Читать книгу The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History - Linda Colley - Страница 13

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.

Evans took his meagre revenge, as he would have seen it, in his will. His still ‘beloved wife Elizabeth Evans’, he stipulated, was to inherit all of his estate, including ‘all negroes’, but with a single exception. One of the household’s male slaves was to be given up, and shipped off in perpetuity to an Evans family member in Philadelphia. The slave who was to be sent away, James Evans specified, was ‘one negro man named Marsh’. No individual of that name is included in the inventory of Evans’ estate, which lists all of his slaves. He seems to have inserted this provision about a ‘negro man named Marsh’ in his will as a calculated, posthumous insult to an interloping Englishman named Milbourne Marsh, and perhaps also as a glancing verbal slight aimed against his own wife. By the end of the year, for whatever reason, James Evans was dead, leaving behind goods and human chattels valued in his inventory at more than £625. On 12 December 1734, the day after Elizabeth Evans was formally granted permission ‘to take into her possession and to administer’ all of her late husband’s property, she married Milbourne in Kingston’s Anglican church.²³ By January 1735, she was pregnant.

Who was she, this woman Milbourne Marsh took to wife? And how had she come to be in Port Royal before marrying her first husband in 1728? The name ‘Elizabeth Bouchier’ does not appear in lists of indentured servants and convicts from Britain coming to Jamaica around this time, though this does not prove she was not amongst them.²⁴ Nor can she be conclusively identified from the surviving Jamaican parish registers – but then, these too are incomplete documents. No record of baptisms for Port Royal seems to have survived, for instance, earlier than 1722. More unusually, the Family Book that was compiled much later by Milbourne Marsh’s younger brother, George Marsh, yields no information about this woman. It was George Marsh’s custom, after introducing individual family members in the Book, to allocate a brief sentence to their spouses, especially if this could illustrate his clan’s respectability and upward mobility. Thus, while he set down his cousin Warren’s wife as ‘a very bad woman’, he was much more concerned to record how his own father had married ‘the best of women’, and how his niece Margaret Duval’s husband was a ‘most worthy sensible good man’, and so forth. In the paragraphs of the Family Book he devoted to Milbourne Marsh, however, the relevant sentences where a judgement on his elder brother’s spouse might have been expected have been inked out.²⁵ The Marsh family’s surviving correspondence also reveals nothing about this woman, and only very occasionally acknowledges her existence. Virtually the only extant formal record of the Elizabeth Bouchier who became first Elizabeth Evans and then Elizabeth Marsh, after her brief appearance in Kingston’s marriage register, is her (now removed) memorial tablet in a church in Chatham, Kent. ‘She was’, Milbourne Marsh had engraved there, ‘a good Christian wife and mother.’ But after this careful testimonial, he supplied no details of her parentage or place of origin.²⁶

She remains a question mark in this story, therefore, but there are at least two possible answers. A widow called Margaret Boucher is listed in the Port Royal vestry minutes as living in a rented house in the town in the late 1730s, and as in receipt of occasional charity. Given the casualness with which surnames, especially those of the poor, were recorded at this time, Milbourne Marsh’s new wife may have been this woman’s daughter. If so, she was white or passed for such, since Margaret Boucher’s name is included in ‘A List of the white inhabitants of this parish’ compiled in Port Royal in 1738.²⁷ If this particular ‘Margaret Boucher’ was her widowed mother, the woman who had once gone under the name of Elizabeth Bouchier clearly left her behind in Jamaica when she escaped to England in 1735, and she made no effort to perpetuate Margaret Boucher’s first name when she came to christen her own daughter.

There is however another possibility. There were Bourchiers – and not just Bouchers – resident in Jamaica at this time. The former, whose surname was also spelt in various ways and who seem to have arrived on the island in the 1660s, were planters. If she did possess some blood relationship with this family, the woman who went on to become Elizabeth Marsh’s mother is unlikely to have been a legitimate child. Daughters of Caribbean planters born in wedlock did not customarily go on to marry shipwrights. She might conceivably have been a mulatto, the mixed-race, possibly christened child of a white landowner – perhaps Charles Bourchier, who died in 1726 – and an African slave mother.²⁸ Or there may have been no blood relationship, just a plantation past at some point. Manumitted slaves in Jamaica sometimes took and kept the surnames of their former owners.

It was widely believed that incoming mariners established easier, more equal relations with members of Jamaica’s black and mulatto population than most of the island’s white residents were willing or able to do. ‘Sailors and negroes are ever on the most amicable terms,’ a one-time resident in Jamaica wrote later:

This is evidenced in their dealings, and in the mutual confidence and familiarity that never subsist between the slaves and the resident whites. There is a feeling of independence in their intercourse with the sailor, that is otherwise bound up in the consciousness of a bitter restraint … In the presence of the sailor, the Negro feels as a man.²⁹

This was an overly sentimental verdict. At least one of the reasons for incoming British sailors cultivating members of Jamaica’s black population was crudely exploitative: the number of single white women in the island’s port towns who were of artisan or servant status, and therefore potentially available as seamen’s companions, was very limited.

Nonetheless, this kind of socializing rested on more than sex, money and loneliness. Visiting sailors and blacks tended to come together on this and other Caribbean islands because they shared a consciousness of difference. If blacks and mulattos were divided from Creole settlers by their skin colour, culture of origin, belief systems and, usually, their un-freedom, sailors too were a people apart, ‘a generation differing from all the world’.³⁰ Tanned, often with long pigtails and amateurish ‘tattoos’ made with ink or gunpowder, markedly agile, and frequently mutilated in some way, sailors looked very different from men who spent all their lives on land. They walked, moved and dressed differently. They possessed, like Jamaica’s black population, their own distinct vocabularies, songs and magical beliefs; and crucially they were transients, men who had left home, family and country, or been torn away from them by press gangs. That they should sometimes have gravitated towards men and women who had also been snatched, even more brutally, from their homelands, was scarcely surprising. In Kingston parish, where Milbourne Marsh married Elizabeth Evans in December 1734, two graveyards ‘to the westward and leeward of the town’ were reserved for ‘free people of colour’ on the one hand, and for ‘soldiers, seamen, and transient people of every description’ on the other.³¹ Even in death, mariners, mulattos and blacks might be set apart from everyone else, and placed together.

They also came together at sea. Rather like Jamaica itself, the Royal Navy was at once violent, dangerous, cosmopolitan and innovating: ‘a new kind of power, which must change the face of the globe’.³² Some of the most complex and expensive machines of their age, the navy’s ships were relatively tolerant and – to a controlled degree – even meritocratic spaces. The skills involved in maintaining and sailing these vessels were so specialized, and in such high demand, that possessing them could sometimes trump a man’s skin colour, just as it often trumped social class.³³ Like most navy men, Milbourne Marsh was accustomed to working alongside sailors who were free blacks. Such men enjoyed the same rights and earned the same wages as their white counterparts. In the Caribbean, the navy also employed black slave seamen, who did the same job as equivalent whites and free blacks, and worked and lived alongside them, but whose wages were paid to their owners. This was the case with a close comrade of Milbourne’s, John Cudjoe. He worked as one of the two servants allowed Milbourne in his capacity as ship’s carpenter: ‘servant’ in this context meaning an apprentice under training. Both servants earned the same wage, just under £14 per annum on top of their keep, but in Cudjoe’s case the money went to his owner, a Jamaican settler. Both men shared quarters with Milbourne and worked with him on a daily basis; and when the latter moved from the Deal Castle to the Rupert in August 1733, John Cudjoe went with him.³⁴

So while, in his choice of a wife, Milbourne Marsh was evidently willing to profit from slave-ownership, he also took daily, comradely contact across racial lines for granted. Whether he also knowingly crossed racial lines in marrying Elizabeth Evans, and whether this contributed to the Marsh family’s subsequent documentary reticence about this woman, will probably never be known. Biography, it has been said, is like a net that catches and brings to the surface an individual life. But a net is only a set of holes tied together by string, so some things slip through. There are always life-parts, and body-parts, that get lost, and the birth identity of Elizabeth Marsh’s mother is one of these.³⁵ As far as she herself is concerned, attempting to establish her precise ethnic origins may be more than usually inappropriate. In 1733, Jamaica’s governing assembly passed a law stipulating that ‘no one shall be deemed a mulatto after the third generation … but … shall have all the privileges and immunities of His Majesty’s white subjects of this island provided they are brought up in the Christian religion’, a belated recognition of the extent of miscegenation, and of its muddled human consequences.³⁶

So, even if she was mixed race in terms of her origins, the one-time Elizabeth Bouchier may have seen herself, even before her two marriages, as a person undergoing change and flux, beyond easy categorization. ‘The fiction of the census’, Benedict Anderson has written of present-day attempts to fix a person’s identity, ‘is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one – and only one – extremely clear place. No fractions.’³⁷ Elizabeth Marsh, brand-new wife of Milbourne Marsh, may have been a person of fractions. For a variety of reasons, her daughter, another Elizabeth Marsh, also seems at times to have viewed herself in these terms; and in her case, the fact that one of these fractions may have been linked in some manner with slavery will need at intervals to be borne in mind.

In 1735, Milbourne Marsh, his new bride and their unborn child had first to survive. Jamaica’s parish registers suggest that a quarter to a third of white children born on the island at this time perished before their first birthday. James and Elizabeth Evans appear themselves to have buried a child in Port Royal in 1730, a daughter who can have been at most barely one year old. But Jamaican parish documents severely understated the volume of infant mortality. Vicars charged money to register baptisms, and parents often held off from making the monetary and emotional investment until a child had survived for several months. Many died earlier than this, and were buried unchristened and unrecorded. Among the children of black slaves, death in the early weeks and months of life was common, and on some plantations may have been the norm. Even if a child survived until its third decade, it was unlikely that both parents would see it do so. Jamaican marriages lasted on average less than nine years before being broken by the death of one or both partners. For a child to reach full maturity, and for its mother and father still to be around to witness this, was exceptional even among the very wealthy.³⁸ What prospects then – for all his newly acquired property – could there be for Milbourne Marsh, a working sailor at risk from the sea as well as from Jamaica? And what prospects could there be for his new wife, Elizabeth, who had already lost a child?

Their private fears of death, which determined so much on Jamaica, were sharpened by mounting racial unrest. Running away and forming armed communities in the island’s rugged mountains was one of the oldest forms of slave resistance. By the early 1730s, these maroons – as the runaways were termed – had become so numerous, and sufficiently organized, for its continuance as a colony to seem at risk. Jamaica was some thousand miles distant from Britain’s other Caribbean islands, but dangerously close to Spanish Cuba and French St Domingue. This was one reason why the Kingston and the Rupert, and by 1735 nineteen other Royal Navy warships, were patrolling the Caribbean. But the navy exercised limited power over Jamaica’s interior, and – as was nearly always the case – the number of British soldiers available was painfully small. The island’s governing assembly and plantocracy had therefore dual reasons for alarm. ‘The terror of them spreads itself every where,’ Jamaica’s Governor, Council and Assembly reported to London of the maroons in February 1734. Their military successes had exerted ‘such influence on our other slaves, that they are continually deserting’. ‘Hopes of freedom’ were even shaking ‘the fidelity of our most trusty slaves’.³⁹ If this level of slave flight were to persist, and if slave anger mutated into large-scale violent resistance, the sugar industry might falter and white settlers might be tempted to abandon the island. In that event, the French or the Spanish, or both, might invade.

Milbourne Marsh experienced some of the consequences of growing panic among Jamaica’s whites at first hand. Several of his former shipmates on the Kingston and the Deal Castle were swept into fighting the maroons on shore, and on 10 October 1734 John Cudjoe was taken off the Rupert at his owner’s request. Slave escapes had reached such levels by now that Cudjoe’s owner may have wanted him under her surveillance, or she may simply have been desperate for his labour. The fact that Milbourne’s former servant shared his Akan surname, which means ‘male born on Monday’, with one of the most prominent maroon chieftains, Cudjoe, who would force the British to a treaty in 1739, may also have provoked superstitious unease and hostility aboard the Rupert itself.⁴⁰ During this same month, October 1734, martial law was declared on Jamaica. Six hundred additional men were raised from its parishes to serve as militia, and London shipped out six new military companies to aid them. By now, Milbourne was closely involved with Elizabeth Evans. Their marriage that December, the certainty by February 1735 that a child was on the way, and mounting fears among Jamaica’s whites that ‘We cannot say we are sure of a other day,’ made them determined to get out.⁴¹

Milbourne Marsh acted with his customary efficiency. On 7 March the Kingston arrived at Port Royal and began lengthy preparations for its voyage back to England. By 10 March, Milbourne had signed on again with his old ship, where he retained friends and patrons. He seems to have sold, or given over his rights in, the drink shop at Port Royal and the wherry to a naval official there. It is possible, though not proven, that he sold the slaves, Palla, Cresia, Silvia, Gosport and the rest, to the Royal Navy, which employed both male and female slaves in its Jamaican dockyards. This indeed may have been how he funded his new wife’s passage to England.⁴² Certainly, her escape from the island was aided by Milbourne’s own specialized skills. On paper, Royal Navy warships were exclusively masculine spaces, but women who posed no obvious sexual temptation were sometimes permitted to sail on them, especially if their responsible male possessed leverage of some kind. When the Kingston left Jamaica that June, Elizabeth Marsh senior was six months pregnant, and she was the wife of one of the ship’s most indispensable craftsmen. Twice married to a mariner, she also understood what was expected of her. She seems to have made private arrangements for her food with the Kingston’s purser so as to keep clear of the ship’s formal accounting system, and she would probably have spent the days of the voyage resting her growing bulk on the orlop deck, the quietest, darkest and most secluded space aboard.⁴³ It was on 20 August 1735 that they sailed into Portsmouth harbour, barely a month before the birth of their daughter.

Such time as this new Elizabeth Marsh spent on dry land during her first nineteen years was mainly lived here, at Portsmouth. The family found lodgings in the New Buildings, a recent development of austere workingmen’s houses in what was then the northern end of Portsea Island. It was only a short walk from here to St Thomas, the medieval church on Portsmouth’s High Street where Elizabeth Marsh was christened on 3 October 1735.⁴⁴

The New Buildings gave Milbourne Marsh easy access to his work. The development had been constructed with public money just outside the walls of Portsmouth’s naval dockyard, so that shipwrights and other workers could arrive punctually for their thirteen-hour day. Although he worked sometimes in the dockyard, and sometimes at sea, Milbourne organized his life so as to spend as much time as possible with his family. He deployed his customary tactic of using his specialized skills to lever himself into a new job whenever the current one became inconvenient. In September 1735, the month he became a father, he abandoned the Kingston and, armed with a recommendation from Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle, moved back as a ship’s carpenter on the Deal Castle. The latter was classed only as a sixth-rate warship, and therefore unlikely to be sent into the thick of battle in the event of war. Small vessels like this could still however be dispatched on missions in foreign waters; and when the Deal Castle was ordered to South Carolina in 1739, Milbourne jumped ship again. He took himself off to the Cambridge, an eighty-gun warship undergoing conveniently lengthy repairs in Portsmouth harbour.⁴⁵

Partly as a result of her father’s ingenuity, these early years in Portsmouth were the most stable of Elizabeth Marsh’s life. Yet, for all that this was a far more secure and healthy environment, Portsmouth shared certain important characteristics with Jamaica. It was vitally involved in empire and organized violence; it was a place of pioneering industrialization; and it was markedly cosmopolitan, and caught up in intercontinental trade and migration. Not for nothing was Portsmouth sometimes described – and sometimes condemned – as England’s equivalent to Port Royal before the earthquake: ‘If that was Sodom, this is Gomorrah.’⁴⁶

At first sight, the town appeared an ancient, walled place of some six hundred houses, occupying part of the island of Portsea, and linked to the mainland by a system of gates and bridges. But the gates and bridges were closely guarded, because Portsmouth was Britain’s premier military town, and the Royal Navy’s main operational base and dockyard. There were six naval dockyards in England at this time, all of them situated along its southern coast. On the Thames there were Deptford and Woolwich, both small dockyards. At the mouth of the Medway in Kent there was Sheerness, and twelve miles up the river the much bigger yard of Chatham. Then there were the so-called western dockyards, Plymouth and Portsmouth. By the 1730s, the latter had overtaken Chatham as the most important.⁴⁷ Hidden behind high walls, inconspicuous to casual travellers arriving by road, Portsmouth looked utterly different when approached from the sea:

A spacious harbour, and the great ships lying at their moorings for three or four miles up, and the harbour for a mile at least on each side covered with buildings and thronged with people; the water covered with boats passing and repassing like as on the Thames … The prospect from the middle of the harbour gives you the idea of a great city.⁴⁸

The dockyard’s specialized warehouses and rope-, mast- and rigging-houses were some of the biggest, most expensive constructions of the time dedicated to secular purposes. Almost 2200 skilled workmen were employed here in 1735, who were divided into twenty-three different categories, and tolled into work at morning and out at night by bells. A further 259 men were attached to the dockyard’s ropeyard. In what was still a primarily agricultural economy, this represented an extraordinary concentration of labour. Even a hundred years after this, it was still rare for industrial establishments anywhere in the world to employ more than five hundred men.⁴⁹

Surrounded by sea, but always short of fresh water, wreathed in coal smoke from the dockyard’s many forges, and full of the noise of metal on wood, Portsmouth, then, was a prime site of state power and imperial projection. But, as indicated by the pair of seven-foot-high dragon-headed pagodas from China erected by its dockyard in the 1740s, and by the mixture of coins and languages in use in its streets, the town was also a magnet for outsiders and alien influences. Portsmouth was where most foreign diplomats made landfall in Britain before taking the London road to present their credentials at court. It was the main British depot outside of London of the East India Company. Ships from Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Canton unloaded textiles, spices and ceramics in Portsmouth, as well as passengers and occasional Asian seamen. This was also a garrison town, and companies of soldiers marched through it en route for, or returning from, overseas expeditions; and Portsmouth was a commercial port as well as a naval base. There were Arab traders arriving from the Levant, seamen and fish-dealers from Hudson’s Bay and New England, Baltic suppliers catering to the Royal Navy’s ceaseless appetite for timber, so-called ‘Port Jews’ eschewing the distinctive life of their people in order to trade and lend money, and smugglers from nowhere in particular.⁵⁰

Elizabeth Marsh’s early exposure in Portsmouth to the sights and sounds of difference and diversity, and simultaneously to the Royal Navy and to the force of the British state, has to be factored in if we are to understand how she came to be the person she was, and to lead the life that she did. But she was also shaped of course by her family. ‘I was the daughter of a gentleman,’ she once wrote.⁵¹ The truth was more interesting.

While almost everything about her mother remains unclear, her father’s background is remarkably well documented. Milbourne Marsh had been christened in St Thomas church in Portsmouth in October 1709. His father, George Marsh (b.1683), was also a ship’s carpenter with the Royal Navy, which was typical enough, since shipbuilding was a closely guarded trade, customarily passed on through the males of a family over generations. Milbourne’s mother, who was born Elizabeth Milbourne in 1687, possessed her own link to the maritime, though a significantly different one. Her father, John Milbourne, ‘an excellent pen man’, was employed after 1713 as clerk to Sir Isaac Townsend, the Resident Commissioner at Portsmouth naval dockyard.⁵²

This blood connection with someone who worked with pen and paper was important, and the careful perpetuation of his mother’s surname in Milbourne Marsh’s own first name shows that his family was well aware of this. Both of Milbourne’s parents were literate, and both took pleasure in using words. As would be true of Elizabeth Marsh, they were compulsive storytellers. From his father, George Marsh, Milbourne heard tales about his grandfather, yet another mariner, called Francis Marsh. On a voyage from Lisbon back to Southampton in the early 1690s, this particular Marsh was wrecked off the Isle of Wight. ‘The ship and everything in it but himself were lost,’ but Francis Marsh – or so Milbourne and his siblings were told – plunged into the sea with his banknotes and valuable papers wrapped up in an ‘oil skin bag’, together with ‘a small family bible, not above 7 inches long, 4 or 5 inches broad and about 1 inch and a half thick’, and was ‘miraculously saved on shore on the beach’. Milbourne’s mother’s favourite tales were of her grandfather, a Northumberland-based dealer in Scottish cattle called John Milbourne. In May 1650, she claimed, he had risked his life hiding the Scottish royalist hero James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, when he was on the run from the Scottish Covenanters who were allies of Parliament. Only when Montrose left this plain man’s sanctuary, and went seeking help from a nearby landowner, was he betrayed and handed over to his enemies and execution.

Tokens of these and other past family dramas were carefully preserved. George Marsh senior and his wife kept a print of the Marquess of Montrose on a wall in every lodging house they occupied. As for Francis Marsh’s providential Bible and prayer book, what passes for this volume still exists today, its battered pages bearing annotations by one of George Marsh senior’s sons. The content of these family legends, and the tenacity with which they were held, suggest the eagerness of Marsh family members to view themselves as something more than mere skilled artisans. Milbourne Marsh and his siblings were brought up on ‘a slender income by good management and prudence’, but the stories he and they listened to, and that he passed on in turn to his own daughter, Elizabeth Marsh, evoked a rather different status. God, these family romances proclaimed, had intervened to preserve one of their ancestors by a ‘wonderful deliverance’. Yet another ancestor had performed an act of signal service to the cause of Britain’s monarchy. Moreover, as Milbourne Marsh’s mother told her children by way of other stories, they should rightfully have been rich. Her father John Milbourne, she insisted, ‘a fine handsome person, a good scholar and of great abilities’, had once owned a colliery in Northumberland and was ‘highly esteemed by the nobility and gentry of the county’. But he lost some of his money to a nobleman (worthless aristocrats are a recurring motif in Marsh family sagas), and his housekeeper subsequently cheated her way into his bed, faked his will, and ‘got possession of the whole fortune’.⁵³

The moral that family members were encouraged to draw from these stories – and Elizabeth Marsh certainly grew up believing this – was that they were marked out in some fashion, and deserving of more than their immediate, circumscribed surroundings and conditions of life. The stories also reveal something else about how she grew up. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, long-distance migration was not an aspect of the coming of modernity. Frequently, it was a practice that was learnt and adopted by a family’s members over successive generations, and that often increased in scale and duration in the process. Elizabeth Marsh’s restlessness, it is clear, was in part an inherited trait. Her father Milbourne Marsh took ship to the Caribbean, but his forebears were also sailors and migrants. His father and grandfather were mariners familiar with European waters. His mother’s family moved between northern England and Scotland, and then down to southern England. And whether Elizabeth’s own mother’s roots lay in West Africa or in England, she too must have been of voluntary or involuntary migrant stock, before sailing herself across the Atlantic to England in 1735.

From Milbourne Marsh’s family – and perhaps from her mother’s – Elizabeth Marsh also inherited good looks and physical toughness. Milbourne’s father, George Marsh senior, was described as a ‘remarkable fine person’, ‘upwards of six feet high … very upright and well proportioned, [and] amazingly strong and healthy’. Although the Navy Board awarded him a pension in the mid-1740s, he seems to have continued working part-time as a shipwright, and was seventy when he was killed in an industrial accident in 1753.⁵⁴ Married in 1707, he and Elizabeth Milbourne produced nine children and, unusually for their time and social level, eight of them reached adulthood. What were then untreatable diseases, and maritime accidents, killed off five of these Marsh progeny before they reached the age of forty, but the life spans of the remaining three confirm a family tendency towards physical vigour and good health. Milbourne Marsh (b.1709) lived to be almost seventy; George Marsh the younger (b.1722) made seventy-eight; while their sister Mary Marsh (b.1712) reached her eighties. It is striking too how, in different ways, and in conformity with the family’s stock of stories, all three of these longer-lived Marsh siblings constructed for themselves richer, more varied existences than their parents. Even Mary Marsh’s life, hampered by her gender, illustrates this. Once in her teens, she went to London to find work, and married a French Huguenot, Jean Duval. He worked as a baker in Spitalfields, a once semi-rural suburb in the east of London that has always attracted a disproportionate number of refugees and immigrants. This alliance with a family of French origins, attached to another form of Protestantism, made more than Mary’s own life more diverse. Visits to aunt Mary and uncle Duval in London in the 1740s and early ’50s seem to have allowed Elizabeth Marsh to learn to speak and read French, one of the prime accomplishments that normally connoted gentility.⁵⁵

The ‘industrious revolution’, as the marked changes in family aspirations at this time have been called, a rising level, throughout Europe and North America and possibly beyond, of individual and clan desire, expectations, and household expenditure, also affected Milbourne Marsh, and to a more spectacular degree his brother, George Marsh the younger.⁵⁶ The temperaments and changing fortunes of these two men, Elizabeth Marsh’s father and her uncle, are important because both men played crucial roles in her development, influencing what she came to be, and what she came to do.

Like most mariners in the age of sail, Milbourne Marsh had gone to sea very early. He recalled in middle age how, when just eleven years old and already sailing the Mediterranean, he was regularly handling explosives. He would be sent on shore from whatever vessel he was on at the time, and ordered to blow up rocks into small stones so as to provide ballast for the ship’s hold.⁵⁷ Yet to view him simply as a manual labourer would be quite wrong. Thomas Rowlandson’s sensitive study of a ship’s carpenter was made more than a decade after Milbourne’s death, but the tools the artist gives his figure – an adze in one hand and a drawing instrument in the other – accurately convey the occupation’s composite quality. As suggested by the adze (an axe with a curved blade), it involved hard physical effort. Timber had to be cut to size, a ship’s rotten wood and any cannon shot embedded in it cut out and made good. As indicated by the drawing instrument, however, this was only part of the job. Milbourne was fully literate, and he had to be. A ship’s carpenter was expected to write ‘an exact and particular account’ of his vessel’s condition and propose solutions to any defects. He needed to know basic accounting so as to estimate the cost of repairs, and keep check of his stocks of timber and other stores. And he required mathematical and geometrical skills: enough to draw plans, calculate the height of a mast from the deck, and estimate the weight of anchors and what thickness of timber was required to support them.⁵⁸

Looked at this way, it becomes easier to understand why the foremost English shipwright of the late seventeenth century, Anthony Deane (c.1638–1720), was knighted and made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Because of increased transoceanic trade, expanding empire, the growth of European and of some non-European fighting navies, and recurrent warfare, skills of the sort that Milbourne Marsh commanded were in urgent national and international demand. Not for nothing do we refer today to ‘navigating’ and ‘surfing’ the web. Rather like cyberspace now, the sea in Milbourne Marsh’s time was the vital gateway to a more interconnected world. Consequently, those in possession of the more specialist maritime skills were in a position to rise economically, and often socially as well. ‘The Ship-Carpenter … to become master of his business must learn the theory as well as practice,’ Britain’s most widely read trade directory insisted in 1747: ‘it is a business that one seldom wants bread in, either at home or abroad.’⁵⁹

The nature of her father’s occupation was of central importance in Elizabeth Marsh’s life. At one level, and along with her many other seafaring relations, Milbourne Marsh gave her access to one of the few eighteenth-century organizations genuinely possessed of something approaching global reach: the Royal Navy. This proved vital to her ability to travel. Long-distance oceanic journeying was expensive, but over the years Elizabeth’s family connections repeatedly secured her free or cheap passage on various navy vessels. She also gained, by way of these maritime menfolk, a network of contacts that stretched across oceans: in effect two extended families, her own, and the navy itself. ‘A visit from Mr. Panton, the 1st Lieutenant of the Salisbury,’ she would record while sailing off the eastern coast of the Indian subcontinent in 1775: ‘he seemed well acquainted with most of my family.’⁶⁰

But her father’s occupation also impacted on her in less enabling ways. It is conceivable that she grew up aware that her mother was different in some manner, or looked at askance by her relations. She certainly seems to have been perpetually insecure about her own and her family’s social position. Milbourne Marsh was from a self-regarding maritime dynasty that encouraged ambition, and he was a master craftsman in a global trade; but his was still an interstitial, sometimes vulnerable existence, lived out between the land and the sea, and between the labouring masses on the one hand, and the officer class on the other. Some of the tensions that could ensue can be seen in two crises that threatened for a while to engulf them all.

In April 1741, six of Milbourne’s workmen in Portsmouth dockyard sent a letter to its Commissioner accusing the carpenter of embezzlement. He had kept back new beds and bedding intended for his current ship, the Cambridge, his accusers claimed, and arranged for them to be smuggled out of the yard at midday, ‘when all the people belonging thereto are absent’. He had used naval timber to make window shutters, chimneypieces, and even palisades. Milbourne’s joiner reported that he had seen ‘the outlines of the head of one [a palisade] drew with a black lead pencil on a small piece of board’ on his desk, ‘which he verily believes was intended for a pattern or mould’. Another of Milbourne’s accusers told of being ordered to chop up good oak for firewood, and how he had carried the sticks out of the dockyard to the Marsh family’s lodgings in the New Buildings, where the carpenter ‘was in company the whole time’.⁶¹

Charges of embezzlement, if proved, normally brought instant dismissal from a navy dockyard. Milbourne Marsh retained his post and livelihood not because his excuses convinced (they were judged ‘indifferent’), but because his superiors recognized his ability (‘the carpenter bears the character of a good officer’). It is the private man and the family’s lifestyle, though, which emerge most sharply from this incident. The workmen’s resentment at Milbourne’s efforts to add some distinction and ornament to his family’s stark lodgings (and perhaps also to make extra money from selling illicitly-constructed window shutters, etc.), like their scorn for his small attempts at a social life (‘in company the whole time’), and their determination to inform against him in the first place are suggestive. These things point to a man and a family visibly getting above themselves and their surroundings, experiencing industrious revolution, and consequently arousing envy. Milbourne’s shuddering answer to his workmen’s accusations confirms this, while also showing how entangled he necessarily still was in deference:

Honourable Sir the whole being a premeditated thing to do me prejudice, for my using of them ill (as they term it) in making them do their duty. Hope you look on it as such, as will appear by my former behaviour and time to come.⁶²

He was literate enough to know how to use the word ‘premeditated’, but his syntax was not, could not be, that of a formally educated man, and he was naturally terrified of dismissal. Even more revealing is his explanation of why exactly he had defied regulations and commandeered the navy’s bedding:

My wife having been sick on board [the Cambridge] for five weeks, and no probability of getting her ashore, [I] thought it not fit to lie on my bed till I had got it washed & well cleaned, so got the above bedding to lie on till my own was fit.⁶³

So it was not just Milbourne Marsh who was amphibious, dividing his time between the sea and the land. His wife, and therefore presumably their five-year-old daughter also, were caught up in this way of living too. Already, Elizabeth Marsh was travelling.

Milbourne’s wife and child – soon children – were also caught up in fears for his survival, and therefore for their own. He fought in only one sea battle during his career, but it was a major one. In 1742 he was sent to the Mediterranean. Based first on the Marlborough and then on the Namur, a ninety-gun second rate and the flagship of Admiral Thomas Mathews, Milbourne Marsh also worked on the thirty-odd other warships in Britain’s Mediterranean fleet, dealing with day-to-day repairs as they waited for the combined Franco-Spanish fleet to emerge from Toulon, France’s premier naval base, and fight.⁶⁴ It is not clear whether any of his family accompanied him, or if they waited throughout in Portsmouth, or London, or with his parents who were now in Chatham, Kent. What is known, because Milbourne Marsh later gave evidence to a naval court martial, is that on 11 February 1744, for the first and only time in his life, he saw action.

‘I can tell you, exactly to a minute, the time we fired the first gun,’ he would tell the court, for ‘… I immediately whip’d my watch out of my pocket, and it was then 10 minutes after one o’clock to a moment.’ The enemy vessel that the 780-man crew of the Namur engaged was the Real, the 114-gun Spanish flagship and part of a twenty-seven-ship Franco-Spanish fleet. Initially, Milbourne the specialist was allowed to experience the battle below deck. Once the Namur started sustaining damage, however, his skills drove him above: ‘The Admiral sent for me up, and ordered me to see what was the matter with the mizzen topmast’ – that is, the mast nearest the ship’s stern. He had to climb it, and then the main mast, under fire throughout, for the Real was only ‘a pistol-shot’ away from them. Milbourne’s breathless account of what happened next is misted by nautical phraseology, but conveys something of what it was like to clamber across the rigging of a sailing ship under fire, and how difficult it was to make sense of a sea battle as it was happening:

At the same time I acquainted the Admiral of the main top mast, I was told, but by whom I can’t tell, that the starboard main yard arm was shot. I looked up, and saw it, from the quarter deck; I went to go up the starboard shrouds to view it; I found several of the shrouds were shot, which made me quit that side, and I went up on the larboard side, and went across the main yard in the slings, out to the yard arm, and I found just within the lift block on the under side, a shot had grazed a slant … when I went down, I did not immediately acquaint the Admiral with that, for by that time I had got upon the gangway, I was told that the bowsprit was shot, and immediately that the fore top mast was shot.⁶⁵

In strategic and naval terms, the Battle of Toulon proved an embarrassment for the British. For reasons that provoked furious controversy at the time and are still debated now, many of the Royal Navy ships present did not engage. The damage to the Namur’s masts and rigging, which Milbourne tried so desperately to monitor, persuaded Admiral Mathews to withdraw early from the fighting on 11 February, and he retreated to Italy two days later. The Franco-Spanish fleet was forced back to Toulon, but emerged from the encounter substantially intact. Milbourne Marsh’s own account of the battle underlines again some of the paradoxes of his work. His testimony makes clear that he was obliged to possess a pocket watch, still a rare accessory at this time among men who worked with their hands. It is also striking how confidently this skilled artisan communicated with the Admiral of Britain’s Mediterranean fleet. Indeed, when Mathews was court martialled for failing at Toulon, he asked Milbourne to testify on his behalf. Yet what happened in the battle also confirms the precariousness of the carpenter’s existence, and therefore of his family’s existence.

At one stage, the Namur’s withdrawal left the Marlborough, Milbourne Marsh’s former ship on which many of his friends were still serving, alone to face enemy fire. He watched, from relative safety, as the sails of the Marlborough caught fire, and as its main mast, battered by shot, crashed onto its decks. The ship stayed afloat, but its captain and about eighty of its crew were killed outright, and 120 more of its men were wounded. The battle also killed the Namur’s Post-Captain, John Russel, who had been one of Milbourne’s own patrons, along with at least twenty-five more of the ship’s crew. As for the Spanish, a British fireship had smashed into some of their warships, resulting, it was reported at the time, in ‘the immediate dissolution of 1350 souls’. Witnessing death on this scale, experiencing battle, persuaded Milbourne to change course. He was not a coward: one of his private discoveries at Toulon was that, at the time, he ‘did not think of the danger’.⁶⁶ But he was now in his thirties, married, a father, and his parents’ oldest surviving son, whereas most seamen were under twenty-five and single. So in 1744 Milbourne Marsh left the sea. For the next ten years he repaired ships at Portsmouth and Chatham dockyards. On land, at what passed for home.

For his daughter, Elizabeth Marsh, this decision led to a more stationary, and seemingly more ordinary, life. To be sure, there were certain respects in which her experiences in the 1740s and early ’50s already made her distinctive. Moving between Portsmouth, London and Chatham, and between various ships at sea and the land, allowed her in some respects an ironic counterfeit of genteel female education, but also more. In addition to the fluent French she acquired from aunt Mary and uncle Duval, she learnt arithmetic and basic accounting from her father, and she acquired a relish for some of the more innocuous pastimes common among sailors, reading, music and singing. She learnt too how to operate without embarrassment in overwhelmingly masculine environments, and how to tolerate physical hardship; and she also learnt, through living close to it, and through sailing on it from infancy, how not to fear the sea, or to regard it as extraordinary, but rather to take travelling on it for granted. She also learnt restlessness and insecurity, and – from watching her mother – a certain female self-reliance.

Mariners’ wives had to be capable of a more than usual measure of independence and responsibility, because their husbands were so often away. During Milbourne’s absences at sea, Elizabeth Marsh senior ran their household in the New Buildings and its finances by herself.⁶⁷ She also had to cope at intervals with the harshness and enforced intimacies of living aboard ship. Both of their sons, Francis Milbourne Marsh and John Marsh, the latter Elizabeth Marsh’s favourite and confidant, seem to have been born at sea. Giving birth to the elder, Francis, may indeed have been what confined Elizabeth Marsh senior to the Cambridge in Portsmouth harbour – that is, several miles from shore – for several weeks in 1741, and what tempted Milbourne to ‘borrow’ supplies of navy bedding ‘till my own was fit’.⁶⁸

In the normal course of events, none of these mixed influences on their daughter Elizabeth Marsh would have mattered very much. When her father left the sea in 1744 after the Battle of Toulon, his and the family’s prospects were modest, and would have appeared predictable. One of the attractions of working in naval dockyards, as distinct from a commercial shipyard that paid higher wages, was that they allowed skilled employees a job for life. Once he came ashore in 1744, Milbourne’s income declined slightly, from £50 per annum to around £40, a sum that placed the family at the bottom of England’s middling sort at this time, ‘the upper station of low life’, as Daniel Defoe styled it.⁶⁹ But at least there was security. It seemed likely that Milbourne would build and repair a succession of warships until he was pensioned off, that his two sons would in due course become shipwrights in their turn, and that ultimately his only daughter would marry a man of the same trade. But this was to reckon without changes that crossed continents, and the second influential man in Elizabeth Marsh’s life: her uncle George Marsh.

Born in January 1723, George Marsh was the eighth and penultimate child of George Marsh senior and Elizabeth Milbourne. This position in a large artisanal family may have made him slighter in physique, and more susceptible to illness – he seems to have suffered sporadically from epilepsy – but he was as driven as any eldest child. Initially sent to sea in 1735, because his father was not ‘able to purchase me a clerkship’, he soon moved to an apprenticeship to a petty officer in Chatham dockyard, and by 1744 was working as a clerk for the Commissioner of Deptford’s naval dockyard.⁷⁰ His next break came almost immediately. In October 1745 the House of Commons demanded a detailed report on how naval expenditure in the previous five years, when Britain had been at war with Spain, compared with that in the first five years of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–07). As he was ‘acquainted with the business of the dockyards, and no clerk of the Navy Office was’, George Marsh was ‘chosen … to perform that great work’. Labouring at the Navy Office in London ‘from 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning till 8 or 9 o’clock at night from October to the end of January’, mining a vast, unsorted store of records for the requisite figures, and organizing and writing up the usable data, exacerbated his epilepsy. He suffered intermittent attacks of near-blindness and dizziness, and ‘fell several times in the street’, he recorded much later, ‘and therefore found it necessary to carry constantly in my pocket a memorandum who I was and where I lodged’. He nonetheless produced the report ‘in a few months’.⁷¹

This episode suggests some of George Marsh’s qualities: his ferocious capacity for industry, strong ambition, and utter belief in paperwork. It also suggests how – through him – Elizabeth Marsh was connected to yet another aspect of modernity and change. The circumstances of her birth and upbringing had already linked her with slavery, migration, empire, economic and industrious revolutions, the navy and the sea. But it was primarily through her uncle George Marsh that she connected with the expanding power of the British state at this time, and with an ever more conscious mobilization of knowledge and paperwork in order to expand that power. To paraphrase the economist J.R. McCulloch’s later verdict on the East India Company, Elizabeth’s father, Milbourne Marsh, was caught up with the power of the sword, Britain’s fighting navy; but it was her uncle, George Marsh, who exemplified the power of the pen and the ledger.⁷²

And he was unstoppable. He rose early every morning, drank only water, confined himself to two meals a day, took regular exercise, spent little on himself, and worked very hard. In 1750 he moved from the provinces to the tall pedimented brick building that Christopher Wren had designed for the Navy Office in Crutched Friars by the Tower of London. From 1751 to 1763, George Marsh was the Clerk in charge of seamen’s wages. He then spent almost ten years as Commissioner of Victualling, before becoming Clerk of the Acts in 1773. This was the position that Samuel Pepys had occupied after 1660, and used as a power base from which to transform the administration of the Royal Navy. Pepys, however, had been able to draw on aristocratic relations and on high, creative intelligence. George Marsh possessed neither advantage, yet he retained the Clerkship of the Acts for over twenty years, and ended his career as a Commissioner of the Navy. At his death in 1800, this shipwright’s son was worth by his own estimate £34,575, over £3 million in present-day values.⁷³

The contrast between his remarkable career and his evident personal limitations reduced some who worked and competed with him to uncomprehending fury. George Marsh, complained his own Chief Clerk in 1782, was

totally unfit for the employment as he can neither read, spell, nor write. This office has in my memory been filled with ability and dignity … but the present Clerk of the Acts has neither, and we should do ten times better without him, for he only perplexes matters.⁷⁴

Yet, as this denunciation suggests, some of the criticism George Marsh attracted at different stages in his career was rooted in snobbery, and he was always able to exploit people’s tendency to underestimate him. In reality, he wrote all the time, privately, and not just in his public capacity. His papers also confirm that he read widely and that, like his parents and his niece Elizabeth Marsh, he enjoyed constructing stories. More than any other member of his immediate family, perhaps because he spent virtually all of his life in a single country, George Marsh seems to have been conscious of the scale of the transformations through which he was living, and he sought out different ways to make sense of them. He was the one who stayed behind. He was the spectator, the recorder, the collector of memories and eloquent, emblematic mementoes. Most of all, George Marsh was someone who relished facts and information, and knew how to deploy them: ‘I am sensible my abilities fall far short of some other men’s,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but [I] am very certain no one knows the whole business of the civil department of the Navy better or perhaps so well as I do.’⁷⁵ This massive, cumulative knowledge gave him an element of power, as did his acute understanding of how patronage worked.

As his correspondence with successive aristocratic First Lords of the Admiralty reveals, he was both unctuously deferential in his dealings with his official and social superiors, and capable sometimes of hoodwinking them. In private, and like his parents, George Marsh tended to be critical of members of the aristocracy, writing regularly about the superiority of ‘the middle station of life’, and of those (like himself) who had to work seriously hard for a living. But he was adept at the patronage game, which necessarily involved him paying court at times to ‘the indolent unhappy nobility’, and he was interested in securing advancement and favours for more than just himself. He ‘always had a very great pleasure’, he wrote, in ‘doing my utmost to make all those happy, by every friendly act, who I have known to be worthy’.⁷⁶ Chief among these worthy beneficiaries were the members of his own family. It was George Marsh’s willingness and ability to use his power and connections to promote his family that transformed Elizabeth Marsh’s expectations, and that separated her forever from the life-trajectory that might have been anticipated for a shipwright’s daughter. Having as her uncle someone with access to influence over several decades was one of the factors that made her life extraordinary. By way of George Marsh, she was able at times to have contact with some of the most powerful men in the British state, while also being helped to travel far beyond it.

His first substantial intervention in his niece’s life was indirect, but it changed everything. In January 1755, using his connections at the Navy Board, George Marsh secured for Milbourne Marsh the position of Naval Officer at Port Mahón in Menorca.⁷⁷ A ‘Naval Officer’ in eighteenth-century British parlance was not a fighting sea officer. The post was a clerical and administrative one, in an overseas dockyard, and for a ship’s carpenter it represented a distinctly unusual career break. To begin with, it tripled the family’s income. In the late 1740s and early ’50s, Milbourne had rarely earned more than £12 a quarter, whereas this new post brought with it an annual salary of £150, and the opportunity to make more.

The rise in income was only part of the alteration in the family’s status and outlook. As a carpenter aboard ship, Milbourne had been an uneasy amalgam of specialist craftsman, resident expert and manual labourer. This now changed. Nothing would ever take him completely from the sea, or from his delight in the construction of wooden ships and in drawing plans, but from now on he ceased to work with his hands for much of the time. The announcements of his promotion in the London press referred to him as ‘Milbourne Marsh Esq.’, thereby conceding to him the suffix that was the minimum requirement for being accounted a gentleman.⁷⁸

But the most dramatic change involved in his promotion to Naval Officer was one that affected his whole family, his wife, their sons, and – as it turned out – the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Marsh most of all. In March 1755, the family left Portsmouth forever and sailed to the Mediterranean and Menorca. She was on her way.