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

For Consul, read commerce. Sidi Muhammad has perceived that, in order to consolidate his own authority and to restore Morocco’s viability as a stable and prosperous polity, any suspicion of the non-Muslim world must be balanced by more normalized relations and positive engagement based on trade. He may conceivably aspire to be Caliph of the West, and he certainly wants to forge closer alliances with fellow Muslim rulers. But he also wishes to foster connections with other parts of the world in order to develop his country’s commerce and thereby increase his own revenue. He has already, in 1753, negotiated three trade treaties with Denmark. Over the course of his reign, the Sultan will go on to sign some forty agreements with other major European states and entrepôts, with Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Prussia, Sweden, Venice, Hamburg, and with Dubrovnik, an important commercial player in the Adriatic.48 ‘The present Emperor is so very circumspect in all his affairs,’ Joseph Popham will write in 1764, by which time Elizabeth’s onetime fellow captive has been transmuted into British Consul to Morocco, ‘that he concerns himself in the most trifling transactions relative to European matters.’ And Sidi Muhammad looks to the west beyond Europe. He will become the first Muslim ruler in the world to acknowledge American independence. In 1784, he will also order his corsairs to capture a US merchant ship, the Betsey. Once they are taken hostage, the Sultan uses the members of the Betsey’s crew as bargaining tools, and in 1786 the US Congress agrees to a treaty establishing full diplomatic relations with Morocco.49

There are clear and significant parallels between what happens to the Betsey in the wake of the American Revolutionary War, and the fate of the Ann at the start of the Seven Years War. In both cases, Sidi Muhammad has resort to a traditional mode of maritime violence for novel and constructive purposes. He is not in the business of making holy war on Christian seafarers, nor is he straightforwardly in search of ransoms, though to his victims it can seem like that. This is not jihad, as it is conventionally and narrowly imagined in the West, but something very different. These particular acts of Moroccan corsairing are designed not to punish or distance non-Muslims, but to force Western powers into closer dialogue and into negotiation. Sidi Muhammad wants the West’s attention and respect. Most of all, he wants and needs increased access to and influence over Western commerce. The essential reason for this lies in that same semi-desert emptiness of much of Morocco that has perplexed and disoriented Elizabeth Marsh.

Like the rest of the Arab world, Morocco at this time was severely underpopulated. As late as 1800, there may have been only seventeen million people scattered throughout Arabia, North Africa, the Western Sahara, Sudan and Greater Syria. By contrast, the Indian subcontinent and China, both geographically smaller territories, contained respectively some two hundred and over three hundred million inhabitants at this time. In contrast too with India and China, the Arab world – with the exception of Egypt – was not populated overwhelmingly by productive peasant farmers, but substantially by semi-autonomous tribespeople. Outside its great cities, many of Morocco’s inhabitants were what Elizabeth Marsh chose to style as ‘wild Arabs’, peoples who were often nomadic and beyond the ruling Sultan’s easy control.50 All this influences Sidi Muhammad’s determination to build up Morocco’s overseas commercial connections, while at the same time exercising some authority over them. His country is too arid, and too sparsely cultivated, to provide for a highly productive agricultural economy, and there is consequently no large, docile peasantry that can easily be fleeced by way of royal taxation. His best hope of enhancing royal revenue and reach, therefore, is by expanding and supervising Morocco’s trade. To be sure, trans-Saharan trade still remains important; and, in addition, there are and there have long been plenty of European merchants active in Morocco’s ports and cities. In the three months she is a hostage here, Elizabeth Marsh will record meetings with traders from England, Ireland, Sweden, France, Spain, Denmark, Greece and the Dutch Republic. But in earlier reigns it has proved easy for such European intruders to get Morocco’s overseas trade substantially into their own hands, and cream off some of the profits. Sidi Muhammad’s aim is therefore both to make his country even more wide open than before to European commerce and commercial players, and to monitor such trade more closely and effectively so that he is able to tax it. This is why, as one French diplomat puts it, ‘the emperor … became a merchant himself’.51

In the process, Sidi Muhammad also became an actor in what in retrospect can be viewed as this period’s proto-globalization, a man preoccupied both with extending his influence in the Islamic world, of which he and Morocco were a part, and with developing and exploiting connections with widely different regions of the Christian West. Sidi Muhammad’s reign is a vivid reminder that, in the words of one historian: ‘proto-globalization was, in effect, a multi-centred phenomenon, strengthened by the active participation of Muslim elements’. As European and American diplomats will become increasingly aware, the Sultan is at one and the same time devoutly Muslim and interested in traditional scholarship, and in some respects a cosmopolitan, commercially driven and consciously innovative figure. ‘A man of great quickness of parts and discernment,’ the British Ambassador conceded in 1783, ‘… beloved much by his subjects.’ However, added this same writer, the Sultan possessed another marked characteristic: ‘his excess in women, in which he confines himself within no bounds’.52

And so Elizabeth Marsh re-enters the story. After hearing the interpreter translate Sidi Muhammad’s formal declaration, she and the other weary hostages are dismissed and taken to a house in the mellah, the Jewish quarter of Marrakech, just to the east of the royal palace. Normally this is walled in on all sides, a segregated place with a single gate guarded by the Sultan’s soldiers. But the Lisbon earthquake and its aftershocks, which recur throughout her time in Morocco, and remind her with their noise of ‘a carriage going speedily over a rough pavement’, have reduced sections of the mellah and its walls to rubble. Although Jews in Morocco are generally allowed freedom of worship, and some play important commercial roles, and act as intermediaries in diplomatic encounters with European Christians, they are still marginal people, subject to mistreatment and punitive taxation. The largest in Morocco, the Marrakech mellah is essentially a ghetto for the disadvantaged, the home not just of the city’s Jewish population, but also of many of its European slaves.53

Elizabeth takes in the dismal, half-ruined one-storey square building that is to be their prison, ‘its walls … covered with bugs, and as black as soot’, and chooses to have her tent pitched outside in its open courtyard. But there is no time to rest. Jaime Arvona, the acting Sultan’s high-level Menorcan slave and favourite, arrives with an order that she, but not the other hostages, is to be escorted to the palace. She goes with him through a succession of gates and gardens, and past a series of guards. As she draws nearer to the centre of the palace complex, she is instructed to take off her shoes because she is entering the domain of a prince of the blood, a descendant of the Prophet. Once inside, there are more rooms, and more guards, until finally there is ‘the apartment wherein His Imperial Highness was’.54

Until now, Elizabeth Marsh’s ordeal in Morocco has been shared with others. Progressively more isolated in her own mind, she has in fact hardly ever been alone. Accordingly, a number of different individuals have been able to observe and report on her. Some of the other captives and several European merchants and envoys have written about her time in Sla and the journey to Marrakech. She has featured in official and private correspondence between British sea officers, politicians, diplomats and colonial officials. And she and the others have been the subject of formal diplomatic missives and proclamations by Sidi Muhammad himself, as well as detailed accounts by slaves and interpreters attached to his court. Individuals of no political weight or wealth, Elizabeth and her companions nevertheless leave an extensive and unusually diverse imprint on the archives. But once she enters barefoot through the gates of Sidi Muhammad’s palace, she becomes the sole chronicler of what happens there, a solitary voice. And her story will only be written down much later, when she is in another country, and subject to different influences and new pressures.55

As she describes it, this first palace encounter is brief, an occasion at which she is carefully appraised perhaps, but unable to register much herself except the cool, richly clad individuals gazing curiously at her. Sidi Muhammad sits at his ease alongside four of his women, ‘who seemed as well pleased as he was himself at seeing me. Not that my appearance could prejudice them much in my favour.’ Elizabeth is self-conscious as well as frightened, aware of her sun-scorched face (or is this a deliberate assertion for her reading public that she is indeed pale-skinned?) and of her crumpled riding-dress, marked with sweat and sand from her journey. One of the women offers her, through an interpreter, some fresh Moroccan clothes. When Elizabeth declines, she takes ‘her bracelets off her arms; and put them on mine, declaring I would wear them for her sake’. Without much experience of jewellery, Elizabeth’s immediate, dazed reaction to these open-sided silver bangles is that they look like horseshoes. The rituals of hospitality over, she is dismissed:

But my conductor, instead of taking me to our lodgings, introduced me into another apartment, where I was soon followed by the Prince, who, having seated himself on a cushion, inquired concerning the reality of my marriage with my friend. This enquiry was entirely unexpected; but, though I positively affirmed, that I was really married, I could perceive he much doubted it … He likewise observed, that it was customary for the English wives to wear a wedding ring; which the slave [interpreter] informed me of, and I answered, that it was packed up, as I did not choose to travel with it.56

At last the acting Sultan allows her to leave, giving her ‘assurances of his esteem and protection’. She is escorted back to the dim, mosquito-infested house in the mellah, but over the next two days her situation changes. As at Sla, the hostages are visited by some members of the European merchant community, who come to offer assistance. There is John Court, an intelligent and cultivated London-born merchant based at Agadir, who has travelled widely in sub-Saharan Africa, and has been summoned to Marrakech by Sidi Muhammad to act as an intermediary. His companion is an Irish trader called Andrews, from Asfi on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Naïvely, Elizabeth Marsh confides to these two men both that her ‘marriage’ to James Crisp is only a pretence, and tells them something of her encounter in the palace.57

Naïvely, because she is now doubly at risk. As Andrews warns her, there is a danger that some of Sidi Muhammad’s spies and slaves will hear gossip, or find evidence in her papers, that she has lied and is not in fact a married woman. She is also increasingly at risk among her own people. It has been over a month since their capture, and by now the other passengers from the Ann, Joseph Popham and his son, are noticeably going their own way: ‘We seldom had the pleasure to see our fellow-captives, as they found much more amusement in the company of the ship’s crew, than with my friend and myself.’58 Even thirteen years after the event, when she wrote these words, Elizabeth Marsh was unwilling to admit that it might not have been a search for amusement that kept the Pophams away from her and James Crisp, but disapproval and/or embarrassment. At the time of her Moroccan ordeal – for all her recent gloss of ladylike accomplishments – she was still firmly artisan in background, and used to the compromises of shipboard life. She may thus not fully have appreciated that her conduct had gone well beyond what conventional middle-class males like the Pophams would have seen as acceptable in a young unmarried woman. She had chosen to travel without a female chaperone. She had been obliged to sleep (or not sleep) in rooms alongside three men to whom she was not related. She had pretended to be first the sister, and subsequently the wife, of James Crisp. And now she had been escorted, without the others, to the palace of a Muslim prince. Whatever happened in the future, and however involuntary some of these actions had been, her reputation was under pressure.

It becomes still more so when Jaime Arvona returns with ‘a basket of fruit … [and] a variety of flowers’, and an order that she accompany him once more to the palace. She dresses herself, she will write, ‘in a suit of clothes, and my hair was done up in the Spanish fashion’.59 True or no, this is a wholly exceptional detail. Nowhere else in any of her writings does Elizabeth Marsh comment on her appearance, except to note its deterioration. During the various journeys and emergencies that make up her life, she may record that her hair is becoming brittle, or that her complexion is burnt, or that she is eating too much, or that she is sick, but the only gesture of physical vanity she admits to is before this second meeting with Morocco’s thirty-five-year-old acting ruler. As before, her errand takes her through gardens and buildings that are aesthetically mixed. Now that Morocco and Denmark are in commercial alliance, the acting Sultan has secured a succession of royal Danish gardeners who are busy redesigning three of the gardens in his palace complex, creating walkways of trees, intricate mazes and flowerbeds. The interior of Sidi Muhammad’s stone and marble palace is also, seemingly, a study in hybridity. There is traditional mosaic work and glazed tiles in geometric designs, but there is also a smattering of Western consumer goods: ‘several fine European pier glasses with very handsome hangings’ in the royal apartments, for instance, and ‘in each room is a fine gilt branch for wax candles’.60 This is not a straightforward act of emulation of Western tastes, however. In Islamic tradition, light possesses a divine quality as the visible manifestation of God’s presence and reason. As he consistently tries to do, Sidi Muhammad has borrowed from the West with premeditation, for his own purposes and in his own way.

The man himself is

tall, finely shaped, of a good complexion … Dressed in a loose robe of fine muslin, with a train of at least two yards on the floor; and under that was a pink satin vest, buttoned with diamonds. He had a small cap of the same satin as his vest, with a diamond button. He wore bracelets on his legs, and slippers wrought with gold. His figure, altogether, was rather agreeable, and his address polite and easy.

As this suggests, it is primarily in terms of surfaces and commodities, and their seductive power, that Elizabeth Marsh describes this second palace encounter. She is offered not traditional coffee, but tea, a re-export from Asia. It arrives in ‘cups and saucers which were as light as tin, and curiously japanned with green and gold. These I was told were presents from the Dutch.’ This is one of the details that confirm that she did indeed witness the royal apartments of Sidi Muhammad’s palace. Earlier in 1756, the Dutch government and the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, had sent the acting Sultan a series of presents in the hope of securing a commercial treaty with Morocco: luxury textiles, a coach, ornamented pistols, and these cups and saucers that were probably, like the tea, imported from China and Batavia (today’s downtown Jakarta). It is with yet more international commodities that the acting Sultan makes his proposition:

A slave brought a great collection of rarities, which were the produce of different nations, and shewed them to me. I greatly admired everything I saw, which pleased the Prince exceedingly; and he told me, by means of the interpreter, that he did not doubt of my preferring, in time, the palace to the confined way of life I was then in; that I might always depend on his favour and protection; and that the curiosities I had seen should be my own property.

Elizabeth Marsh rejects his suggestion. She reiterates through the interpreter that she is married to James Crisp, and that she does not ‘wish to change my situation in that respect, and whenever it was agreeable to him, I would take my leave’.61

Instead, she is passed on to one of Sidi Muhammad’s women, seated at the opposite end of the room. Elizabeth Marsh describes her, too, in terms of surfaces and commodities. But while the acting Sultan, who aspires to be a merchant of sorts, is surrounded by the products of transoceanic trade, this lesser, female being is mainly, though almost certainly not entirely, Moroccan in ornament:

She had a large piece of muslin, edged with silver, round her head and raised high at the top; her ear-rings were extremely large, and the part which went through the ears was made hollow, for lightness. She wore a loose dress … of the finest muslin, her slippers were made of blue satin worked with silver.

Dressed in fine Indian textiles, which have perhaps also been presented by the Dutch, or which may have been shipped across the Indian Ocean by Arab or Asian traders, this woman converses with Elizabeth, using as her interpreter a French boy-slave who is young enough to be allowed in the company of the acting Sultan’s harem.62

It is at this point that the narrative changes in quality and tone.

Given the quantity and quality of detail she supplies, much of it unavailable in any other English-language source at this time, there can be no doubt that Elizabeth Marsh did have at least one close encounter with Morocco’s acting ruler in the inner rooms of his Marrakech palace. It is probable too that he sought to retain her there for sexual purposes. But what kernel of accuracy there is in Elizabeth’s scarcely believable account of what happens now, when she is in the company of the acting Sultan’s woman, is simply unknowable. As she tells it, the French boy assures her that the Moroccan woman alongside her is merely uttering routine pleasantries. Since the woman appears friendly and waves her hands as if making gestures of encouragement, Elizabeth risks repeating some of her words. What she inadvertently says, or attempts to say, is as follows: ‘La ilaha illa Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah’. This is of course the primal statement of Muslim commitment: the affirmation that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is God’s prophet.

Unsurprisingly, on her speaking these words, ‘the palace was immediately in the utmost confusion, and there was every sign of joy in all faces’. Sidi Muhammad orders silence, and Elizabeth Marsh is taken swiftly out of the public rooms into a large, secluded apartment ‘much longer than broad, and crowded with women, but mostly blacks’, that is part of the seraglio. (There may be a small ring of truth here. An English slave at Sidi Muhammad’s court reported in the 1750s that it was the acting Sultan’s custom to have a black, that is a sub-Saharan, female slave bring his chosen women to his bed.)63 Elizabeth waits there, both frightened and intensely curious, refusing offers of refreshments in case the food and drink are drugged. Then she is summoned to attend Sidi Muhammad once more, this time in a different, private apartment. He is

seated under a canopy of crimson velvet, richly embellished with gold. The room was large, finely decorated, and supported by pillars of mosaic work; and there was, at the other end, a range of cushions, with gold tassels, and a Persian carpet on the floor.

They converse again through an interpreter:

‘Will you become a Muslim? Will you properly consider the advantages resulting from doing as I desire?’

‘It is impossible for me to change my sentiments in religious matters, but I will ever retain the highest sense of the honour you have done me, and hope for the continuance of Your Highness’s protection.’

‘You have this morning renounced the Christian faith and turned Muslim. And a capital punishment, namely, burning, is by our laws inflicted on all who convert and then recant.’

‘If I am an apostate, it entirely proceeds from the fallacy of the French boy, and not from my own inclination. But if my death will give you any satisfaction, I no longer desire to avoid this last remedy to all my misfortunes. Living on the terms you propose would only add an accent to my misery.’

He seems perplexed, but continues to importune her. On her knees, she replies:

‘I implore your compassion, and – as a proof of the esteem you have given me reason to expect – I beseech you to permit me to leave you forever.’

He covers his face with his hands and waves her away. The slave interpreter grabs her by the hand, and:

Having hurried, as far as possible to the gates, found it no easy matter to pass a great crowd which had assembled there. My worthy friend [James Crisp] was on the other side, with his hair all loose, and a distracted countenance, demanding me as his wife; but the inhuman guards beat him down for striving to get in, and the black women, holding me and hallooing out – No Christian, but a Moor – tore all the plaits out of my clothes, and my hair hung down about my ears. After a number of arguments, my friend prevailed; and, having forced me from the women, took me in his arms, and, with all possible expedition, got out of their sight.64

Rewritten and converted into dialogue, Elizabeth Marsh’s retrospective published account of the climax of this, her last interview with Sidi Muhammad, reads like an extract from a contemporary play or novel. This is scarcely surprising since she certainly drew some inspiration from the latter form of literature, and possibly also from the former. Nor is the drama, even melodrama, of this part of her story at all surprising. She wrote it in 1769, in the midst of another and different phase of her ordeal, when she was under acute pressure. Yet for all the naïve literary artifice, and a clear element of invention (it was Western European states, for instance, not Maghrebi societies, that traditionally burnt religious apostates), authentic bewilderment and terror still seep through her words. This was not surprising either. Her danger in Morocco had been real, and her temptations had been real.

Because women rarely worked as sailors or traders, and travelled far less frequently than men, they formed over the centuries only a minority of the Europeans who were captured at sea by Muslim corsairs. But European women who were captured in this fashion were far more likely than their male counterparts to be retained for life for sexual or other services in Maghrebi and Ottoman households. This was particularly the case if they were young, single, poor, or in some other way unprotected. In the 1720s, Moroccan corsairs are known to have taken at least three British women at sea. Two of these were the wives of prosperous Jewish merchants who were captured alongside them, and in due course all of these individuals were ransomed and handed over to the Royal Navy. The remaining woman, Margaret Shea, was young and single when she was captured travelling on her own from Ireland in 1720, and she was treated very differently. Impregnated after being brought to Morocco, passed between several owners, and converting or forced to convert to Islam, she seems never to have got home.65 Such incidents also occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. After his formal accession to the Sultanate in November 1757, Sidi Muhammad committed himself to reducing corsairing and slave-taking as part of his wider policy of improving commercial relations with the West. Nonetheless, he is known to have retained attractive and vulnerable Christian female captives. In about 1764, a very young Genoese woman was shipwrecked on Morocco’s Mediterranean coastline. Like Elizabeth Marsh, she was brought to Sidi Muhammad’s palace at Marrakech, but unlike Marsh she converted to Islam, submitted to entering the harem first as a concubine, then as one of his wives, learnt to read and write Arabic, and was renamed Lalla Dawia.66