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

Attempting this is essential because, although she undoubtedly viewed certain phases of her life as an ordeal, Marsh rarely presented herself straightforwardly as a victim. It was her own actions and plans, and not just the vulnerabilities attaching to her marginal status, the occupations and mishaps of her male relations, the chronology of her life, and the country and empire to which she was formally attached, that rendered her at intervals so mobile, and exposed her so ruthlessly to events. In particular, without attending closely to these private and family writings, it would be hard to make sense of five occasions – in 1756, in 1769, in 1770–71, in 1774–76, and again after 1777 – on which, to differing degrees, Elizabeth Marsh broke away from conventional ties of family and female duty, only to become still more vividly entangled in processes and politics spanning continents and oceans.

History and Her Story

So this is a book that ranges between biography, family history, British and imperial history, and global histories in the plural. Because of the tendencies of our own times, historians have become increasingly concerned to attempt seeing the world as a whole. This has encouraged an understandable curiosity about very large-scale phenomena: the influence of shifting weather systems on world history, ecological change over time, patterns of forced and voluntary migration, the movement of capital, or commodities, or disease over continents, the transmission of ideas and print, the workings of vast overland and oceanic networks of trade, the impact of conflicting imperial systems, and so on.10 These, and other such grand transcontinental forces, were and are massively important. Yet they have never just been simply and inhumanly there. They have impacted on people, who have understood them (or not), and adapted to them (or not), but who have invariably interpreted them in very many different ways. Writings on world and global history (to which I stand enormously indebted) sometimes seem as aggressively impersonal as globalization can itself.

In this book, by contrast, I am concerned to explore how the lives of a group of individuals, and especially the existence of one particular unsophisticated but not unperceptive woman, were informed and tormented by changes that were viewed at the time as transnational, and transcontinental, and even as pan-global, to an unprecedented degree. I seek to tack between the individual and world histories ‘in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view’.11 Writing some fifty years ago, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills suggested that at no other era had ‘so many men been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change’. The ‘earthquakes’ happening in the 1950s were due, he thought, to the collapse of old colonial empires and to the emergence of new, less blatant forms of imperialism, to the horrific implications of atomic warfare, to politicians’ surging capacity to deploy power over individual lives, to runaway modernization, and to inordinate pressure on marriage and the family. It was vital, Mills suggested, to try to understand the relationship between these ‘most impersonal and remote transformations’ and ‘the most intimate features of the human self’. Not least because those living through such earthquakes were often unable themselves to see this relationship clearly and make sense of it:

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men [sic] do not usually know what the connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world.

Instead, he suggested, men and women whose fate it was to ‘cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted’ often simply felt ‘possessed by a sense of trap’.12

As far as Elizabeth Marsh is concerned, Mills’ characterization of the responses of those who live through ‘earthquakes’ of global change is both right and wrong. As will become clear, at times, and for good reason, she was indeed ‘possessed by a sense of trap’. But, like other members of her family, she tried to make sense of the changes transcending seas and continents that she and they were so markedly living through and acting out. The extent and quality of Elizabeth Marsh’s global earthquake in the mid-eighteenth century was substantially different from that perceived by Mills in the 1950s, though the flux of empire, enhanced state power, runaway military violence, modernization, and strains on the family and marriage were part of her experience too. Elizabeth Marsh’s earthquake was also very different from our own at the start of the twenty-first century. But the nature of her ordeal, her precocious and concentrated exposure to so many forces of transcontinental change, and her sense in the face of these ‘impersonal and remote transformations’ both of shock and wonder, entrapment and new opportunities, remain eloquent and recognizable. This is her story.

1 Out of the Caribbean

THE BEGINNING prefigured much of the rest. She came to life against the odds, in a place of rampant death, and in the midst of forces that were already transforming large stretches of the globe.

The man who became her father, Milbourne Marsh, first set foot on Jamaica on 20 July 1732, which was when his ship, the Kingston, anchored off Port Royal.1 The Kingston was one of a squadron of Royal Navy vessels ordered to the Caribbean that spring with instructions to deter smuggling in the region and attacks on British merchant shipping by Spanish armed coast-guards, and to suppress any slave rebellions within Jamaica itself. Since wresting it from the Spanish in 1655, retaining this island had become increasingly important to the English, and subsequently to the British state, initially because of its location and size. Ninety miles south of Cuba, Jamaica was ideally situated for legal and illicit trade with Spain’s settlements in the Americas, and for staging attacks on them and on Spanish treasure ships, bearing gold and silver from New World mines back to Seville. At some 140 miles from east to west, Jamaica was also ten times larger than the rest of Britain’s Caribbean islands combined. Tropical, fertile and well-watered, it offered – for all its steep, mountainous interior and steamy forests – sufficient arable land, or so at first it seemed, to accommodate large numbers of incoming white smallholders. When Milbourne Marsh arrived, individuals of very modest means, indentured servants, shopkeepers, skilled labourers, cooks, peddlers, retired or runaway sailors, itinerants, pen-keepers (cow-farmers), garrison troops and the like still made up between a half and a third of Jamaica’s white population. But the island’s smallholders were in retreat before the rise of much larger landed estates and a single crop. Jamaica’s sugar industry did not reach the height of its profitability until the last third of the eighteenth century. Even so, by the 1730s, with over four hundred sugar mills, the island had comfortably overtaken Barbados as the biggest sugar-producer in Britain’s Empire.2

The Caribbean

Although much of the technology employed on sugar plantations remained unchanged for centuries, these were still brutally innovative places. The unending work of planting, harvesting and cutting the sugar cane, milling it, boiling and striking the sugar syrup, transporting the finished products, rum, molasses, and the various sugars to the dockside, and loading them aboard ship, fostered task specialization, the synchronization of very large quantities of labour, and the imposition of shift systems and a ruthless time discipline.3 Establishing the necessary mills, boiling houses and other fixed plant required large-scale capital investment; and plantation owners were acutely dependent on long-distance oceanic trade and communications to sell their products – and to recruit and import their workforces. As the historian David Eltis writes:

The slave trade was possibly the most international activity of the pre-industrial era. It required the assembling of goods from at least two continents [Asia and Europe] … the transporting of those goods to a third [Africa], and their exchange for forced labour that would be carried to yet another continent [the Americas].

Between a third and a half of the more than 1.2 million men, women and children purchased by British traders and carried in British ships from West Africa between 1700 and 1760 were probably landed in Jamaica. When Milbourne Marsh arrived here, the island contained almost eighty thousand black slaves, most of them recent arrivals from the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin.4

There were other ways, too, in which Jamaica functioned as a laboratory for new ways of living and new types of people. Port Royal, Milbourne Marsh’s landfall on the island’s south-eastern coast, was an extreme case in point. The English had found its deep offshore waters, and its position at the end of a nine-mile spit separating Kingston harbour from the Caribbean, ideally suited for the loading and unloading of merchantmen from Europe and North America. Port Royal was also useful, they soon discovered, for piracy and for conducting contraband trade with, and raids against, Cuba, Hispaniola and mainland Spanish America. In 1688, 213 ships are known to have docked at Port Royal, almost as many as the total number calling that year at all of New England’s ports. With its almost seven thousand slaves, shopkeepers, merchants, sailors, book-keepers, lawyers, sea captains, craftsmen, wives, children, smugglers and ‘crue of vile strumpets and common prostratures’, the town was also more populous at this stage than its main competitor in British America, Boston, Massachusetts. And since its two thousand houses, many of them brick and some of them four prosperous storeys high, clustered together on barely fifty acres of gravel and sand, Port Royal was probably the most crowded and expensive English-speaking urban settlement outside London.5

Then came the earthquake. It happened at 11.43 a.m. on 7 June 1692. In ten minutes, two-thirds of Port Royal and two thousand of its citizens disappeared beneath the sea. A further three thousand died of injuries and disease in the days after:

The sky, which was clear and serene, grew obscured and red throughout the whole extent of Jamaica. A rumbling noise was heard under ground, spreading from the mountains to the plain; the rocks were split; hills came close together; infectious lakes appeared on the spots where whole mountains had been swallowed up; immense forests were removed several miles from the place where they stood; the edifices disappeared … This terrible phenomenon should have taught the Europeans not to trust to the possessions of a world that trembles under their feet, and seems to slip out of their rapacious hands.

In so describing its destruction, Abbé Raynal and his collaborators were adding an anti-colonialist twist to a tradition of moralizing disapproval of Port Royal that was in existence well before the earthquake.6 Yet this lost town, a kind of maritime Pompeii, had been a dynamic and creative as well as a corrupt, exploitative place, and after the earthquake there were repeated attempts to rebuild it. They were aborted by a major fire in 1704 and a succession of hurricanes; and when Milbourne Marsh arrived, little remained of Port Royal except ‘three handsome streets, several cross lanes, and a fine church’, the nearby garrison, Fort Charles, and a small naval dockyard where ships from Britain’s Jamaica fleet were repaired and victualled. The town’s main commercial and slaving businesses had moved to nearby Kingston, which was more sheltered from the elements, and there were barely five hundred white inhabitants remaining in Port Royal, most of the men amongst them employed by the Royal Navy or as soldiers in Fort Charles.7

Port Royal’s most material legacy was arguably Jamaica’s developing sugar monoculture, since both the town’s gentile merchants and their Jewish counterparts had been important sources of credit for planters wanting to purchase land and slaves.8 As this suggests, Jamaica was at once brutally divided by racial difference and violence, and in some respects also a cosmopolitan, even tolerant environment. The cosmopolitanism expressed itself in flamboyant consumerism. A taste for imported Chinese ceramics, for instance, seems to have been more prevalent in households in Port Royal before 1692, and in other Jamaican settlements, than in either British or mainland colonial American homes. At another level, British Jamaica resembled ‘a curious terrestrial space-station’ full of ‘fragments of various races, torn from the worlds of their ancestors’.9 Most white incomers, like Milbourne Marsh himself, were young, single, male Protestants from southern England; but there were also Scots, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Portuguese-speaking Sephardic Jews from Brazil and Surinam, Huguenots, Dutchmen, occasional French and Spanish spies, smugglers and traders from nearby St Domingue and Cuba, and mainland American colonists, principally from Boston, New York and Philadelphia. There were about 8300 of these miscellaneous whites by the early 1730s, and the island’s ethnically and culturally diverse black population outnumbered them by more than ten to one.10

Many Africans caught up in the slave trade perished long before they arrived at Jamaica. They were killed resisting capture, or they died of shipborne diseases, or they committed suicide in order to escape the pain and humiliation of servitude, or out of a belief that death would restore their spirits to their homelands. Of those who reached the island and stayed there, as distinct from being re-exported to Spanish America or the Dutch West Indies, perhaps half died in the first two or three years, that apprentice phase of slavery which local whites termed ‘the seasoning’. And few Jamaicans, black or white, slave or free, survived on the island for longer than fifteen years.11

Milbourne Marsh and the other men on the Kingston saw their first ‘guineaman come in with slaves’ to Port Royal harbour shortly after their own arrival. Captain Thomas Trevor was so struck by the sight, and by the sounds coming from those on board the slave-ship, that he made a special note of the event in his logbook.12 It was an act that marked him out as a newcomer to the Caribbean; and neither he nor most of his fellow seamen on the Kingston were in a position to understand that slave ships might be lethal even to those who were not imprisoned on board. Jamaica’s heavy rains and malarial swamps killed easily enough, and new arrivals were particularly vulnerable. They were still more so if they made landfall – as the crew of the Kingston did – during the rainy summer months:

New-come buckra,

He get sick,

He tak fever,

He be die

He be die.13

Slave ships transported in still further risks. They often carried smallpox, and in their water casks and cisterns they also brought in the West African mosquitoes that spread yellow fever. Once in port, the insects would seek out fresh human hosts, and places in which to breed. New immigrants with no immunity were easy targets, and so were men crowded together in damp wooden ships equipped with their own water barrels.

The 327 seamen aboard the Kingston had remained healthy on the three-month voyage out from Portsmouth, but this changed once they were exposed to Jamaica’s infection, climate, and the appalling sanitation of Port Royal and Kingston. Two weeks after its arrival, the ship was already ‘growing bad’ and losing men. The mortality rate lessened once it started patrolling the Caribbean, only to increase when it moored off Jamaica’s other naval base, Port Antonio, on the north-eastern coast of the island, a place at this time of ‘prodigious rains … insomuch that sometimes for several months together, there is hardly one fair or dry day in a week between’. For some weeks in early 1733, the Kingston was unable to put out to sea. Many of the original crewmen had died, and some of the survivors were too weak for the heavy manual labour and agility demanded by a wooden ship of war.14 And this was when the man called Milbourne Marsh began to show his quality.

He had come to Jamaica knowing something of the risks. Six years before the Kingston’s voyage, in 1726, Rear-Admiral Francis Hosier had led a naval squadron of 4750 men out of Portsmouth to intercept Spanish treasure ships in the West Indies. Yellow fever killed him in Jamaica within a year, along with four thousand of his men.15 British newspapers, folk tales and ballads ensured that this disaster was widely known, especially in Milbourne’s home town of Portsmouth, so joining a ship bound for the Caribbean was a calculated gamble on his part. In 1732 he was twenty-two and single, with no formal education or means of support except his own skills. The Kingston, with its sixty guns, was the flagship of Commodore Richard Lestock, who would soon be replaced by Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle. Joining it as a carpenter’s mate gave Milbourne more wages and status than were available on voyages and in shipyards nearer home, a chance of attracting the attention of influential patrons in the navy, and passage to a frontier society where poor whites could sometimes encounter greater opportunities, if they survived.

That Milbourne Marsh did so, and lived to father Elizabeth Marsh, was a function not simply of luck, but also of his persistent intelligence and confidence, and his specific skills. A carpenter aboard a Royal Navy warship was a warrant sea officer. Like his fellow warrant officers, the gunner and the boatswain, he was not regarded – as fighting sea officers usually were – as a gentleman. Ships’ carpenters were not granted a formal navy uniform until the end of the eighteenth century, and they did not expect to dine at the captain’s table or in the wardroom. They were specialist craftsmen with a distinctive role aboard ship, and a recognized status. Even a carpenter’s mate was treated as roughly on a par with a midshipman, the apprentice rank for commissioned officers. ‘The carpenter’, declared the navy’s printed regulations at this time:

is to take upon himself the care and preservation of the ship’s hull, masts, yards, bulkheads, and cabins, etc and to receive into his charge the sea stores committed to him by indenture from the Surveyor of the Navy. At sea, he is to visit daily all the parts of the ship, and see if the ports are well secured, and decks and sides be well caulked, and whether any thing gives way; and if the pumps are in good order; and from time to time to inspect into the condition of the masts and yards, and to make a report of every thing to the Captain.16

The ability to carry out these duties efficiently was especially valued in the Caribbean. Even after hulls began to be sheathed in copper, wooden ships rarely lasted in these warm, stormy, worm-ridden waters for more than three years, and constant maintenance was required to keep them seaworthy even for this long. Consequently, Milbourne Marsh’s skills assured him a particular status here, and he seems consciously to have exploited this in order to advance and stay alive. In January 1733 he abandoned the fever-stricken Kingston to replace a dead man as ship’s carpenter on the Deal Castle. The move increased his workload, since this new vessel was a modest twenty-four-gun frigate with a smaller crew to share the tasks of maintenance and sailing, but it gained him promotion, higher wages, and for a while a healthier working environment. In August, when crewmen were being taken off the Deal Castle to join an expedition against rebel slaves, Milbourne promptly switched ships again, moving this time to be carpenter of the Rupert, a veteran 930-ton warship with a crew of 350.17

Unlike most men at sea, a ship’s carpenter was not woken up every four hours at night to stand watch. Nor did he usually have to snap to attention when ‘All hands on deck’ was piped. So although his was an arduous, often dangerous job, frequently carried out in the rigging fifty to seventy feet above deck, Milbourne Marsh experienced a better working life off Jamaica than many of his comrades. He was more rested and less stressed, and he would have been buoyed up by a consciousness of his modest indispensability. Once on the Rupert, he spent most of the next nineteen months at sea, and therefore less at risk of disease, but never straying out of the Caribbean, and returning at regular intervals to Port Royal, something that had begun to be important.

The name she went by was Elizabeth Evans, and he claimed later that she was about one year younger than himself. She had been an Elizabeth Bouchier, and living as a single woman in Port Royal, when she met and married James Evans in 1728.18 Evans was another migrant, possibly Pennsylvanian by origin, and worked part-time as a shipwright on the Royal Navy vessels anchoring off the port. Milbourne Marsh and Elizabeth Evans appear to have known each other well before August 1734, because it was in this month that Evans made his will. For a man of his sort, this was an atypical act. Since death snatched Jamaicans so quickly, most died intestate; and white craftsmen and artisans only occasionally went to the expense of setting out their final dispensations and opinions in legal script. Evans, though, whose signature on the will, and the ‘few old books’ he left behind, reveal a certain level of literacy, chose to have this final say, this last exercise of power. Mindful of the ‘peril & dangers of the sea and other uncertainties of this transitory life’, he declared, he wanted to make his wishes known ‘for the sake of avoiding controversies after my decease’.19 As well as these formulaic pieties, he also had something substantial to leave; and someone, and perhaps two people, to accuse.

James Evans had prospered in Jamaica. He had obtained a licence ‘to sell and retail wine, beer, ale or other strong liquor’ in the house he rented in Port Royal.20 Judging by the inventory, this drink shop was a modest establishment, with six old tables, each equipped with a candlestick, seating for eighteen, a spittoon, a close stool, and little else in its interior except a chest and a corner cupboard, and some beds (the establishment may have doubled as a brothel). But, together with the wherry he owned and rented out to the Royal Navy, the business had allowed Evans and his wife to live in modest style. They owned ‘a new feather bed & pillows’, pewter-ware, supplies of fine linen – and at least nine adult slaves. As was customary in slaveholding systems throughout the world, these people had been given new names so as to erase their pre-slave selves and re-inscribe them as property. For his female slaves, Evans had selected mock-classical names that bear witness again to his literacy, and to its limits. There was ‘Cresia’ and her two ‘pickaninnys’, and ‘Palla’ (Pallas?) and her child, and Venus and Silvia, who all worked in one capacity or another in the drink shop. Since Evans used his male slaves to crew his wherry, and rented them out to the navy as dock labourers and caulkers, they were named in more practical, masculine style. As with his women slaves, however, Evans gave them single names, not multiple names like white people. He called them ‘Plymouth’, or ‘Gosport’, or ‘Bristol’, or after other British ports, as if they were horses or pet animals, not human beings.21

By Jamaican standards, this level of slave-ownership on the part of a skilled craftsman was not unusual. The 157 inhabitants of Port Royal who were registered as slave-owners in 1738 laid claim on average to nine slaves apiece.22 But to Milbourne Marsh, an English incomer with no property beyond the contents of his sea-chest, the sight of this level of affluence in a fellow shipwright must have been startling, and it is unlikely that it was merely physical and emotional attraction that drew him initially to James Evans’ wife.