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

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.23 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.24

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.

Whatever her own ancestry, Elizabeth Marsh will later stress for her readers this Moroccan woman’s ‘very dark’ skin. More significantly, she will parade her own Christian, Anglican faith by evoking a vicar’s surplice in her description of the Moroccan’s djellaba.25 Yet, at the time, it is the possible resemblances between her plight and the situation of the other woman – not what divides them – that nag at her most. Both of them are confined in different ways; but what if, in the future, she herself comes to be immured in Morocco in a similar fashion to that of the other woman? It is someone who has access to both local Muslim and Christian societies, a slave called Pedro Umbert, who first puts this possibility into words. A Menorcan by birth, captured by corsairs and now the property of Morocco’s acting Sultan, Sidi Muhammad, Umbert has been ordered to Sla to negotiate with members of its European merchant community.26 He is drawn to the captives because both Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp can speak some Catalan, his cradle tongue, and having established their story, he urges them to replace one deception with another.

Since their capture, Crisp has been posing as Elizabeth’s brother ‘in order to be some little protection to me’. Now, Umbert warns them:

I should be in less danger of an injury, at Morocco, by his [Crisp] passing for my husband than my brother. My friend replied, he imagined I should be entirely safe, by his appearing in the character he then did; and, as he had been examined by the principal people of [Sla] concerning the truth of it, it was then too late to alter that scheme. The conversation then dropped, and he left us; but his advice, and the manner in which he had given it, greatly alarmed me.27

Her unease at masquerading as James Crisp’s wife, which she finally agrees to do, sets her even more apart from her male companions. With the terrors and discomfort of their capture at sea receding, and epistolary contacts with home restored, they are feeling moderately complacent. Even when the order arrives for them to be escorted to Marrakech, where Sidi Muhammad has his court, Joseph Popham for instance remains phlegmatic. He feels sorry for ‘poor Miss Marsh’, he writes in one of a series of smuggled-out letters, faced with the prospect of a three-hundred-mile ride across mountains and desert, but ‘not under the least apprehension … nor was not from the beginning’. Perhaps, he adds, Milbourne Marsh might be contacted in Gibraltar and encouraged to ship over some practical comforts for his daughter: ‘a small firkin of good butter, some cheese, tea and sugar … a little mace, cinnamon and nutmegs, two bottles of Turlington drops for fear of illness, [and] half a pound of best sealing wax’.28 Basic groceries, herbs and condiments to offset the unfamiliar, almond sweetness of Moroccan food, a laudanum-based medicine that is widely used on both sides of the Atlantic for everything from bruises and coughs to headaches, and wax to seal up their incessant correspondence: these are the only precautions and palliatives that occur to Popham at this stage. Nor does he worry that sealing their letters with wax may prove an insufficient safeguard. Like Elizabeth Marsh, he does not yet fully understand.

In part, Joseph Popham’s confidence reflected the transformations that had occurred in Britain’s relations with Morocco and other Maghrebi powers since the seventeenth century. At that time, corsairs operating out of Morocco, and from Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers and other Ottoman ports, had posed a major threat to Christian shipping in the western Mediterranean and parts of the Atlantic, and also and intermittently to some western European coastlines.29 Before 1660 – though not after – there may have been as many European sailors, fishermen, traders, male and female passengers, and coastal villagers seized and enslaved in this manner in Morocco and throughout the Ottoman Empire as there were West Africans traded into Atlantic slavery by Europeans. Perhaps 1.25 million Europeans were captured and initially enslaved in this fashion between the late 1500s and the end of the eighteenth century; and many more were taken overland by Ottoman armies, in eastern Europe and Russia, and in occasional forays into western Europe. The Ottoman assault on Vienna in 1683 alone is said to have resulted in over eighty thousand men, women and children being carried into slavery.30

As far as the Mediterranean was concerned, these modes of violence and enslavement were never one-sided. There were abundant, nominally Christian, corsairs and pirates also active in the eastern and western portions of the sea in the late medieval and early modern eras. Many were sponsored by France, or Spain, or various Italian states, or by the Knights of St John on Malta; and – as was true of their Islamic counterparts – many of these Christian sea-raiders were motivated more by greed for potential ransoms than by religious zeal or antipathy. But so long as Ottoman and Maghrebi corsairing and slave-taking persisted, they could pose considerable dangers to vulnerable individuals and regions, and the fears they aroused were far more widespread. Even in the 1750s, ships belonging to some of the weaker European states, such as Genoa, and small villages situated around the rim of the Mediterranean, remained exposed to Maghrebi sea-raiders. Sailing past coastal Spain in transit to Menorca and Gibraltar, the members of the Marsh family would have noticed how rare it was to see inhabited villages close to the shorelines, and how small fishing and trading communities tended to cluster instead on hillsides at a prudent distance from any beach. As a Royal Navy officer remarked in 1756:

The reason of their houses being thus situated is the fear of the Moors, who would, if their houses were accessible, land and carry whole villages into slavery, which is frequently done notwithstanding all their caution, much more so in that part of Spain that lies on the coast of the Mediterranean.31

For the British, the threat from Maghrebi corsairs was normally minimal by this time. The Royal Navy’s power and Mediterranean bases deterred most corsairs from attacking British merchant shipping. So too did a certain community of interests. Since the early 1700s the British had come to rely on Morocco, and to a lesser degree on Algiers and Tunis, for supplies of provisions, horses and mules for their garrisons in Menorca and Gibraltar; and they paid for these not only with cash and luxury re-exports like tea and fine textiles, but also with guns, cannon and ammunition. Set apart by religion, culture, mutual prejudice and different levels of power and wealth, imperial Britain and imperial Morocco were to this extent interdependent and usually tolerant of each other in practice.32 This was why Joseph Popham and the other male captives from the Ann initially allowed themselves to feel relaxed about their predicament in 1756. They assumed that once the British authorities learned of it, an appropriate ransom would be paid, a warship would be dispatched to rescue them, and that would be the end of it. The politicians and navy officials in London, Dublin and Gibraltar who received their written requests for assistance took a more serious and more accurate view of the Ann’s capture, though they too failed to appreciate all the forces that were involved.

Since the death of the ’Alawi dynasty’s most famous Sultan, Moulay Ismail, in 1727, Morocco’s wealth and importance had been undermined by epidemics, earthquakes, recurrent periods of drought and repeated civil wars. The right to the throne of Moulay Abdallah, the nominal Sultan in 1756, had been violently contested on five different occasions. By this stage, real authority had definitively and by his own wish slipped away from him to his son, Sidi Muhammad, who was a very different ruler in both calibre and ideas. Sidi Muhammad was ‘too fierce to be tamed without some chastisement’, the British Governor of Gibraltar had predicted some months before the Ann’s capture, though this was neither true nor to the point.33 But the new acting Sultan was ruthless and adroit enough to play on Christian preconceptions about arbitrary and barbaric Muslim rulers. In 1755, the captains of some Royal Navy vessels had cut deals with some independent warlords on Morocco’s northern coast, supplying them with armaments in exchange for fresh provisions for their crews. Sidi Muhammad’s response was swift. He launched a punitive strike against the European merchant communities in Sla:

His Highness made prisoners of all the Christian merchants and friars; but Mr. Mounteney being English, he put a large chain on his neck, and bolts upon his legs, and gave him so many bastinados that he was left for dead, although he afterwards died in his own house, for understanding that the Prince intended him a lingering death because he was an Englishman, and having lost his senses, he hanged himself.

This was not merely one more stock European horror story of Barbary cruelties. Jaime Arvona, yet another Menorcan-born slave who was fluent in French, Spanish and Arabic, and who acted as treasurer, secretary and royal confidant in the acting Sultan’s court in Marrakech, sent this account of Mounteney’s miserable fate to a British diplomat in September 1755 on Sidi Muhammad’s explicit instructions.34 The British might have recognized in this communication a violent opening bid. They might have remembered that European traders and Christian clerics were normally free to operate in Moroccan cities, just as low-grade Christian slaves, as well as privileged individuals like Arvona, were routinely given days off to celebrate the main Christian holidays and freedom of worship every Sunday. But they focused more on Sidi Muhammad’s threat as transmitted by Arvona:

I dispatch this express to give you advice that His Highness intends to place his Governors all along the coast as far as Tangier and Tetuan … the first Englishman that puts foot in his country he will make him a slave.35

‘My ships and galliots at sea shall look out for you,’ Sidi Muhammad himself had warned a British sea officer in the summer of 1756, ‘and take you wherever they meet you.’ This deterioration in Anglo – Moroccan relations in late 1755 and early 1756 formed part of the background to the corsair attack on the Ann. When the Danish Consul in Morocco, Georg Höst, learnt of the incident, his sense of the captives’ plight was therefore initially unambiguous. ‘The passengers (some merchants and a woman)’, he noted in his diary, had been ‘detained as slaves’.36

Riding out of Sla under guard with the rest of the captives on 30 August, Elizabeth Marsh knows little of this. She is both caught up in violent public events that she is in no position fully to understand, and preoccupied with the personal. She is intent, to begin with, on her physical comforts, on the fact that a Spanish merchant from Rabat has lent her a tent for the journey and improvised a sidesaddle for her mule that soon proves both painful and insecure. As the caravan moves southwards through plains and deserts towards Marrakech, she struggles more seriously with agoraphobia. For the first time in her life, she has moved out of sight of the sea, and she can no longer make out either any signs of permanent human settlement: ‘there was no appearance of a house or a tree but a large tract of country, abounding with high mountains, affording little worthy of notice, though I made as many observations as I could in my confined situation, without any books’.37 Without books or maps, or personal access to Arabic, or Spanish, or any Berber language, and with no sequence of built towns by which to measure distance and progress, only a succession of douars or encampments, she is robbed of formal geography. She cannot give names to the stages of her journey. Since the caravan travels in the cool of the nights, and stops for short intervals of sleep during the hottest parts of the day, she is also deprived of a confident sense of clock and calendar time. She is dehydrated and malnourished, surviving for the most part on eggs and milk, and is now persistently reminded of her exposed female status. The makeshift sidesaddle has had to be abandoned for ‘such a machine as the Moorish women make use of’. This is placed across her mule ‘over a pack, and held a small mattress; the Moorish women lie on it, as it may be covered close; but I sat with my feet on one side [of] the mule’s neck, and found it very proper to screen me from the Arabs’. The device also increases her isolation, while further advertising that she is the lone female member of the caravan. When some passing Bedouin tribesmen are ‘inclined to be rude’, her guard shouts out – or so she is told – that ‘I was going as a present to Sidi Muhammad’.38

The Moroccan admiral in charge of the caravan, Rais al-Hadj al-Arbi Mistari, seems to have taken it along a customary route for slaves and captives disembarked at Sla. Over the course of six or seven days (there is no sure way of telling, for the captives lose track of dates), they move south from Rabat, skirt the Middle Atlas mountains, cross the Oum er Rbia river, where she almost drowns, and finally the Tensift river just north of Marrakech. Elizabeth Marsh is not the first woman claiming Britain as her home to be forced to make this journey, nor will she be the last. She is, however, the first to record her experiences; indeed she is the first woman in history to write at length about Morocco in the English language. But the mental notes she stores up at the time are only occasionally those of a conventional travel-writer. Unlike many other eighteenth-century female travellers, she does not for example commit to memory anecdotes illustrative of her unusual pluckiness (though her physical hardiness in making this journey on mule-back and at a rapid pace is clear). Nor, with some exceptions – like her first sight of mountains ‘which reached above the clouds’ – is she much concerned with a landscape that for the most part she can see only as empty.39 She travels under coercion, and under growing mental as well as physical stress, and as a result the journey she comes to describe is partly internal, an exploration of her own mind and fears.

Elizabeth Marsh’s Morocco

Eight miles outside Marrakech, the caravan halts, her tent is pitched and her sea-chest is opened, and through an interpreter Mistari orders her to change her dress ‘in order to make some figure at going into Morocco’. For the first time since leaving Sla, she puts on fresh clothes, wrapping a nightcap around her head for protection from the sun, ‘as I was told they did not intend to let me wear my hat’. Once ‘ornamented, as they imagined’, she is placed, not on her own mule, but in front of James Crisp on his:

At the same time, one of the guards pulled off his hat, and carried it away with him; which treatment amazed us extremely: But our astonishment increased, when our fellow-sufferers were made to dismount, and walk, two and two, bare-headed, the sun being much hotter than I had ever felt it, and the road so heavy, that the mules were knee-deep in the same.40

So, as Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp finally ride into Sidi Muhammad’s city and power base, they are cut off from the thousands crowding to see them, not just by fear and fatigue, but also by different systems of signs. The watching Moroccans may have interpreted their comparatively affluent Western clothes as a welcome demonstration that higher-grade captives than usual had been won, and could be ransomed accordingly. They would undoubtedly have noticed that all of the prisoners had been deprived of their hats, and therefore stripped after a fashion of their identity. Hats at this time were the most obvious sartorial markers of people who were European. But for Crisp – and even more for Elizabeth Marsh – being made to ride together on a broken-down mount amidst noisy and abusive crowds is likely to have had a different set of connotations. Apart from the obvious humiliation and discomfort, the ordeal would have been reminiscent to them of the crude charivari or rough music processions still sometimes inflicted by vengeful villagers and townsfolk in Britain, and in other Western European societies, on conspicuously adulterous or disorderly couples. Placing victims on a donkey, parading them through the streets ‘amidst raucous, ear-shattering noise, unpitying laughter, and the mimicry of obscenities’: this is what is customarily involved in rough music rituals. And this is what the ‘shouts and hallooings’ of the Marrakech crowd, the cuts inflicted on Crisp’s legs by the horsemen who hurtle past them, and the crude gestures made at Elizabeth herself would have reminded them of now.41 Already deeply conscious of masquerading as husband and wife, they enter Marrakech the red, with its landscape of scattered, quadrangular minarets, in a manner reminiscent (to them) of shame and sexual misbehaviour.

Their self-consciousness increases when they are made to dismount, separated from the other captives, and confined for most of the afternoon alone in the upstairs room of an ancient castle three miles’ distance from Sidi Muhammad’s palace. Unconcerned by now with polite Western conventions, Crisp and Elizabeth Marsh allow themselves to sit on the floor, ‘lamenting our miserable fate’. As a result, when they are finally let out, brought outside the palace gates and, after more hours of standing, at last see the acting Sultan, it is through a haze not simply of exhaustion and European preconceptions, but also of more personal preoccupations. Elizabeth does register some things with conspicuous accuracy. She takes note of the acting Sultan’s concern with dignity and ritual: ‘He was mounted on a beautiful horse with slaves on each side fanning off the flies, and guarded by a party of the black regiment,’ that is by members of the ‘Abid al-Bukhari, forcibly recruited dark-skinned Haratin and black slave soldiers. She reports, correctly, that this encounter occurs in the open air. Unlike their fellow Sunni Muslims, the Ottoman Sultans, Moroccan rulers do not traditionally receive envoys, petitioners and supplicants in rich interiors. Nor do Moroccan Sultans customarily issue their pronouncements at audiences in writing by way of scribes, but – as on this occasion – personally and through the spoken word. She notes too how the ‘Moorish admiral and his crew’ fall on their knees before their ruler, kiss the ground ‘and, as they arose, did the same to his feet’. As a Moroccan envoy later records, it is a ‘custom with our Sultan, when we are close to him, we kiss the soil, which is considered as a prostration of gratitude [to God]’.42 All these things Elizabeth Marsh sees and later writes down. But what does Sidi Muhammad see in this meeting?

In 1756 he is in his mid-thirties, very tall by contemporary standards at five foot ten, and in the words of one of his British slaves at this time, ‘well made, of a majestic deportment, of a dark chestnut colour, squints with his right eye, but still an agreeable aspect’.43 Indeed, Elizabeth Marsh judges him, wrongly, to be about twenty-five. Sidi Muhammad is determined to restore and expand the Sultan’s authority over his divided, partly tribal society, and he can be ruthless in response to foreign and domestic enemies. As more percipient European envoys are increasingly willing to acknowledge, however, the new acting Sultan is also conspicuously charitable, highly organized and hard-working, sharply intelligent, and possessed of wide interests. Robbed in his youth of a conventional, princely education by Morocco’s civil wars and the need to fight, he now operates according to a fixed and demanding schedule. His custom is to get up very early every morning, ride out to inspect his city and the work of his outdoor slaves, breakfast alone sitting in his gardens, and then combine governance with intellectual and religious study. He has set up a small council with which he can discuss works of Islamic literature and history, and he meets daily with the scholars who are attached to his court.44 As this suggests, Sidi Muhammad is devout, and deeply attached to a kind of pan-Islamic world-view. All too aware of the growing wealth and aggression of the major European powers, he is eager to consolidate defensive alliances with other Muslim rulers, especially with the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, the world capital of Islam. During his formal reign as Sultan of Morocco (1757–90), Sidi Muhammad will dispatch three embassies to Istanbul, in each case to advance pacts of mutual support against the ‘infidels’.45 His desire for a close rapport with the Ottoman Sultan, and his concern to support his fellow Maghrebi rulers in Tunis and Algiers against European predators, also rest on deep religious conviction.

Like Christianity, Islam is a monotheistic religion with universalistic aspirations. Wherever in the world they live, Muslims are linked by Arabic, Islam’s sacred language, by the injunction to carry out the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and by the concept of the dar-al-islam, the land of Islam, which allows them to ‘imagine and experience the local as part of a larger Islamic universal whole’. These tenets of belief inform Sidi Muhammad’s own brand of internationalism, though they do not account for all of it. Unlike his father and predecessor as Sultan, Moulay Abdallah, he has gone on the hajj, and is an attentive visitor to other pilgrimage sites.46 The evidence suggests that he may even have aspired to be recognized as Caliph of the Muslim west: that is, as a politico-religious sovereign acting as a twin pole, along with the Ottoman Sultan in the east, in upholding the entire Islamic world. In other words, the ruler whom Elizabeth Marsh and her fellow bedraggled captives confront this early September 1756, outside the gates of his Marrakech palace, is a clever, determined and reflective individual who possesses horizons that are far wider than Morocco itself. Sidi Muhammad makes this clear even in what he announces to them, through his interpreters, although the captives are scarcely in a position to appreciate the full significance of his words. They are not after all to be enslaved, he tells Elizabeth, James Crisp and the others. Instead, they will be detained as hostages until Britain agrees to establish a proper Consul in Morocco.47