Читать книгу The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History - Linda Colley - Страница 14

MOVING TO MENORCA meant an immediate change of landscape, climate and cultural and religious milieu, and a conspicuous change of scale. Accustomed, when on land, to crowded ports in the world’s foremost Protestant power, Elizabeth Marsh now found herself on a rocky, sparsely cultivated, ten-mile-long Mediterranean island of twenty-eight thousand souls, where a sprinkling of Jews and Greek Orthodox Christians were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Catholics, and where the dominant language was a form of Catalan. Most of the four-thousand-odd Britons on Menorca were soldiers or sailors. The officers among them, and the few civilian professionals and merchants, generally held aloof from the local Catholics (who tended to cold-shoulder them in turn), organizing for themselves a cosy, desperately restricted simulacrum of social life back home.¹ In her case, the claustrophobia scarcely had time to register. What did was a rise in status marked out by shifts in behaviour and consumerism. She seems to have learnt how to ride and to have acquired a riding costume. Her father could now afford a music teacher, and she began reading sheet music, as distinct from simply memorizing tunes. And, in place of shared lodgings, she moved with her family into a substantial freestone house on Hospital Island, a twelve-acre offshore islet in Mahón harbour. She was ‘happily situated’, she wrote later, abruptly promoted to minor membership of a colonial elite, and refashioning herself in a setting where young, single Protestant women who might conceivably pass as ladies were flatteringly sparse.²

Milbourne Marsh’s new life was also substantially different. No longer a full-time manual worker, he was now a ‘pen and ink’ man, without a uniform or a sword, and therefore on a different and lower level than the senior military and sea officers who ran the colony, yet indispensable and multi-tasked. Part of his job as the island’s Naval Officer was to act as Clerk of the Cheque: that is, as senior financial officer of Menorca’s naval dockyard. The naval stores lining the wharves of Mahón’s huge harbour, which extends inland for some six thousand yards, were his responsibility. So was paying the Britons and Menorcans who worked in the dockyard as shipwrights, sail-makers and carpenters, and in the navy’s victualling office, bakehouse, windmills and magazines. In addition, Milbourne acted as Clerk of the Survey, drafting maps and drawing up plans for new buildings and defences. At intervals he was Master Shipwright too, overseeing the repair and careening of incoming British warships and transports, and keeping an eye on the merchant ships arriving with provisions and bullion to pay the troops. In his limited leisure time he joined his wife, sons and newly accomplished daughter on Hospital Island, with its ‘rocks and precipices … intermixed with scattering houses’, where the navy’s local commander, surgeon and any visiting admirals were also accommodated.³ But Milbourne’s daylight hours were spent in the undistinguished row of low-storeyed sheds that made up the naval dockyard, or rowing the small boat that came with his office from ship to ship in the harbour, seeking out information from their captains, or mustering men and resolving disagreements, or surveying the island’s innumerable coves, inlets and bays.

For Menorca was not a place of refuge and colonial ease. The British had seized it from Spain in 1708 for essentially the same reason that had led the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and Catalans to invade it before them, and for much the same reason too as would cause the United States Navy to maintain a base of operations there in the nineteenth century. Menorca offered an advantageous location from which to monitor and to seek to dominate the western Mediterranean. In the words of a British writer in 1756:

All ships sailing up the straits of Gibraltar, and bound to any part of Africa, east of Algiers, to any part of Italy, or to any part of Turkey, either in Asia or Europe, and all ships from any of those places, and bound to any port without the straits-mouth, must and usually do pass between this island and the coast of Africa.⁴

Some of the main sea routes to and from Genoa, Livorno, Nice, Sicily, Marseilles, Lisbon, Tetuan and Tripoli lay within easy reach of Menorca. So did ships setting out from Spain’s Mediterranean ports, and from its naval bases, Cartagena and Cádiz. Possessed of Menorca and sufficient force, Britain could intervene in the commercial and naval activities of three of its imperial competitors: France, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire with its provinces in Northern Africa. Toulon, the prime French naval base, was 220 miles away from Menorca, within striking distance of a British fleet using the island as a base. Of course, the converse also applied. Ringed and replete with commercial, strategic and warlike possibilities, Menorca was itself a natural target. It was a ‘frontier garrison’, one politician had remarked in the 1720s, where discipline and watchfulness were mandatory ‘as if it were always in a state of war’.⁵

The members of the Marsh family were introduced to the risks attendant on the island’s location and strategic role almost as soon as they arrived in 1755. The aftershocks they experienced that November from the Lisbon earthquake, which killed over 100,000 people in the Iberian peninsula and Morocco, and caused tremors in France, Italy, Switzerland and Finland, and tsunamis as far apart as Galway, Ireland, and Barbados, were accompanied by other far-reaching convulsions, engineered by human actors. France and Britain were at war again. This time, by contrast with their previous conflicts, the fighting did not begin in Europe. The initial battles of what Americans generally term the French and Indian War, and Europeans call the Seven Years War, took place in parts of Asia and the Caribbean, and above all in North America; and both the onset of the war, and its unprecedented geographical extent, impacted directly on Menorca – and on Elizabeth Marsh.⁶

The Mediterranean world of Elizabeth Marsh and James Crisp

Although Menorca was tiny, its complex coastline, ‘indented with long bays and promontories’, and its disgruntled Catholic population were too extensive to be adequately guarded in wartime by the resident British garrison. Retaining the island in these circumstances required reinforcements on land, and also a significant naval presence. This time, such reinforcements were not easily available. Before the 1740s, it was rare for large numbers of Royal Navy ships to be stationed for any length of time in Asian or American waters. Now that war was spilling over into different continents, the resulting dispersal of Britain’s naval resources left traditional European frontier sites like Menorca more exposed and potentially vulnerable. As a later Admiralty report argued:

If our possessions and commerce increase, our cares and our difficulties are increased likewise; that commerce and those possessions being extended all over the world must be defended by sea having no other defence … [Yet] it is impossible to keep at all of them, perhaps at any one, a strength equal to what the enemy can send thither.⁷

In late 1755, when rumours were already circulating of a French invasion force assembling in Toulon and Marseilles, there were just three British ships of the line in the Mediterranean, as against fifteen patrolling off the coasts of Bengal and North America. By early 1756, when 150 ships and 100,000 troops were in readiness along France’s Mediterranean coast, the situation for the British was only marginally better. More than one hundred Royal Navy vessels were under repair or guarding Britain’s own coasts, and an additional fifty were in service in extra-European waters, but only thirteen warships were available for other locations.⁸

As a result, in 1756 those on Menorca were left substantially to fend for themselves. For Milbourne Marsh, in his capacity as Naval Officer, this meant locating and purchasing obsolete vessels from various Mediterranean ports, and then converting them into fireships that could be sailed against any invading French fleet. He also supervised the splicing together of surplus masts and cables to fashion a 250-yard-long barrier that could be floated across the narrow entrance to Mahón harbour. In early April, Menorca’s military out-stations and outlying wells were destroyed to keep them from falling into French hands. Most of the island’s Catholics were disarmed, and soldiers and their families, along with the island’s pro-British Jewish and Greek inhabitants, began assembling, with hundreds of live cattle and other supplies, behind the walls of Fort St Philip at the entrance to Mahón harbour.⁹

Had Elizabeth Marsh and her family belonged unquestionably to the lower ranks, this would have been their refuge too. As almost four hundred other women did, she would have spent the next two and a half months under siege in Fort St Philip’s web of subterranean stone passages, ‘the garrison knocked about her ears every minute, and some of her acquaintances killed or wounded every day’. Conversely, had the family’s social status been more assured, she might have been dispatched – like many of the officers’ womenfolk – to Majorca, the neighbouring Balearic island ruled by still-neutral Spain.¹⁰ As it was, her fate was determined once again by the distinctive, indispensable nature of her father’s skills. On Saturday, 17 April, Milbourne Marsh was summoned to the island’s naval commander:

Upon the French being landed on the island of Menorca, Commodore Edgcumbe gave him an order … to proceed from thence in His Majesty’s ship the Princess Louisa to Gibraltar, and there to take upon him the duty of Master Shipwright.¹¹

By now there were five Royal Navy ships off Mahón, ‘moored head and stern in line across the harbour’s mouth’, but still manifestly too few to engage the 120 French warships and transports assembling off the coast of Ciutadella, to the west of the island, or to slow for very long the troops that these vessels were disgorging. Two of these British warships left on 21 April, which was when Milbourne Marsh carefully finished up and signed his remaining official paperwork, and ‘the same day the enemy appeared on this side of Mahón’. The following day, a Thursday, the forty-gun Princess Louisa with the Marsh family on board, together with the Dolphin and the Portland, slipped away to Gibraltar.¹² She was rescued, but not saved.

For it is now that Elizabeth Marsh begins to struggle out of the meshes of family plots and transcontinental forces and events, and seeks to take charge of her own life. She arrives in Gibraltar on 30 April 1756. Within two months, she has determined to sail to England by way of Lisbon. Although by this stage Britain and France are formally at war, and the Mediterranean is criss-crossed by French and British warships under orders to ‘take, sink, burn or otherwise destroy’ each other’s naval and merchant vessels, she insists on setting sail, initially in defiance of her parents’ wishes, and as a lone female traveller among men.

She has her private reasons for acting this way, but she can also make a prudential case for her decision. After just three days in Gibraltar, Milbourne Marsh has been able to compile a report on its naval facilities and defences. The British have long neglected the fortress for reasons of economy, and his assessment is uncompromising and discouraging:

The capstans, partners and frames [are] entirely decayed, the mast house, boat house, pitch house, smiths shop and cable shed all decayed, and tumbling down; the yard launch wants a thorough repair, and in case there may be a necessity to careen or caulk any of His Majesty’s ships, there is neither floating stages for that service, or boat for the officers to attend their respective duties; the shed within the new mole gates that was used for repairing sails in, likewise the shed for the use of the artificers are both decayed and tumbling down.

This, and more, is what he proceeds to tell Admiral John Byng, who is also newly arrived at Gibraltar, under instructions to sail with ten warships to relieve the besieged British garrison on Menorca. Even before Byng sets out, Milbourne’s damning report has therefore encouraged him to begin contemplating failure. ‘If I should fail in the relief of Port Mahón,’ he informs his superiors in London on 4 May, ‘I shall look upon the security and protection of Gibraltar as my next object.’¹³

Subsequently, these words will be interpreted by the senior officers at Byng’s court martial as evidence of a lack of determined resolution and aggressiveness on his part. Yet this is not altogether fair. Gibraltar, a three-mile-long rocky promontory off southern Andalusia in Spain with no source of fresh water at this time except for the rain, is like ‘a great man of war at anchor’.¹⁴ It is formidable, a natural fortress, but with weaknesses corresponding to its strengths. The Rock gives its British occupiers a strategically key position from which to monitor the straits between the Mediterranean and Atlantic. If it is closely besieged from the sea, however, there is nowhere for its inhabitants to retreat except into Spain. Reports from diplomats and spies have been circulating since March 1756 that if Menorca falls (as it does at the end of June), France will move on to attack Gibraltar, and then offer both of these territories back to Spain in return for the loan of its naval fleet in the war against Britain.¹⁵ If the French do attack Gibraltar – and if Spain turns hostile – how can the fortress defend itself without adequate stores, or the dockyard facilities necessary to keep a fighting navy at sea and in action?

Because he is thinking along these lines, Byng will decide to retreat after his fleet’s inconclusive encounter with the marquis de la Galissonière’s French squadron on 20 May 1756. He will hurry back to defend Gibraltar, leaving Menorca’s garrison to its fate, and so ultimately condemn himself to a naval firing squad. For the men of the Marsh family, however, Byng’s anxieties about the poor state of Gibraltar’s naval dockyard and defences have substantial compensations. ‘It requiring a proper person to inspect into and manage these affairs,’ Byng informs London, ‘I have taken upon me to give Mr. Milbourne Marsh … an order to act as Master Shipwright … and have given him orders to use his best endeavours to put the wharf etc. in the best condition he can, for very soon they will be wanted.’¹⁶ The added responsibility boosts Milbourne’s annual salary from £150 to £200, and this is in addition to the accommodation and food the navy allows him. By July, John Marsh is also in naval employ, working as clerk to his father, who no longer has the time to write his own letters. Elizabeth Marsh’s situation is necessarily different. For her, there can be no job. If a Franco-Spanish force lays siege to Gibraltar, there may be no easy means of escape this time, especially for a single, twenty-year-old woman who is associated with the British. Moreover, now that the war has reached Europe, Gibraltar itself is filling up with troops and is increasingly crowded and unhealthy. There are over a thousand men confined in its naval hospital, and every day some of them die.¹⁷

All this enables Elizabeth Marsh to rationalize her decision to leave and to persuade her parents to agree, but she is also influenced – indeed misled – by her past. She is used to sailing in large, well-crewed, well-disciplined warships that are designed to take punishment as well as give it, and accordingly she has no fear of the sea. But the Ann, on which she embarks on the afternoon of 27 July, is a battered, unarmed 150-ton merchantman, loaded with casks of brandy, and with only ten crewmen. The man in overall charge is James Crisp, a nominally British merchant based in Barcelona who is already known to the Marsh family; and there are two other passengers, an Irish trader called Joseph Popham who is in his late forties, and his adolescent son William.¹⁸ Since it is wartime, the Ann sails in convoy with fourteen other merchant vessels bound for Lisbon and under the protection of the forty-four-gun Gosport. This too misleads Elizabeth, for naturally she trusts the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, and like most sea officers, Captain Richard Edwards dislikes convoy duty, and he is also peculiarly bad at it. On the Gosport’s previous voyage, from Plymouth to Gibraltar, he has more than once lost sight of all thirty-four vessels entrusted to his care. In the case of this new Lisbon convoy, the fog that is so common in this stretch of the Mediterranean puts a further strain on his abilities. Although there is ‘moderate and fair weather to begin with’, one day out from Gibraltar the mist is so thick that he can no longer see any of the fifteen merchantmen sailing with him. Edwards orders the Gosport’s rowing boats to be hoisted aboard so as to make up speed, and fires its guns to signal his location.¹⁹ Those on the Ann hear the shots, and on the morning of 30 July catch a last glimpse of the Gosport, seven miles away. The Ann’s Master desperately carries ‘all the sail he could, in order to keep up with the man of war, even to endangering our lives, for there was six feet [of] water in the hold, before any one knew of it’. Used to the sea, but not to the limitations of small merchantmen, Elizabeth Marsh, by her own admission, was ‘entirely ignorant of the danger we had been in until it was over’.²⁰

But by now they are all lost: the other merchant ships, the Gosport that takes ten days to reach Lisbon, and the Ann that finally emerges from drifting in deep fog at 2 p.m. on 8 August to see ‘a sail to windward giving us chase and at half past seven came within pistol shot of us’. It is not – as they first think – a French warship. It is a twenty-gun Moroccan cruiser with more than 130 armed men on board. With flight now out of the question, Crisp and the Pophams agree to row over to the Moroccan vessel, thinking that it is simply a matter of showing their Mediterranean pass and establishing their identity, for Morocco and Britain are formally at peace. Elizabeth Marsh meanwhile was ‘tolerably easy, until night drew on, when fear seized my spirits, at their not returning at the time appointed. I continued in that state, until the morning … [when] instead of seeing the gentlemen, boats, crowded with Moors, came to our ship, in exchange for whom our sailors were sent on board theirs.’ She remains on the Ann four more days, as do the Moroccan boarders. Then, on 12 August, she is rowed over to their ship, terrified by ‘the waves looking like mountains’, because she is no longer observing them from the secure upper decks of a warship, and because – like most seafarers at this time – she is unable to swim. Once all are on board the corsair ship, there is a brutal social but not yet a gender divide. The ordinary sailors from the Ann are left roped together on deck. But James Crisp, Joseph Popham and his son, and Elizabeth are pushed into a cabin ‘so small as not to admit our standing upright. In this miserable place four people were to live.’²¹

During the three days she is confined here – and still more afterwards – what become significant are the things that she takes note of and is careful to remember, and the aspects of her ordeal and changing surroundings that she either refuses to acknowledge, or is in no position to understand. She is used to living at intervals at sea among hundreds of men, and so copes well with the utter lack of privacy, the discomfort, the smells, the stray glimpses of the others’ nudity, the glances they snatch of her own. ‘Miss Marsh’, Joseph Popham concedes later, ‘… has supported herself under her misfortunes beyond what may be expected from her tender sex.’²² It is not so much the embarrassments and hardships of being mewed up in a stinking cabin with three males that begin to undermine her, or even the shock of violent capture, so much as a sense of being torn from all moorings. She has grown up in tight, usually well-disciplined communities, the cherished only daughter of a respected master craftsman. Socially marginal in terms of British society in general, she has nonetheless been sure of her place in her own maritime sphere. As this strange, nightmarish ordeal progresses, her sense of personal anchorage loosens, and she feels marked out by her gender in new and dangerous ways.

She has already spent several days on the Ann surrounded by curious, occasionally ribald Moroccan seamen, with – or so she later records – only the ship’s elderly steward standing between her and them. Now, imprisoned on the corsair ship, William Popham tries to relieve his own fears by telling her ‘stories of the cruelties of the Moors, and the dangers my sex was exposed to in Barbary’. When they finally disembark at the port of Sla (Salé) on Morocco’s Atlantic coast on 15 August, and Elizabeth Marsh rides the mule they give her for two miles over rough tracks into its old town, she is greeted by ‘a confused noise of women’s voices from the top of the houses, which surprised me much, until I was informed it was a testimony of joy on the arrival of a female captive’. There are more reminders of her difference. As she, the Pophams and James Crisp wait in the half-ruined house allocated them, confined again to a single room, some local European merchants bribe their way in and undertake to smuggle out letters. The captives wait until night ‘lest the guards should suspect what we were upon’, and then they write.²³ Joseph Popham writes to a patron, Sir Henry Cavendish in Dublin, urging him to get his brother the Duke of Devonshire, a former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to intervene on the captives’ behalf. James Crisp writes to the new Governor of Gibraltar, James O’Hara, Baron Tyrawley, and to Sir Edward Hawke, who has replaced Byng as Commander-in-Chief of the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Both Popham and Crisp pass on personal messages in postscripts to their letters, but their first instinct is to make contact with public figures who are possessed of influence. When Milbourne Marsh finally learns of his daughter’s real plight (the newspapers initially report that the Ann has been seized or sunk by the French), he reacts in a similar fashion. He immediately, and with characteristic confidence, appeals for aid to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Anson. Elizabeth Marsh by contrast has no contacts with powerful males at this stage of her life, and so writes only to her parents. Consequently her letters, unlike most of the others, do not survive.²⁴

Those who now have power over her also remind her of the vulnerabilities of her position. When the captives are taken for questioning before a high-ranking Moroccan official at Sla, James Crisp is able to converse with him in Spanish, the language that Maghrebi elite males and incoming Europeans often employ to communicate with each other. But Elizabeth, who knows little Spanish, is conducted into the official’s harem, ‘the apartment of his ladies’, and brought for the first time into the company of a Moroccan woman, whose name she never learns. With no interpreter available, they see each other – or so she claims later in print – only in terms of mutual strangeness:

She was surprisingly tall and stout, with a broad, flat face, very dark complexion, and long black hair. She wore a dress resembling a clergyman’s gown, made of muslin, and buttoned at the neck, like the collar of a shirt, which reached her feet. She had bracelets on her arms and legs; and was extremely inquisitive, curious in examining my dress and person, and was highly entertained at the appearance I made.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Marsh’s Morocco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man himself is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They converse again through an interpreter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a Genoan, this woman hailed from a modest republic possessed of only a small navy and limited diplomatic leverage. Yet although Elizabeth Marsh and her fellow hostages came by contrast from the world’s foremost Protestant power, this did not automatically guarantee their safety or her own virtue. When Lalla Dawia told her story in the 1780s to an English doctor, William Lempriere, who had been allowed into the Sultan’s harem in order to treat her, she made no mention of actual acts of coercion, as distinct from threats, being used against her when she first arrived at Sidi Muhammad’s palace in 1764. With no immediate prospects of escape or rescue, and cut off from her family, her resistance had simply been worn down over time in the face of the Sultan’s blandishments. This could easily have been Elizabeth’s fate too. In 1756 Britain was engaged in a transcontinental war, and needed Moroccan supplies for its only remaining Mediterranean base, Gibraltar. Its politicians were in no position to dispatch an expeditionary force against Sidi Muhammad to rescue a handful of low-grade hostages, and in any case, acting in that fashion was never at any time standard British policy. Britons who were captured at sea and brought to Morocco in this period customarily spent at least a year, and usually more, in confinement or engaged in hard labour there, until the Sultan of the day allowed negotiations to get under way for their release. So the Ann’s