The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
By Linda Colley
Pantheon, 363 pages, $27.50
Biography allows readers to trace vicariously the footsteps, or peer into the minds, of influential individuals, representative figures or otherwise-fascinating people. If some biographers focus narrowly on their subject’s thoughts and actions, others balance the “life” with attention to “the times.” However they approach their topics, most biographical studies usually rest upon a significant paper trail that allows for the close and detailed reconstruction of past lives.
But occasionally, obscure, forgotten or invisible characters otherwise lost to history find their chroniclers. In their different ways, Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Timothy Gilfoyle and Laura Thatcher Ulrich have resurrected the life stories of a 16th Century Italian miller and a rural French peasant, an 18th Century New England midwife and a 19th Century New York petty thief, whose stories are inherently captivating and simultaneously illuminating of the worlds they inhabited.
Linda Colley is the latest to join these biographers of the obscure with an eye on the bigger picture with her “The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History.” Marsh, a minor figure in Colley’s previous book “Captives,” now occupies center stage in an account that is engaging yet measured, informative yet readable.
The daughter of a shipwright and Royal Navy bureaucrat and then wife of an erratic, enterprising and ultimately failed global entrepreneur, Marsh was not the sort of individual who left a noticeable and enduring mark on history. She was “socially obscure, sometimes impoverished, and elusively mobile,” Colley observes. “In the ancient, medieval and early modern world, such individuals, especially if they were female, rarely left any extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event.”
To Colley’s pleasant surprise, however, Marsh and her relatives did leave pronounced footprints in a variety of library collections scattered about the globe. Over the course of her life (1735 to 1785), members of the Marsh family found themselves in constant motion that took them across the globe — to Britain, Mediterranean islands, North Africa, the Middle East and India. Colley tracked Marsh wherever she went: in government records, letters, diaries and Marsh’s own thinly disguised published autobiography. Acknowledging “no possible owning of all the facts” of Marsh’s existence, Colley, a dogged researcher and creative scholar, has resurrected considerable portions of Marsh’s “obliterated life” to reveal the contours of her “remarkable” career.
Colley begins her story in Jamaica, then Great Britain’s most significant sugar-producing colony, where Marsh’s father, Milbourne, a skilled ship’s carpenter, met and married her mother, widow Elizabeth Evans, about whom little is known. Colley speculates — she has no hard evidence — that Marsh’s mother may have been a mulatto, part English, part African. Whatever her origins, apparently no one questioned her racial status, allowing her to pass (if, indeed, she were part African) as white. Fearing slave rebellion, Milbourne and his pregnant wife departed Jamaica forever in 1735, making their way to England, where a daughter, Elizabeth, was born shortly after they arrived in Portsmouth.
Young Elizabeth’s life was anything but stationary and landlocked; her “restlessness” was “an inherited trait,” informed by the experiences of generations of maritime-oriented Marshes who found the sea to be “the vital gateway to a more interconnected world.” At 19, Marsh found herself with her family on the rocky and inhospitable Mediterranean island of Minorca, where her father was a naval officer until an impending French invasion during the Seven Year’s War drove the family to Gibraltar, the British outpost in southern Spain.
The independent-minded Marsh’s insistence on returning to England while France and Britain remained at war launched the next harrowing phase of her itinerant life. En route, her ship was seized by Moroccan corsairs, and its crew and passengers taken captive. Transported overland in a caravan to Marrakech, she spent her time as a captive of Sultan Sidi Muhammad, who alternately tried to seduce Marsh and persuade her to remain with him in Morocco and to use Marsh and her fellow prisoners as bargaining chips to increase British commerce with Morocco. Eventually freed, she returned home set on an altered life course. When her fiance broke off his engagement with the now “compromised” Elizabeth, she turned, perhaps reluctantly, to James Crisp, a fellow passenger and prisoner who had posed as her husband to provide her with a modicum of protection.
Their marriage may not have been the happiest, but it did reinforce “the distinctive, revealing trajectory of her life,” expanding Marsh’s geographical horizons farther. Crisp, an international entrepreneur whose trading network extended from London, Barcelona, Hamburg, Livorno and Genoa to the Shetland Islands and the Isle of Man, made considerable sums of money — and then lost it all. After dabbling unsuccessfully in a Florida real-estate and colonization project, Crisp headed for India “to avoid the bailiffs and utter ruin.”
Marsh eventually followed, but they would find no domestic bliss in Britain’s huge colony in South Asia. While Crisp’s economic fortunes rose and again fell as an East India Co. official and private textile trader, his bored wife undertook her own, unique exploration of India.
At a time when few Europeans, and even fewer women, undertook such difficult journeys in southern and eastern India, and when married women rarely traveled (and, in Marsh’s case, temporarily resided) with men who were not their husbands, Marsh’s 18-month sojourn was not merely unconventional but “extraordinary,” Colley writes. All the more so when contrasted with her life’s final years. After her husband died in 1779, she lived off a small inheritance from her father and her son’s financial beneficence, devoting considerable energy to marrying off her daughter before dying of cancer at 49.
Colley’s book is about more than Marsh’s life and travails, for Colley does not limit herself to reconstructing the life of one obscure woman; she also vividly brings to life her world and the forces shaping it. Changes “in the global landscape” — slave revolts, the expansion of the British Empire, Britain’s wars with France and the American Colonies, and North African politics, for instance — “repeatedly shaped and distorted Elizabeth Marsh’s personal progress,” Coley writes. Her book “charts a world in a life and a life in the world,” as she uses her biography “as a way of deepening our understanding of the global past.”
Marsh’s personal opportunities, as well as her ability to travel, depended on the men in her extended family and their contacts with more-powerful individuals connected to the British government, Colley shows. And Marsh’s life story is inseparable from that of international maritime commerce and the expansion of the British Empire. “Without Britain’s empire, maritime reach, and slave trade,” Colley concludes, Marsh “would never have been conceived. And without the resources of the British imperial state” to which her family “afforded her repeated access … her career would never have unfolded as it did.”
Throughout, Colley resists the temptation to romanticize her subject, instead portraying Marsh as a fascinating and dynamic individual — though not a particularly appealing or sympathetic one — who was “caught up … in the flux of transcontinental events and contacts.” The result is a nuanced and sensitive portrait of a woman whose life was “poised on a cusp between phases in world history” and whose experiences and observations constitute a unique window into matters familial and political, local and global.
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Eric Arnesen is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and president of The Historical Society, based in Boston.
