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(#litres_trial_promo) Yet to view him simply as a manual labourer would be quite wrong. Thomas Rowlandson’s sensitive study of a ship’s carpenter was made more than a decade after Milbourne’s death, but the tools the artist gives his figure – an adze in one hand and a drawing instrument in the other – accurately convey the occupation’s composite quality. As suggested by the adze (an axe with a curved blade), it involved hard physical effort. Timber had to be cut to size, a ship’s rotten wood and any cannon shot embedded in it cut out and made good. As indicated by the drawing instrument, however, this was only part of the job. Milbourne was fully literate, and he had to be. A ship’s carpenter was expected to write ‘an exact and particular account’ of his vessel’s condition and propose solutions to any defects. He needed to know basic accounting so as to estimate the cost of repairs, and keep check of his stocks of timber and other stores. And he required mathematical and geometrical skills: enough to draw plans, calculate the height of a mast from the deck, and estimate the weight of anchors and what thickness of timber was required to support them.
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Looked at this way, it becomes easier to understand why the foremost English shipwright of the late seventeenth century, Anthony Deane (c.1638–1720), was knighted and made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Because of increased transoceanic trade, expanding empire, the growth of European and of some non-European fighting navies, and recurrent warfare, skills of the sort that Milbourne Marsh commanded were in urgent national and international demand. Not for nothing do we refer today to ‘navigating’ and ‘surfing’ the web. Rather like cyberspace now, the sea in Milbourne Marsh’s time was the vital gateway to a more interconnected world. Consequently, those in possession of the more specialist maritime skills were in a position to rise economically, and often socially as well. ‘The Ship-Carpenter … to become master of his business must learn the theory as well as practice,’ Britain’s most widely read trade directory insisted in 1747: ‘it is a business that one seldom wants bread in, either at home or abroad.’
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The nature of her father’s occupation was of central importance in Elizabeth Marsh’s life. At one level, and along with her many other seafaring relations, Milbourne Marsh gave her access to one of the few eighteenth-century organizations genuinely possessed of something approaching global reach: the Royal Navy. This proved vital to her ability to travel. Long-distance oceanic journeying was expensive, but over the years Elizabeth’s family connections repeatedly secured her free or cheap passage on various navy vessels. She also gained, by way of these maritime menfolk, a network of contacts that stretched across oceans: in effect two extended families, her own, and the navy itself. ‘A visit from Mr. Panton, the 1st Lieutenant of the Salisbury,’ she would record while sailing off the eastern coast of the Indian subcontinent in 1775: ‘he seemed well acquainted with most of my family.’
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But her father’s occupation also impacted on her in less enabling ways. It is conceivable that she grew up aware that her mother was different in some manner, or looked at askance by her relations. She certainly seems to have been perpetually insecure about her own and her family’s social position. Milbourne Marsh was from a self-regarding maritime dynasty that encouraged ambition, and he was a master craftsman in a global trade; but his was still an interstitial, sometimes vulnerable existence, lived out between the land and the sea, and between the labouring masses on the one hand, and the officer class on the other. Some of the tensions that could ensue can be seen in two crises that threatened for a while to engulf them all.
In April 1741, six of Milbourne’s workmen in Portsmouth dockyard sent a letter to its Commissioner accusing the carpenter of embezzlement. He had kept back new beds and bedding intended for his current ship, the Cambridge, his accusers claimed, and arranged for them to be smuggled out of the yard at midday, ‘when all the people belonging thereto are absent’. He had used naval timber to make window shutters, chimneypieces, and even palisades. Milbourne’s joiner reported that he had seen ‘the outlines of the head of one [a palisade] drew with a black lead pencil on a small piece of board’ on his desk, ‘which he verily believes was intended for a pattern or mould’. Another of Milbourne’s accusers told of being ordered to chop up good oak for firewood, and how he had carried the sticks out of the dockyard to the Marsh family’s lodgings in the New Buildings, where the carpenter ‘was in company the whole time’.
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Charges of embezzlement, if proved, normally brought instant dismissal from a navy dockyard. Milbourne Marsh retained his post and livelihood not because his excuses convinced (they were judged ‘indifferent’), but because his superiors recognized his ability (‘the carpenter bears the character of a good officer’). It is the private man and the family’s lifestyle, though, which emerge most sharply from this incident. The workmen’s resentment at Milbourne’s efforts to add some distinction and ornament to his family’s stark lodgings (and perhaps also to make extra money from selling illicitly-constructed window shutters, etc.), like their scorn for his small attempts at a social life (‘in company the whole time’), and their determination to inform against him in the first place are suggestive. These things point to a man and a family visibly getting above themselves and their surroundings, experiencing industrious revolution, and consequently arousing envy. Milbourne’s shuddering answer to his workmen’s accusations confirms this, while also showing how entangled he necessarily still was in deference:
Honourable Sir the whole being a premeditated thing to do me prejudice, for my using of them ill (as they term it) in making them do their duty. Hope you look on it as such, as will appear by my former behaviour and time to come.
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He was literate enough to know how to use the word ‘premeditated’, but his syntax was not, could not be, that of a formally educated man, and he was naturally terrified of dismissal. Even more revealing is his explanation of why exactly he had defied regulations and commandeered the navy’s bedding:
My wife having been sick on board [the Cambridge] for five weeks, and no probability of getting her ashore, [I] thought it not fit to lie on my bed till I had got it washed & well cleaned, so got the above bedding to lie on till my own was fit.
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So it was not just Milbourne Marsh who was amphibious, dividing his time between the sea and the land. His wife, and therefore presumably their five-year-old daughter also, were caught up in this way of living too. Already, Elizabeth Marsh was travelling.
Milbourne’s wife and child – soon children – were also caught up in fears for his survival, and therefore for their own. He fought in only one sea battle during his career, but it was a major one. In 1742 he was sent to the Mediterranean. Based first on the Marlborough and then on the Namur, a ninety-gun second rate and the flagship of Admiral Thomas Mathews, Milbourne Marsh also worked on the thirty-odd other warships in Britain’s Mediterranean fleet, dealing with day-to-day repairs as they waited for the combined Franco-Spanish fleet to emerge from Toulon, France’s premier naval base, and fight.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is not clear whether any of his family accompanied him, or if they waited throughout in Portsmouth, or London, or with his parents who were now in Chatham, Kent. What is known, because Milbourne Marsh later gave evidence to a naval court martial, is that on 11 February 1744, for the first and only time in his life, he saw action.
‘I can tell you, exactly to a minute, the time we fired the first gun,’ he would tell the court, for ‘… I immediately whip’d my watch out of my pocket, and it was then 10 minutes after one o’clock to a moment.’ The enemy vessel that the 780-man crew of the Namur engaged was the Real, the 114-gun Spanish flagship and part of a twenty-seven-ship Franco-Spanish fleet. Initially, Milbourne the specialist was allowed to experience the battle below deck. Once the Namur started sustaining damage, however, his skills drove him above: ‘The Admiral sent for me up, and ordered me to see what was the matter with the mizzen topmast’ – that is, the mast nearest the ship’s stern. He had to climb it, and then the main mast, under fire throughout, for the Real was only ‘a pistol-shot’ away from them. Milbourne’s breathless account of what happened next is misted by nautical phraseology, but conveys something of what it was like to clamber across the rigging of a sailing ship under fire, and how difficult it was to make sense of a sea battle as it was happening:
At the same time I acquainted the Admiral of the main top mast, I was told, but by whom I can’t tell, that the starboard main yard arm was shot. I looked up, and saw it, from the quarter deck; I went to go up the starboard shrouds to view it; I found several of the shrouds were shot, which made me quit that side, and I went up on the larboard side, and went across the main yard in the slings, out to the yard arm, and I found just within the lift block on the under side, a shot had grazed a slant … when I went down, I did not immediately acquaint the Admiral with that, for by that time I had got upon the gangway, I was told that the bowsprit was shot, and immediately that the fore top mast was shot.
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In strategic and naval terms, the Battle of Toulon proved an embarrassment for the British. For reasons that provoked furious controversy at the time and are still debated now, many of the Royal Navy ships present did not engage. The damage to the Namur’s masts and rigging, which Milbourne tried so desperately to monitor, persuaded Admiral Mathews to withdraw early from the fighting on 11 February, and he retreated to Italy two days later. The Franco-Spanish fleet was forced back to Toulon, but emerged from the encounter substantially intact. Milbourne Marsh’s own account of the battle underlines again some of the paradoxes of his work. His testimony makes clear that he was obliged to possess a pocket watch, still a rare accessory at this time among men who worked with their hands. It is also striking how confidently this skilled artisan communicated with the Admiral of Britain’s Mediterranean fleet. Indeed, when Mathews was court martialled for failing at Toulon, he asked Milbourne to testify on his behalf. Yet what happened in the battle also confirms the precariousness of the carpenter’s existence, and therefore of his family’s existence.
At one stage, the Namur’s withdrawal left the Marlborough, Milbourne Marsh’s former ship on which many of his friends were still serving, alone to face enemy fire. He watched, from relative safety, as the sails of the Marlborough caught fire, and as its main mast, battered by shot, crashed onto its decks. The ship stayed afloat, but its captain and about eighty of its crew were killed outright, and 120 more of its men were wounded. The battle also killed the Namur’s Post-Captain, John Russel, who had been one of Milbourne’s own patrons, along with at least twenty-five more of the ship’s crew. As for the Spanish, a British fireship had smashed into some of their warships, resulting, it was reported at the time, in ‘the immediate dissolution of 1350 souls’. Witnessing death on this scale, experiencing battle, persuaded Milbourne to change course. He was not a coward: one of his private discoveries at Toulon was that, at the time, he ‘did not think of the danger’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But he was now in his thirties, married, a father, and his parents’ oldest surviving son, whereas most seamen were under twenty-five and single. So in 1744 Milbourne Marsh left the sea. For the next ten years he repaired ships at Portsmouth and Chatham dockyards. On land, at what passed for home.
For his daughter, Elizabeth Marsh, this decision led to a more stationary, and seemingly more ordinary, life. To be sure, there were certain respects in which her experiences in the 1740s and early ’50s already made her distinctive. Moving between Portsmouth, London and Chatham, and between various ships at sea and the land, allowed her in some respects an ironic counterfeit of genteel female education, but also more. In addition to the fluent French she acquired from aunt Mary and uncle Duval, she learnt arithmetic and basic accounting from her father, and she acquired a relish for some of the more innocuous pastimes common among sailors, reading, music and singing. She learnt too how to operate without embarrassment in overwhelmingly masculine environments, and how to tolerate physical hardship; and she also learnt, through living close to it, and through sailing on it from infancy, how not to fear the sea, or to regard it as extraordinary, but rather to take travelling on it for granted. She also learnt restlessness and insecurity, and – from watching her mother – a certain female self-reliance.
Mariners’ wives had to be capable of a more than usual measure of independence and responsibility, because their husbands were so often away. During Milbourne’s absences at sea, Elizabeth Marsh senior ran their household in the New Buildings and its finances by herself.
(#litres_trial_promo) She also had to cope at intervals with the harshness and enforced intimacies of living aboard ship. Both of their sons, Francis Milbourne Marsh and John Marsh, the latter Elizabeth Marsh’s favourite and confidant, seem to have been born at sea. Giving birth to the elder, Francis, may indeed have been what confined Elizabeth Marsh senior to the Cambridge in Portsmouth harbour – that is, several miles from shore – for several weeks in 1741, and what tempted Milbourne to ‘borrow’ supplies of navy bedding ‘till my own was fit’.
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In the normal course of events, none of these mixed influences on their daughter Elizabeth Marsh would have mattered very much. When her father left the sea in 1744 after the Battle of Toulon, his and the family’s prospects were modest, and would have appeared predictable. One of the attractions of working in naval dockyards, as distinct from a commercial shipyard that paid higher wages, was that they allowed skilled employees a job for life. Once he came ashore in 1744, Milbourne’s income declined slightly, from £50 per annum to around £40, a sum that placed the family at the bottom of England’s middling sort at this time, ‘the upper station of low life’, as Daniel Defoe styled it.
(#litres_trial_promo) But at least there was security. It seemed likely that Milbourne would build and repair a succession of warships until he was pensioned off, that his two sons would in due course become shipwrights in their turn, and that ultimately his only daughter would marry a man of the same trade. But this was to reckon without changes that crossed continents, and the second influential man in Elizabeth Marsh’s life: her uncle George Marsh.
Born in January 1723, George Marsh was the eighth and penultimate child of George Marsh senior and Elizabeth Milbourne. This position in a large artisanal family may have made him slighter in physique, and more susceptible to illness – he seems to have suffered sporadically from epilepsy – but he was as driven as any eldest child. Initially sent to sea in 1735, because his father was not ‘able to purchase me a clerkship’, he soon moved to an apprenticeship to a petty officer in Chatham dockyard, and by 1744 was working as a clerk for the Commissioner of Deptford’s naval dockyard.
(#litres_trial_promo) His next break came almost immediately. In October 1745 the House of Commons demanded a detailed report on how naval expenditure in the previous five years, when Britain had been at war with Spain, compared with that in the first five years of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–07). As he was ‘acquainted with the business of the dockyards, and no clerk of the Navy Office was’, George Marsh was ‘chosen … to perform that great work’. Labouring at the Navy Office in London ‘from 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning till 8 or 9 o’clock at night from October to the end of January’, mining a vast, unsorted store of records for the requisite figures, and organizing and writing up the usable data, exacerbated his epilepsy. He suffered intermittent attacks of near-blindness and dizziness, and ‘fell several times in the street’, he recorded much later, ‘and therefore found it necessary to carry constantly in my pocket a memorandum who I was and where I lodged’. He nonetheless produced the report ‘in a few months’.
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This episode suggests some of George Marsh’s qualities: his ferocious capacity for industry, strong ambition, and utter belief in paperwork. It also suggests how – through him – Elizabeth Marsh was connected to yet another aspect of modernity and change. The circumstances of her birth and upbringing had already linked her with slavery, migration, empire, economic and industrious revolutions, the navy and the sea. But it was primarily through her uncle George Marsh that she connected with the expanding power of the British state at this time, and with an ever more conscious mobilization of knowledge and paperwork in order to expand that power. To paraphrase the economist J.R. McCulloch’s later verdict on the East India Company, Elizabeth’s father, Milbourne Marsh, was caught up with the power of the sword, Britain’s fighting navy; but it was her uncle, George Marsh, who exemplified the power of the pen and the ledger.
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And he was unstoppable. He rose early every morning, drank only water, confined himself to two meals a day, took regular exercise, spent little on himself, and worked very hard. In 1750 he moved from the provinces to the tall pedimented brick building that Christopher Wren had designed for the Navy Office in Crutched Friars by the Tower of London. From 1751 to 1763, George Marsh was the Clerk in charge of seamen’s wages. He then spent almost ten years as Commissioner of Victualling, before becoming Clerk of the Acts in 1773. This was the position that Samuel Pepys had occupied after 1660, and used as a power base from which to transform the administration of the Royal Navy. Pepys, however, had been able to draw on aristocratic relations and on high, creative intelligence. George Marsh possessed neither advantage, yet he retained the Clerkship of the Acts for over twenty years, and ended his career as a Commissioner of the Navy. At his death in 1800, this shipwright’s son was worth by his own estimate £34,575, over £3 million in present-day values.
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The contrast between his remarkable career and his evident personal limitations reduced some who worked and competed with him to uncomprehending fury. George Marsh, complained his own Chief Clerk in 1782, was
totally unfit for the employment as he can neither read, spell, nor write. This office has in my memory been filled with ability and dignity … but the present Clerk of the Acts has neither, and we should do ten times better without him, for he only perplexes matters.
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Yet, as this denunciation suggests, some of the criticism George Marsh attracted at different stages in his career was rooted in snobbery, and he was always able to exploit people’s tendency to underestimate him. In reality, he wrote all the time, privately, and not just in his public capacity. His papers also confirm that he read widely and that, like his parents and his niece Elizabeth Marsh, he enjoyed constructing stories. More than any other member of his immediate family, perhaps because he spent virtually all of his life in a single country, George Marsh seems to have been conscious of the scale of the transformations through which he was living, and he sought out different ways to make sense of them. He was the one who stayed behind. He was the spectator, the recorder, the collector of memories and eloquent, emblematic mementoes. Most of all, George Marsh was someone who relished facts and information, and knew how to deploy them: ‘I am sensible my abilities fall far short of some other men’s,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but [I] am very certain no one knows the whole business of the civil department of the Navy better or perhaps so well as I do.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This massive, cumulative knowledge gave him an element of power, as did his acute understanding of how patronage worked.
As his correspondence with successive aristocratic First Lords of the Admiralty reveals, he was both unctuously deferential in his dealings with his official and social superiors, and capable sometimes of hoodwinking them. In private, and like his parents, George Marsh tended to be critical of members of the aristocracy, writing regularly about the superiority of ‘the middle station of life’, and of those (like himself) who had to work seriously hard for a living. But he was adept at the patronage game, which necessarily involved him paying court at times to ‘the indolent unhappy nobility’, and he was interested in securing advancement and favours for more than just himself. He ‘always had a very great pleasure’, he wrote, in ‘doing my utmost to make all those happy, by every friendly act, who I have known to be worthy’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Chief among these worthy beneficiaries were the members of his own family. It was George Marsh’s willingness and ability to use his power and connections to promote his family that transformed Elizabeth Marsh’s expectations, and that separated her forever from the life-trajectory that might have been anticipated for a shipwright’s daughter. Having as her uncle someone with access to influence over several decades was one of the factors that made her life extraordinary. By way of George Marsh, she was able at times to have contact with some of the most powerful men in the British state, while also being helped to travel far beyond it.
His first substantial intervention in his niece’s life was indirect, but it changed everything. In January 1755, using his connections at the Navy Board, George Marsh secured for Milbourne Marsh the position of Naval Officer at Port Mahón in Menorca.
(#litres_trial_promo) A ‘Naval Officer’ in eighteenth-century British parlance was not a fighting sea officer. The post was a clerical and administrative one, in an overseas dockyard, and for a ship’s carpenter it represented a distinctly unusual career break. To begin with, it tripled the family’s income. In the late 1740s and early ’50s, Milbourne had rarely earned more than £12 a quarter, whereas this new post brought with it an annual salary of £150, and the opportunity to make more.
The rise in income was only part of the alteration in the family’s status and outlook. As a carpenter aboard ship, Milbourne had been an uneasy amalgam of specialist craftsman, resident expert and manual labourer. This now changed. Nothing would ever take him completely from the sea, or from his delight in the construction of wooden ships and in drawing plans, but from now on he ceased to work with his hands for much of the time. The announcements of his promotion in the London press referred to him as ‘Milbourne Marsh Esq.’, thereby conceding to him the suffix that was the minimum requirement for being accounted a gentleman.
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But the most dramatic change involved in his promotion to Naval Officer was one that affected his whole family, his wife, their sons, and – as it turned out – the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Marsh most of all. In March 1755, the family left Portsmouth forever and sailed to the Mediterranean and Menorca. She was on her way.
2 Taken to Africa, Encountering Islam (#ulink_d1e012cb-8f8c-5126-a0de-6249b0ea8a3b)
MOVING TO MENORCA meant an immediate change of landscape, climate and cultural and religious milieu, and a conspicuous change of scale. Accustomed, when on land, to crowded ports in the world’s foremost Protestant power, Elizabeth Marsh now found herself on a rocky, sparsely cultivated, ten-mile-long Mediterranean island of twenty-eight thousand souls, where a sprinkling of Jews and Greek Orthodox Christians were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Catholics, and where the dominant language was a form of Catalan. Most of the four-thousand-odd Britons on Menorca were soldiers or sailors. The officers among them, and the few civilian professionals and merchants, generally held aloof from the local Catholics (who tended to cold-shoulder them in turn), organizing for themselves a cosy, desperately restricted simulacrum of social life back home.
(#litres_trial_promo) In her case, the claustrophobia scarcely had time to register. What did was a rise in status marked out by shifts in behaviour and consumerism. She seems to have learnt how to ride and to have acquired a riding costume. Her father could now afford a music teacher, and she began reading sheet music, as distinct from simply memorizing tunes. And, in place of shared lodgings, she moved with her family into a substantial freestone house on Hospital Island, a twelve-acre offshore islet in Mahón harbour. She was ‘happily situated’, she wrote later, abruptly promoted to minor membership of a colonial elite, and refashioning herself in a setting where young, single Protestant women who might conceivably pass as ladies were flatteringly sparse.
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Milbourne Marsh’s new life was also substantially different. No longer a full-time manual worker, he was now a ‘pen and ink’ man, without a uniform or a sword, and therefore on a different and lower level than the senior military and sea officers who ran the colony, yet indispensable and multi-tasked. Part of his job as the island’s Naval Officer was to act as Clerk of the Cheque: that is, as senior financial officer of Menorca’s naval dockyard. The naval stores lining the wharves of Mahón’s huge harbour, which extends inland for some six thousand yards, were his responsibility. So was paying the Britons and Menorcans who worked in the dockyard as shipwrights, sail-makers and carpenters, and in the navy’s victualling office, bakehouse, windmills and magazines. In addition, Milbourne acted as Clerk of the Survey, drafting maps and drawing up plans for new buildings and defences. At intervals he was Master Shipwright too, overseeing the repair and careening of incoming British warships and transports, and keeping an eye on the merchant ships arriving with provisions and bullion to pay the troops. In his limited leisure time he joined his wife, sons and newly accomplished daughter on Hospital Island, with its ‘rocks and precipices … intermixed with scattering houses’, where the navy’s local commander, surgeon and any visiting admirals were also accommodated.
(#litres_trial_promo) But Milbourne’s daylight hours were spent in the undistinguished row of low-storeyed sheds that made up the naval dockyard, or rowing the small boat that came with his office from ship to ship in the harbour, seeking out information from their captains, or mustering men and resolving disagreements, or surveying the island’s innumerable coves, inlets and bays.
For Menorca was not a place of refuge and colonial ease. The British had seized it from Spain in 1708 for essentially the same reason that had led the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and Catalans to invade it before them, and for much the same reason too as would cause the United States Navy to maintain a base of operations there in the nineteenth century. Menorca offered an advantageous location from which to monitor and to seek to dominate the western Mediterranean. In the words of a British writer in 1756:
All ships sailing up the straits of Gibraltar, and bound to any part of Africa, east of Algiers, to any part of Italy, or to any part of Turkey, either in Asia or Europe, and all ships from any of those places, and bound to any port without the straits-mouth, must and usually do pass between this island and the coast of Africa.
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Some of the main sea routes to and from Genoa, Livorno, Nice, Sicily, Marseilles, Lisbon, Tetuan and Tripoli lay within easy reach of Menorca. So did ships setting out from Spain’s Mediterranean ports, and from its naval bases, Cartagena and Cádiz. Possessed of Menorca and sufficient force, Britain could intervene in the commercial and naval activities of three of its imperial competitors: France, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire with its provinces in Northern Africa. Toulon, the prime French naval base, was 220 miles away from Menorca, within striking distance of a British fleet using the island as a base. Of course, the converse also applied. Ringed and replete with commercial, strategic and warlike possibilities, Menorca was itself a natural target. It was a ‘frontier garrison’, one politician had remarked in the 1720s, where discipline and watchfulness were mandatory ‘as if it were always in a state of war’.
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The members of the Marsh family were introduced to the risks attendant on the island’s location and strategic role almost as soon as they arrived in 1755. The aftershocks they experienced that November from the Lisbon earthquake, which killed over 100,000 people in the Iberian peninsula and Morocco, and caused tremors in France, Italy, Switzerland and Finland, and tsunamis as far apart as Galway, Ireland, and Barbados, were accompanied by other far-reaching convulsions, engineered by human actors. France and Britain were at war again. This time, by contrast with their previous conflicts, the fighting did not begin in Europe. The initial battles of what Americans generally term the French and Indian War, and Europeans call the Seven Years War, took place in parts of Asia and the Caribbean, and above all in North America; and both the onset of the war, and its unprecedented geographical extent, impacted directly on Menorca – and on Elizabeth Marsh.
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The Mediterranean world of Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp
Although Menorca was tiny, its complex coastline, ‘indented with long bays and promontories’, and its disgruntled Catholic population were too extensive to be adequately guarded in wartime by the resident British garrison. Retaining the island in these circumstances required reinforcements on land, and also a significant naval presence. This time, such reinforcements were not easily available. Before the 1740s, it was rare for large numbers of Royal Navy ships to be stationed for any length of time in Asian or American waters. Now that war was spilling over into different continents, the resulting dispersal of Britain’s naval resources left traditional European frontier sites like Menorca more exposed and potentially vulnerable. As a later Admiralty report argued:
If our possessions and commerce increase, our cares and our difficulties are increased likewise; that commerce and those possessions being extended all over the world must be defended by sea having no other defence … [Yet] it is impossible to keep at all of them, perhaps at any one, a strength equal to what the enemy can send thither.
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In late 1755, when rumours were already circulating of a French invasion force assembling in Toulon and Marseilles, there were just three British ships of the line in the Mediterranean, as against fifteen patrolling off the coasts of Bengal and North America. By early 1756, when 150 ships and 100,000 troops were in readiness along France’s Mediterranean coast, the situation for the British was only marginally better. More than one hundred Royal Navy vessels were under repair or guarding Britain’s own coasts, and an additional fifty were in service in extra-European waters, but only thirteen warships were available for other locations.
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As a result, in 1756 those on Menorca were left substantially to fend for themselves. For Milbourne Marsh, in his capacity as Naval Officer, this meant locating and purchasing obsolete vessels from various Mediterranean ports, and then converting them into fireships that could be sailed against any invading French fleet. He also supervised the splicing together of surplus masts and cables to fashion a 250-yard-long barrier that could be floated across the narrow entrance to Mahón harbour. In early April, Menorca’s military out-stations and outlying wells were destroyed to keep them from falling into French hands. Most of the island’s Catholics were disarmed, and soldiers and their families, along with the island’s pro-British Jewish and Greek inhabitants, began assembling, with hundreds of live cattle and other supplies, behind the walls of Fort St Philip at the entrance to Mahón harbour.
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Had Elizabeth Marsh and her family belonged unquestionably to the lower ranks, this would have been their refuge too. As almost four hundred other women did, she would have spent the next two and a half months under siege in Fort St Philip’s web of subterranean stone passages, ‘the garrison knocked about her ears every minute, and some of her acquaintances killed or wounded every day’. Conversely, had the family’s social status been more assured, she might have been dispatched – like many of the officers’ womenfolk – to Majorca, the neighbouring Balearic island ruled by still-neutral Spain.
(#litres_trial_promo) As it was, her fate was determined once again by the distinctive, indispensable nature of her father’s skills. On Saturday, 17 April, Milbourne Marsh was summoned to the island’s naval commander:
Upon the French being landed on the island of Menorca, Commodore Edgcumbe gave him an order … to proceed from thence in His Majesty’s ship the Princess Louisa to Gibraltar, and there to take upon him the duty of Master Shipwright.
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By now there were five Royal Navy ships off Mahón, ‘moored head and stern in line across the harbour’s mouth’, but still manifestly too few to engage the 120 French warships and transports assembling off the coast of Ciutadella, to the west of the island, or to slow for very long the troops that these vessels were disgorging. Two of these British warships left on 21 April, which was when Milbourne Marsh carefully finished up and signed his remaining official paperwork, and ‘the same day the enemy appeared on this side of Mahón’. The following day, a Thursday, the forty-gun Princess Louisa with the Marsh family on board, together with the Dolphin and the Portland, slipped away to Gibraltar.
(#litres_trial_promo) She was rescued, but not saved.
For it is now that Elizabeth Marsh begins to struggle out of the meshes of family plots and transcontinental forces and events, and seeks to take charge of her own life. She arrives in Gibraltar on 30 April 1756. Within two months, she has determined to sail to England by way of Lisbon. Although by this stage Britain and France are formally at war, and the Mediterranean is criss-crossed by French and British warships under orders to ‘take, sink, burn or otherwise destroy’ each other’s naval and merchant vessels, she insists on setting sail, initially in defiance of her parents’ wishes, and as a lone female traveller among men.
She has her private reasons for acting this way, but she can also make a prudential case for her decision. After just three days in Gibraltar, Milbourne Marsh has been able to compile a report on its naval facilities and defences. The British have long neglected the fortress for reasons of economy, and his assessment is uncompromising and discouraging:
The capstans, partners and frames [are] entirely decayed, the mast house, boat house, pitch house, smiths shop and cable shed all decayed, and tumbling down; the yard launch wants a thorough repair, and in case there may be a necessity to careen or caulk any of His Majesty’s ships, there is neither floating stages for that service, or boat for the officers to attend their respective duties; the shed within the new mole gates that was used for repairing sails in, likewise the shed for the use of the artificers are both decayed and tumbling down.
This, and more, is what he proceeds to tell Admiral John Byng, who is also newly arrived at Gibraltar, under instructions to sail with ten warships to relieve the besieged British garrison on Menorca. Even before Byng sets out, Milbourne’s damning report has therefore encouraged him to begin contemplating failure. ‘If I should fail in the relief of Port Mahón,’ he informs his superiors in London on 4 May, ‘I shall look upon the security and protection of Gibraltar as my next object.’
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Subsequently, these words will be interpreted by the senior officers at Byng’s court martial as evidence of a lack of determined resolution and aggressiveness on his part. Yet this is not altogether fair. Gibraltar, a three-mile-long rocky promontory off southern Andalusia in Spain with no source of fresh water at this time except for the rain, is like ‘a great man of war at anchor’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is formidable, a natural fortress, but with weaknesses corresponding to its strengths. The Rock gives its British occupiers a strategically key position from which to monitor the straits between the Mediterranean and Atlantic. If it is closely besieged from the sea, however, there is nowhere for its inhabitants to retreat except into Spain. Reports from diplomats and spies have been circulating since March 1756 that if Menorca falls (as it does at the end of June), France will move on to attack Gibraltar, and then offer both of these territories back to Spain in return for the loan of its naval fleet in the war against Britain.
(#litres_trial_promo) If the French do attack Gibraltar – and if Spain turns hostile – how can the fortress defend itself without adequate stores, or the dockyard facilities necessary to keep a fighting navy at sea and in action?
Because he is thinking along these lines, Byng will decide to retreat after his fleet’s inconclusive encounter with the marquis de la Galissonière’s French squadron on 20 May 1756. He will hurry back to defend Gibraltar, leaving Menorca’s garrison to its fate, and so ultimately condemn himself to a naval firing squad. For the men of the Marsh family, however, Byng’s anxieties about the poor state of Gibraltar’s naval dockyard and defences have substantial compensations. ‘It requiring a proper person to inspect into and manage these affairs,’ Byng informs London, ‘I have taken upon me to give Mr. Milbourne Marsh … an order to act as Master Shipwright … and have given him orders to use his best endeavours to put the wharf etc. in the best condition he can, for very soon they will be wanted.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The added responsibility boosts Milbourne’s annual salary from £150 to £200, and this is in addition to the accommodation and food the navy allows him. By July, John Marsh is also in naval employ, working as clerk to his father, who no longer has the time to write his own letters. Elizabeth Marsh’s situation is necessarily different. For her, there can be no job. If a Franco-Spanish force lays siege to Gibraltar, there may be no easy means of escape this time, especially for a single, twenty-year-old woman who is associated with the British. Moreover, now that the war has reached Europe, Gibraltar itself is filling up with troops and is increasingly crowded and unhealthy. There are over a thousand men confined in its naval hospital, and every day some of them die.
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All this enables Elizabeth Marsh to rationalize her decision to leave and to persuade her parents to agree, but she is also influenced – indeed misled – by her past. She is used to sailing in large, well-crewed, well-disciplined warships that are designed to take punishment as well as give it, and accordingly she has no fear of the sea. But the Ann, on which she embarks on the afternoon of 27 July, is a battered, unarmed 150-ton merchantman, loaded with casks of brandy, and with only ten crewmen. The man in overall charge is James Crisp, a nominally British merchant based in Barcelona who is already known to the Marsh family; and there are two other passengers, an Irish trader called Joseph Popham who is in his late forties, and his adolescent son William.
(#litres_trial_promo) Since it is wartime, the Ann sails in convoy with fourteen other merchant vessels bound for Lisbon and under the protection of the forty-four-gun Gosport. This too misleads Elizabeth, for naturally she trusts the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, and like most sea officers, Captain Richard Edwards dislikes convoy duty, and he is also peculiarly bad at it. On the Gosport’s previous voyage, from Plymouth to Gibraltar, he has more than once lost sight of all thirty-four vessels entrusted to his care. In the case of this new Lisbon convoy, the fog that is so common in this stretch of the Mediterranean puts a further strain on his abilities. Although there is ‘moderate and fair weather to begin with’, one day out from Gibraltar the mist is so thick that he can no longer see any of the fifteen merchantmen sailing with him. Edwards orders the Gosport’s rowing boats to be hoisted aboard so as to make up speed, and fires its guns to signal his location.
(#litres_trial_promo) Those on the Ann hear the shots, and on the morning of 30 July catch a last glimpse of the Gosport, seven miles away. The Ann’s Master desperately carries ‘all the sail he could, in order to keep up with the man of war, even to endangering our lives, for there was six feet [of] water in the hold, before any one knew of it’. Used to the sea, but not to the limitations of small merchantmen, Elizabeth Marsh, by her own admission, was ‘entirely ignorant of the danger we had been in until it was over’.
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But by now they are all lost: the other merchant ships, the Gosport that takes ten days to reach Lisbon, and the Ann that finally emerges from drifting in deep fog at 2 p.m. on 8 August to see ‘a sail to windward giving us chase and at half past seven came within pistol shot of us’. It is not – as they first think – a French warship. It is a twenty-gun Moroccan cruiser with more than 130 armed men on board. With flight now out of the question, Crisp and the Pophams agree to row over to the Moroccan vessel, thinking that it is simply a matter of showing their Mediterranean pass and establishing their identity, for Morocco and Britain are formally at peace. Elizabeth Marsh meanwhile was ‘tolerably easy, until night drew on, when fear seized my spirits, at their not returning at the time appointed. I continued in that state, until the morning … [when] instead of seeing the gentlemen, boats, crowded with Moors, came to our ship, in exchange for whom our sailors were sent on board theirs.’ She remains on the Ann four more days, as do the Moroccan boarders. Then, on 12 August, she is rowed over to their ship, terrified by ‘the waves looking like mountains’, because she is no longer observing them from the secure upper decks of a warship, and because – like most seafarers at this time – she is unable to swim. Once all are on board the corsair ship, there is a brutal social but not yet a gender divide. The ordinary sailors from the Ann are left roped together on deck. But James Crisp, Joseph Popham and his son, and Elizabeth are pushed into a cabin ‘so small as not to admit our standing upright. In this miserable place four people were to live.’
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During the three days she is confined here – and still more afterwards – what become significant are the things that she takes note of and is careful to remember, and the aspects of her ordeal and changing surroundings that she either refuses to acknowledge, or is in no position to understand. She is used to living at intervals at sea among hundreds of men, and so copes well with the utter lack of privacy, the discomfort, the smells, the stray glimpses of the others’ nudity, the glances they snatch of her own. ‘Miss Marsh’, Joseph Popham concedes later, ‘… has supported herself under her misfortunes beyond what may be expected from her tender sex.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It is not so much the embarrassments and hardships of being mewed up in a stinking cabin with three males that begin to undermine her, or even the shock of violent capture, so much as a sense of being torn from all moorings. She has grown up in tight, usually well-disciplined communities, the cherished only daughter of a respected master craftsman. Socially marginal in terms of British society in general, she has nonetheless been sure of her place in her own maritime sphere. As this strange, nightmarish ordeal progresses, her sense of personal anchorage loosens, and she feels marked out by her gender in new and dangerous ways.
She has already spent several days on the Ann surrounded by curious, occasionally ribald Moroccan seamen, with – or so she later records – only the ship’s elderly steward standing between her and them. Now, imprisoned on the corsair ship, William Popham tries to relieve his own fears by telling her ‘stories of the cruelties of the Moors, and the dangers my sex was exposed to in Barbary’. When they finally disembark at the port of Sla (Salé) on Morocco’s Atlantic coast on 15 August, and Elizabeth Marsh rides the mule they give her for two miles over rough tracks into its old town, she is greeted by ‘a confused noise of women’s voices from the top of the houses, which surprised me much, until I was informed it was a testimony of joy on the arrival of a female captive’. There are more reminders of her difference. As she, the Pophams and James Crisp wait in the half-ruined house allocated them, confined again to a single room, some local European merchants bribe their way in and undertake to smuggle out letters. The captives wait until night ‘lest the guards should suspect what we were upon’, and then they write.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joseph Popham writes to a patron, Sir Henry Cavendish in Dublin, urging him to get his brother the Duke of Devonshire, a former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to intervene on the captives’ behalf. James Crisp writes to the new Governor of Gibraltar, James O’Hara, Baron Tyrawley, and to Sir Edward Hawke, who has replaced Byng as Commander-in-Chief of the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Both Popham and Crisp pass on personal messages in postscripts to their letters, but their first instinct is to make contact with public figures who are possessed of influence. When Milbourne Marsh finally learns of his daughter’s real plight (the newspapers initially report that the Ann has been seized or sunk by the French), he reacts in a similar fashion. He immediately, and with characteristic confidence, appeals for aid to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Anson. Elizabeth Marsh by contrast has no contacts with powerful males at this stage of her life, and so writes only to her parents. Consequently her letters, unlike most of the others, do not survive.
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Those who now have power over her also remind her of the vulnerabilities of her position. When the captives are taken for questioning before a high-ranking Moroccan official at Sla, James Crisp is able to converse with him in Spanish, the language that Maghrebi elite males and incoming Europeans often employ to communicate with each other. But Elizabeth, who knows little Spanish, is conducted into the official’s harem, ‘the apartment of his ladies’, and brought for the first time into the company of a Moroccan woman, whose name she never learns. With no interpreter available, they see each other – or so she claims later in print – only in terms of mutual strangeness:
She was surprisingly tall and stout, with a broad, flat face, very dark complexion, and long black hair. She wore a dress resembling a clergyman’s gown, made of muslin, and buttoned at the neck, like the collar of a shirt, which reached her feet. She had bracelets on her arms and legs; and was extremely inquisitive, curious in examining my dress and person, and was highly entertained at the appearance I made.
