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