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

2 Taken to Africa, Encountering Islam

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.1 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.2

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.3 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.4

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’.5

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.6

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.7

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.8

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.9

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.10 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.11

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.12 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.’13

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’.14 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.15 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.’16 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.17

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.18 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.19 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’.20

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.’21

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.’22 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.