The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History

Nonetheless, this kind of socializing rested on more than sex, money and loneliness. Visiting sailors and blacks tended to come together on this and other Caribbean islands because they shared a consciousness of difference. If blacks and mulattos were divided from Creole settlers by their skin colour, culture of origin, belief systems and, usually, their un-freedom, sailors too were a people apart, ‘a generation differing from all the world’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Tanned, often with long pigtails and amateurish ‘tattoos’ made with ink or gunpowder, markedly agile, and frequently mutilated in some way, sailors looked very different from men who spent all their lives on land. They walked, moved and dressed differently. They possessed, like Jamaica’s black population, their own distinct vocabularies, songs and magical beliefs; and crucially they were transients, men who had left home, family and country, or been torn away from them by press gangs. That they should sometimes have gravitated towards men and women who had also been snatched, even more brutally, from their homelands, was scarcely surprising. In Kingston parish, where Milbourne Marsh married Elizabeth Evans in December 1734, two graveyards ‘to the westward and leeward of the town’ were reserved for ‘free people of colour’ on the one hand, and for ‘soldiers, seamen, and transient people of every description’ on the other.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even in death, mariners, mulattos and blacks might be set apart from everyone else, and placed together.

They also came together at sea. Rather like Jamaica itself, the Royal Navy was at once violent, dangerous, cosmopolitan and innovating: ‘a new kind of power, which must change the face of the globe’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Some of the most complex and expensive machines of their age, the navy’s ships were relatively tolerant and – to a controlled degree – even meritocratic spaces. The skills involved in maintaining and sailing these vessels were so specialized, and in such high demand, that possessing them could sometimes trump a man’s skin colour, just as it often trumped social class.

(#litres_trial_promo) Like most navy men, Milbourne Marsh was accustomed to working alongside sailors who were free blacks. Such men enjoyed the same rights and earned the same wages as their white counterparts. In the Caribbean, the navy also employed black slave seamen, who did the same job as equivalent whites and free blacks, and worked and lived alongside them, but whose wages were paid to their owners. This was the case with a close comrade of Milbourne’s, John Cudjoe. He worked as one of the two servants allowed Milbourne in his capacity as ship’s carpenter: ‘servant’ in this context meaning an apprentice under training. Both servants earned the same wage, just under £14 per annum on top of their keep, but in Cudjoe’s case the money went to his owner, a Jamaican settler. Both men shared quarters with Milbourne and worked with him on a daily basis; and when the latter moved from the Deal Castle to the Rupert in August 1733, John Cudjoe went with him.

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So while, in his choice of a wife, Milbourne Marsh was evidently willing to profit from slave-ownership, he also took daily, comradely contact across racial lines for granted. Whether he also knowingly crossed racial lines in marrying Elizabeth Evans, and whether this contributed to the Marsh family’s subsequent documentary reticence about this woman, will probably never be known. Biography, it has been said, is like a net that catches and brings to the surface an individual life. But a net is only a set of holes tied together by string, so some things slip through. There are always life-parts, and body-parts, that get lost, and the birth identity of Elizabeth Marsh’s mother is one of these.

(#litres_trial_promo) As far as she herself is concerned, attempting to establish her precise ethnic origins may be more than usually inappropriate. In 1733, Jamaica’s governing assembly passed a law stipulating that ‘no one shall be deemed a mulatto after the third generation … but … shall have all the privileges and immunities of His Majesty’s white subjects of this island provided they are brought up in the Christian religion’, a belated recognition of the extent of miscegenation, and of its muddled human consequences.

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So, even if she was mixed race in terms of her origins, the one-time Elizabeth Bouchier may have seen herself, even before her two marriages, as a person undergoing change and flux, beyond easy categorization. ‘The fiction of the census’, Benedict Anderson has written of present-day attempts to fix a person’s identity, ‘is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one – and only one – extremely clear place. No fractions.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth Marsh, brand-new wife of Milbourne Marsh, may have been a person of fractions. For a variety of reasons, her daughter, another Elizabeth Marsh, also seems at times to have viewed herself in these terms; and in her case, the fact that one of these fractions may have been linked in some manner with slavery will need at intervals to be borne in mind.

In 1735, Milbourne Marsh, his new bride and their unborn child had first to survive. Jamaica’s parish registers suggest that a quarter to a third of white children born on the island at this time perished before their first birthday. James and Elizabeth Evans appear themselves to have buried a child in Port Royal in 1730, a daughter who can have been at most barely one year old. But Jamaican parish documents severely understated the volume of infant mortality. Vicars charged money to register baptisms, and parents often held off from making the monetary and emotional investment until a child had survived for several months. Many died earlier than this, and were buried unchristened and unrecorded. Among the children of black slaves, death in the early weeks and months of life was common, and on some plantations may have been the norm. Even if a child survived until its third decade, it was unlikely that both parents would see it do so. Jamaican marriages lasted on average less than nine years before being broken by the death of one or both partners. For a child to reach full maturity, and for its mother and father still to be around to witness this, was exceptional even among the very wealthy.

(#litres_trial_promo) What prospects then – for all his newly acquired property – could there be for Milbourne Marsh, a working sailor at risk from the sea as well as from Jamaica? And what prospects could there be for his new wife, Elizabeth, who had already lost a child?

Their private fears of death, which determined so much on Jamaica, were sharpened by mounting racial unrest. Running away and forming armed communities in the island’s rugged mountains was one of the oldest forms of slave resistance. By the early 1730s, these maroons – as the runaways were termed – had become so numerous, and sufficiently organized, for its continuance as a colony to seem at risk. Jamaica was some thousand miles distant from Britain’s other Caribbean islands, but dangerously close to Spanish Cuba and French St Domingue. This was one reason why the Kingston and the Rupert, and by 1735 nineteen other Royal Navy warships, were patrolling the Caribbean. But the navy exercised limited power over Jamaica’s interior, and – as was nearly always the case – the number of British soldiers available was painfully small. The island’s governing assembly and plantocracy had therefore dual reasons for alarm. ‘The terror of them spreads itself every where,’ Jamaica’s Governor, Council and Assembly reported to London of the maroons in February 1734. Their military successes had exerted ‘such influence on our other slaves, that they are continually deserting’. ‘Hopes of freedom’ were even shaking ‘the fidelity of our most trusty slaves’.

(#litres_trial_promo) If this level of slave flight were to persist, and if slave anger mutated into large-scale violent resistance, the sugar industry might falter and white settlers might be tempted to abandon the island. In that event, the French or the Spanish, or both, might invade.

Milbourne Marsh experienced some of the consequences of growing panic among Jamaica’s whites at first hand. Several of his former shipmates on the Kingston and the Deal Castle were swept into fighting the maroons on shore, and on 10 October 1734 John Cudjoe was taken off the Rupert at his owner’s request. Slave escapes had reached such levels by now that Cudjoe’s owner may have wanted him under her surveillance, or she may simply have been desperate for his labour. The fact that Milbourne’s former servant shared his Akan surname, which means ‘male born on Monday’, with one of the most prominent maroon chieftains, Cudjoe, who would force the British to a treaty in 1739, may also have provoked superstitious unease and hostility aboard the Rupert itself.

(#litres_trial_promo) During this same month, October 1734, martial law was declared on Jamaica. Six hundred additional men were raised from its parishes to serve as militia, and London shipped out six new military companies to aid them. By now, Milbourne was closely involved with Elizabeth Evans. Their marriage that December, the certainty by February 1735 that a child was on the way, and mounting fears among Jamaica’s whites that ‘We cannot say we are sure of a other day,’ made them determined to get out.

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Milbourne Marsh acted with his customary efficiency. On 7 March the Kingston arrived at Port Royal and began lengthy preparations for its voyage back to England. By 10 March, Milbourne had signed on again with his old ship, where he retained friends and patrons. He seems to have sold, or given over his rights in, the drink shop at Port Royal and the wherry to a naval official there. It is possible, though not proven, that he sold the slaves, Palla, Cresia, Silvia, Gosport and the rest, to the Royal Navy, which employed both male and female slaves in its Jamaican dockyards. This indeed may have been how he funded his new wife’s passage to England.

(#litres_trial_promo) Certainly, her escape from the island was aided by Milbourne’s own specialized skills. On paper, Royal Navy warships were exclusively masculine spaces, but women who posed no obvious sexual temptation were sometimes permitted to sail on them, especially if their responsible male possessed leverage of some kind. When the Kingston left Jamaica that June, Elizabeth Marsh senior was six months pregnant, and she was the wife of one of the ship’s most indispensable craftsmen. Twice married to a mariner, she also understood what was expected of her. She seems to have made private arrangements for her food with the Kingston’s purser so as to keep clear of the ship’s formal accounting system, and she would probably have spent the days of the voyage resting her growing bulk on the orlop deck, the quietest, darkest and most secluded space aboard.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was on 20 August 1735 that they sailed into Portsmouth harbour, barely a month before the birth of their daughter.

Such time as this new Elizabeth Marsh spent on dry land during her first nineteen years was mainly lived here, at Portsmouth. The family found lodgings in the New Buildings, a recent development of austere workingmen’s houses in what was then the northern end of Portsea Island. It was only a short walk from here to St Thomas, the medieval church on Portsmouth’s High Street where Elizabeth Marsh was christened on 3 October 1735.

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The New Buildings gave Milbourne Marsh easy access to his work. The development had been constructed with public money just outside the walls of Portsmouth’s naval dockyard, so that shipwrights and other workers could arrive punctually for their thirteen-hour day. Although he worked sometimes in the dockyard, and sometimes at sea, Milbourne organized his life so as to spend as much time as possible with his family. He deployed his customary tactic of using his specialized skills to lever himself into a new job whenever the current one became inconvenient. In September 1735, the month he became a father, he abandoned the Kingston and, armed with a recommendation from Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle, moved back as a ship’s carpenter on the Deal Castle. The latter was classed only as a sixth-rate warship, and therefore unlikely to be sent into the thick of battle in the event of war. Small vessels like this could still however be dispatched on missions in foreign waters; and when the Deal Castle was ordered to South Carolina in 1739, Milbourne jumped ship again. He took himself off to the Cambridge, an eighty-gun warship undergoing conveniently lengthy repairs in Portsmouth harbour.

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Partly as a result of her father’s ingenuity, these early years in Portsmouth were the most stable of Elizabeth Marsh’s life. Yet, for all that this was a far more secure and healthy environment, Portsmouth shared certain important characteristics with Jamaica. It was vitally involved in empire and organized violence; it was a place of pioneering industrialization; and it was markedly cosmopolitan, and caught up in intercontinental trade and migration. Not for nothing was Portsmouth sometimes described – and sometimes condemned – as England’s equivalent to Port Royal before the earthquake: ‘If that was Sodom, this is Gomorrah.’

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At first sight, the town appeared an ancient, walled place of some six hundred houses, occupying part of the island of Portsea, and linked to the mainland by a system of gates and bridges. But the gates and bridges were closely guarded, because Portsmouth was Britain’s premier military town, and the Royal Navy’s main operational base and dockyard. There were six naval dockyards in England at this time, all of them situated along its southern coast. On the Thames there were Deptford and Woolwich, both small dockyards. At the mouth of the Medway in Kent there was Sheerness, and twelve miles up the river the much bigger yard of Chatham. Then there were the so-called western dockyards, Plymouth and Portsmouth. By the 1730s, the latter had overtaken Chatham as the most important.

(#litres_trial_promo) Hidden behind high walls, inconspicuous to casual travellers arriving by road, Portsmouth looked utterly different when approached from the sea:

A spacious harbour, and the great ships lying at their moorings for three or four miles up, and the harbour for a mile at least on each side covered with buildings and thronged with people; the water covered with boats passing and repassing like as on the Thames … The prospect from the middle of the harbour gives you the idea of a great city.

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The dockyard’s specialized warehouses and rope-, mast- and rigging-houses were some of the biggest, most expensive constructions of the time dedicated to secular purposes. Almost 2200 skilled workmen were employed here in 1735, who were divided into twenty-three different categories, and tolled into work at morning and out at night by bells. A further 259 men were attached to the dockyard’s ropeyard. In what was still a primarily agricultural economy, this represented an extraordinary concentration of labour. Even a hundred years after this, it was still rare for industrial establishments anywhere in the world to employ more than five hundred men.

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Surrounded by sea, but always short of fresh water, wreathed in coal smoke from the dockyard’s many forges, and full of the noise of metal on wood, Portsmouth, then, was a prime site of state power and imperial projection. But, as indicated by the pair of seven-foot-high dragon-headed pagodas from China erected by its dockyard in the 1740s, and by the mixture of coins and languages in use in its streets, the town was also a magnet for outsiders and alien influences. Portsmouth was where most foreign diplomats made landfall in Britain before taking the London road to present their credentials at court. It was the main British depot outside of London of the East India Company. Ships from Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Canton unloaded textiles, spices and ceramics in Portsmouth, as well as passengers and occasional Asian seamen. This was also a garrison town, and companies of soldiers marched through it en route for, or returning from, overseas expeditions; and Portsmouth was a commercial port as well as a naval base. There were Arab traders arriving from the Levant, seamen and fish-dealers from Hudson’s Bay and New England, Baltic suppliers catering to the Royal Navy’s ceaseless appetite for timber, so-called ‘Port Jews’ eschewing the distinctive life of their people in order to trade and lend money, and smugglers from nowhere in particular.

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Elizabeth Marsh’s early exposure in Portsmouth to the sights and sounds of difference and diversity, and simultaneously to the Royal Navy and to the force of the British state, has to be factored in if we are to understand how she came to be the person she was, and to lead the life that she did. But she was also shaped of course by her family. ‘I was the daughter of a gentleman,’ she once wrote.

(#litres_trial_promo) The truth was more interesting.

While almost everything about her mother remains unclear, her father’s background is remarkably well documented. Milbourne Marsh had been christened in St Thomas church in Portsmouth in October 1709. His father, George Marsh (b.1683), was also a ship’s carpenter with the Royal Navy, which was typical enough, since shipbuilding was a closely guarded trade, customarily passed on through the males of a family over generations. Milbourne’s mother, who was born Elizabeth Milbourne in 1687, possessed her own link to the maritime, though a significantly different one. Her father, John Milbourne, ‘an excellent pen man’, was employed after 1713 as clerk to Sir Isaac Townsend, the Resident Commissioner at Portsmouth naval dockyard.

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This blood connection with someone who worked with pen and paper was important, and the careful perpetuation of his mother’s surname in Milbourne Marsh’s own first name shows that his family was well aware of this. Both of Milbourne’s parents were literate, and both took pleasure in using words. As would be true of Elizabeth Marsh, they were compulsive storytellers. From his father, George Marsh, Milbourne heard tales about his grandfather, yet another mariner, called Francis Marsh. On a voyage from Lisbon back to Southampton in the early 1690s, this particular Marsh was wrecked off the Isle of Wight. ‘The ship and everything in it but himself were lost,’ but Francis Marsh – or so Milbourne and his siblings were told – plunged into the sea with his banknotes and valuable papers wrapped up in an ‘oil skin bag’, together with ‘a small family bible, not above 7 inches long, 4 or 5 inches broad and about 1 inch and a half thick’, and was ‘miraculously saved on shore on the beach’. Milbourne’s mother’s favourite tales were of her grandfather, a Northumberland-based dealer in Scottish cattle called John Milbourne. In May 1650, she claimed, he had risked his life hiding the Scottish royalist hero James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, when he was on the run from the Scottish Covenanters who were allies of Parliament. Only when Montrose left this plain man’s sanctuary, and went seeking help from a nearby landowner, was he betrayed and handed over to his enemies and execution.

Tokens of these and other past family dramas were carefully preserved. George Marsh senior and his wife kept a print of the Marquess of Montrose on a wall in every lodging house they occupied. As for Francis Marsh’s providential Bible and prayer book, what passes for this volume still exists today, its battered pages bearing annotations by one of George Marsh senior’s sons. The content of these family legends, and the tenacity with which they were held, suggest the eagerness of Marsh family members to view themselves as something more than mere skilled artisans. Milbourne Marsh and his siblings were brought up on ‘a slender income by good management and prudence’, but the stories he and they listened to, and that he passed on in turn to his own daughter, Elizabeth Marsh, evoked a rather different status. God, these family romances proclaimed, had intervened to preserve one of their ancestors by a ‘wonderful deliverance’. Yet another ancestor had performed an act of signal service to the cause of Britain’s monarchy. Moreover, as Milbourne Marsh’s mother told her children by way of other stories, they should rightfully have been rich. Her father John Milbourne, she insisted, ‘a fine handsome person, a good scholar and of great abilities’, had once owned a colliery in Northumberland and was ‘highly esteemed by the nobility and gentry of the county’. But he lost some of his money to a nobleman (worthless aristocrats are a recurring motif in Marsh family sagas), and his housekeeper subsequently cheated her way into his bed, faked his will, and ‘got possession of the whole fortune’.

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The moral that family members were encouraged to draw from these stories – and Elizabeth Marsh certainly grew up believing this – was that they were marked out in some fashion, and deserving of more than their immediate, circumscribed surroundings and conditions of life. The stories also reveal something else about how she grew up. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, long-distance migration was not an aspect of the coming of modernity. Frequently, it was a practice that was learnt and adopted by a family’s members over successive generations, and that often increased in scale and duration in the process. Elizabeth Marsh’s restlessness, it is clear, was in part an inherited trait. Her father Milbourne Marsh took ship to the Caribbean, but his forebears were also sailors and migrants. His father and grandfather were mariners familiar with European waters. His mother’s family moved between northern England and Scotland, and then down to southern England. And whether Elizabeth’s own mother’s roots lay in West Africa or in England, she too must have been of voluntary or involuntary migrant stock, before sailing herself across the Atlantic to England in 1735.

From Milbourne Marsh’s family – and perhaps from her mother’s – Elizabeth Marsh also inherited good looks and physical toughness. Milbourne’s father, George Marsh senior, was described as a ‘remarkable fine person’, ‘upwards of six feet high … very upright and well proportioned, [and] amazingly strong and healthy’. Although the Navy Board awarded him a pension in the mid-1740s, he seems to have continued working part-time as a shipwright, and was seventy when he was killed in an industrial accident in 1753.

(#litres_trial_promo) Married in 1707, he and Elizabeth Milbourne produced nine children and, unusually for their time and social level, eight of them reached adulthood. What were then untreatable diseases, and maritime accidents, killed off five of these Marsh progeny before they reached the age of forty, but the life spans of the remaining three confirm a family tendency towards physical vigour and good health. Milbourne Marsh (b.1709) lived to be almost seventy; George Marsh the younger (b.1722) made seventy-eight; while their sister Mary Marsh (b.1712) reached her eighties. It is striking too how, in different ways, and in conformity with the family’s stock of stories, all three of these longer-lived Marsh siblings constructed for themselves richer, more varied existences than their parents. Even Mary Marsh’s life, hampered by her gender, illustrates this. Once in her teens, she went to London to find work, and married a French Huguenot, Jean Duval. He worked as a baker in Spitalfields, a once semi-rural suburb in the east of London that has always attracted a disproportionate number of refugees and immigrants. This alliance with a family of French origins, attached to another form of Protestantism, made more than Mary’s own life more diverse. Visits to aunt Mary and uncle Duval in London in the 1740s and early ’50s seem to have allowed Elizabeth Marsh to learn to speak and read French, one of the prime accomplishments that normally connoted gentility.

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The ‘industrious revolution’, as the marked changes in family aspirations at this time have been called, a rising level, throughout Europe and North America and possibly beyond, of individual and clan desire, expectations, and household expenditure, also affected Milbourne Marsh, and to a more spectacular degree his brother, George Marsh the younger.

(#litres_trial_promo) The temperaments and changing fortunes of these two men, Elizabeth Marsh’s father and her uncle, are important because both men played crucial roles in her development, influencing what she came to be, and what she came to do.

Like most mariners in the age of sail, Milbourne Marsh had gone to sea very early. He recalled in middle age how, when just eleven years old and already sailing the Mediterranean, he was regularly handling explosives. He would be sent on shore from whatever vessel he was on at the time, and ordered to blow up rocks into small stones so as to provide ballast for the ship’s hold.