and devoted journals to the more significant episodes in his life. Ostensibly concerned with personal and family happenings, achievements and disasters, these miscellaneous chronicles can be read also as allegories of much wider changes. Even some of the maps drawn by Elizabeth Marsh’s father contain more than their obvious levels of meaning. I have drawn repeatedly on these various family texts in order to decipher this half-hidden woman’s shifting ideas, emotions and ambitions.
Attempting this is essential because, although she undoubtedly viewed certain phases of her life as an ordeal, Marsh rarely presented herself straightforwardly as a victim. It was her own actions and plans, and not just the vulnerabilities attaching to her marginal status, the occupations and mishaps of her male relations, the chronology of her life, and the country and empire to which she was formally attached, that rendered her at intervals so mobile, and exposed her so ruthlessly to events. In particular, without attending closely to these private and family writings, it would be hard to make sense of five occasions – in 1756, in 1769, in 1770–71, in 1774–76, and again after 1777 – on which, to differing degrees, Elizabeth Marsh broke away from conventional ties of family and female duty, only to become still more vividly entangled in processes and politics spanning continents and oceans.
History and Her Story
So this is a book that ranges between biography, family history, British and imperial history, and global histories in the plural. Because of the tendencies of our own times, historians have become increasingly concerned to attempt seeing the world as a whole. This has encouraged an understandable curiosity about very large-scale phenomena: the influence of shifting weather systems on world history, ecological change over time, patterns of forced and voluntary migration, the movement of capital, or commodities, or disease over continents, the transmission of ideas and print, the workings of vast overland and oceanic networks of trade, the impact of conflicting imperial systems, and so on.
(#litres_trial_promo) These, and other such grand transcontinental forces, were and are massively important. Yet they have never just been simply and inhumanly there. They have impacted on people, who have understood them (or not), and adapted to them (or not), but who have invariably interpreted them in very many different ways. Writings on world and global history (to which I stand enormously indebted) sometimes seem as aggressively impersonal as globalization can itself.
In this book, by contrast, I am concerned to explore how the lives of a group of individuals, and especially the existence of one particular unsophisticated but not unperceptive woman, were informed and tormented by changes that were viewed at the time as transnational, and transcontinental, and even as pan-global, to an unprecedented degree. I seek to tack between the individual and world histories ‘in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Writing some fifty years ago, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills suggested that at no other era had ‘so many men been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change’. The ‘earthquakes’ happening in the 1950s were due, he thought, to the collapse of old colonial empires and to the emergence of new, less blatant forms of imperialism, to the horrific implications of atomic warfare, to politicians’ surging capacity to deploy power over individual lives, to runaway modernization, and to inordinate pressure on marriage and the family. It was vital, Mills suggested, to try to understand the relationship between these ‘most impersonal and remote transformations’ and ‘the most intimate features of the human self’. Not least because those living through such earthquakes were often unable themselves to see this relationship clearly and make sense of it:
Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men [sic] do not usually know what the connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
Instead, he suggested, men and women whose fate it was to ‘cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted’ often simply felt ‘possessed by a sense of trap’.
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As far as Elizabeth Marsh is concerned, Mills’ characterization of the responses of those who live through ‘earthquakes’ of global change is both right and wrong. As will become clear, at times, and for good reason, she was indeed ‘possessed by a sense of trap’. But, like other members of her family, she tried to make sense of the changes transcending seas and continents that she and they were so markedly living through and acting out. The extent and quality of Elizabeth Marsh’s global earthquake in the mid-eighteenth century was substantially different from that perceived by Mills in the 1950s, though the flux of empire, enhanced state power, runaway military violence, modernization, and strains on the family and marriage were part of her experience too. Elizabeth Marsh’s earthquake was also very different from our own at the start of the twenty-first century. But the nature of her ordeal, her precocious and concentrated exposure to so many forces of transcontinental change, and her sense in the face of these ‘impersonal and remote transformations’ both of shock and wonder, entrapment and new opportunities, remain eloquent and recognizable. This is her story.
1 Out of the Caribbean (#ulink_67aa493f-5888-5858-8dd3-0ab1a26a02a6)
THE BEGINNING prefigured much of the rest. She came to life against the odds, in a place of rampant death, and in the midst of forces that were already transforming large stretches of the globe.
The man who became her father, Milbourne Marsh, first set foot on Jamaica on 20 July 1732, which was when his ship, the Kingston, anchored off Port Royal.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Kingston was one of a squadron of Royal Navy vessels ordered to the Caribbean that spring with instructions to deter smuggling in the region and attacks on British merchant shipping by Spanish armed coast-guards, and to suppress any slave rebellions within Jamaica itself. Since wresting it from the Spanish in 1655, retaining this island had become increasingly important to the English, and subsequently to the British state, initially because of its location and size. Ninety miles south of Cuba, Jamaica was ideally situated for legal and illicit trade with Spain’s settlements in the Americas, and for staging attacks on them and on Spanish treasure ships, bearing gold and silver from New World mines back to Seville. At some 140 miles from east to west, Jamaica was also ten times larger than the rest of Britain’s Caribbean islands combined. Tropical, fertile and well-watered, it offered – for all its steep, mountainous interior and steamy forests – sufficient arable land, or so at first it seemed, to accommodate large numbers of incoming white smallholders. When Milbourne Marsh arrived, individuals of very modest means, indentured servants, shopkeepers, skilled labourers, cooks, peddlers, retired or runaway sailors, itinerants, pen-keepers (cow-farmers), garrison troops and the like still made up between a half and a third of Jamaica’s white population. But the island’s smallholders were in retreat before the rise of much larger landed estates and a single crop. Jamaica’s sugar industry did not reach the height of its profitability until the last third of the eighteenth century. Even so, by the 1730s, with over four hundred sugar mills, the island had comfortably overtaken Barbados as the biggest sugar-producer in Britain’s Empire.
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The Caribbean
Although much of the technology employed on sugar plantations remained unchanged for centuries, these were still brutally innovative places. The unending work of planting, harvesting and cutting the sugar cane, milling it, boiling and striking the sugar syrup, transporting the finished products, rum, molasses, and the various sugars to the dockside, and loading them aboard ship, fostered task specialization, the synchronization of very large quantities of labour, and the imposition of shift systems and a ruthless time discipline.
(#litres_trial_promo) Establishing the necessary mills, boiling houses and other fixed plant required large-scale capital investment; and plantation owners were acutely dependent on long-distance oceanic trade and communications to sell their products – and to recruit and import their workforces. As the historian David Eltis writes:
The slave trade was possibly the most international activity of the pre-industrial era. It required the assembling of goods from at least two continents [Asia and Europe] … the transporting of those goods to a third [Africa], and their exchange for forced labour that would be carried to yet another continent [the Americas].
Between a third and a half of the more than 1.2 million men, women and children purchased by British traders and carried in British ships from West Africa between 1700 and 1760 were probably landed in Jamaica. When Milbourne Marsh arrived here, the island contained almost eighty thousand black slaves, most of them recent arrivals from the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin.
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There were other ways, too, in which Jamaica functioned as a laboratory for new ways of living and new types of people. Port Royal, Milbourne Marsh’s landfall on the island’s south-eastern coast, was an extreme case in point. The English had found its deep offshore waters, and its position at the end of a nine-mile spit separating Kingston harbour from the Caribbean, ideally suited for the loading and unloading of merchantmen from Europe and North America. Port Royal was also useful, they soon discovered, for piracy and for conducting contraband trade with, and raids against, Cuba, Hispaniola and mainland Spanish America. In 1688, 213 ships are known to have docked at Port Royal, almost as many as the total number calling that year at all of New England’s ports. With its almost seven thousand slaves, shopkeepers, merchants, sailors, book-keepers, lawyers, sea captains, craftsmen, wives, children, smugglers and ‘crue of vile strumpets and common prostratures’, the town was also more populous at this stage than its main competitor in British America, Boston, Massachusetts. And since its two thousand houses, many of them brick and some of them four prosperous storeys high, clustered together on barely fifty acres of gravel and sand, Port Royal was probably the most crowded and expensive English-speaking urban settlement outside London.
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Then came the earthquake. It happened at 11.43 a.m. on 7 June 1692. In ten minutes, two-thirds of Port Royal and two thousand of its citizens disappeared beneath the sea. A further three thousand died of injuries and disease in the days after:
The sky, which was clear and serene, grew obscured and red throughout the whole extent of Jamaica. A rumbling noise was heard under ground, spreading from the mountains to the plain; the rocks were split; hills came close together; infectious lakes appeared on the spots where whole mountains had been swallowed up; immense forests were removed several miles from the place where they stood; the edifices disappeared … This terrible phenomenon should have taught the Europeans not to trust to the possessions of a world that trembles under their feet, and seems to slip out of their rapacious hands.
