Intrigued by the word 'Ordeal' in the title of the biography, the presumption is that Elizabeth Marsh is a victim of circumstances. The sub-title of the book, however, provides us with an insight. It reads: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History. One's interest has been piqued and there is no letting down.
Elizabeth Marsh (1735-1785) was conceived in Jamaica. Her mother Elizabeth Bouchier may have been of mixed ethnic origin. No documentary evidence remains. Her English father Milbourne Marsh arrived at Port Royal aboard The Kingston Royal Navy vessel which had been ordered to Caribbean waters in order to deter attacks on British merchant ships by Spanish armed coast-guards and to suppress any slave rebellions on the island. According to the historian David Eltis, 'The slave trade was possibly the most international activity of the pre-industrial era.' At the time of Marsh's arrival in Jamaica, there were some eighty thousand slaves most of them recent arrivals from West Africa. Aided by the slave workforce and the island's fertile and tropical topography; by the 1730s, with over four hundred sugar mills, the island was the biggest sugar-producer in Britain's Empire. Such economic prosperity attracted all and sundry whereby "Port Royal was probably the most crowded and expensive English-speaking urban settlement outside London." In a measure of conspicuous consumption, there developed a taste for imported Chinese ceramics.
Born in Portsmouth, England in 1735, Elizabeth lived on dry land her first nineteen years. Yet the sea with all its maritime connections was never distant. Milbourne Marsh became a master ship-builder. Portsmouth was the principal British depot outside of London of the East India Company. Ships from Bombay, Calcutta, Canton and Madras off-loaded their precious cargoes of ceramics, spices, tea and textile. The city was "a place of pioneering industrialization; and it was markedly cosmopolitan and caught up in intercontinental trade and migration" In the words of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: 'A merchant is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade…" In other words, the world is his stage.
Recipient of a genteel feminine eighteenth century education, she relished music, singing and reading. Arithmetic and accounts were included. Elizabeth also acquired fluency in French. Of interest is her background exposure. "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." All the personality traits were to manifest themselves in her future when transcontinental forces and events determined her life's path.
Struggling to make ends meet in a private dockyard, Milbourne Marsh in 1775 accepts the offer of Naval Officer in Menorca in the Mediterranean. The senior Marshs' also wanted to move out of what Daniel Defoe styled 'the upper station of low life.' He is now no longer a manual worker but a 'pen and ink' man and his daughter "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." A year later, the family moves to Gibraltar at the tip of Morocco and Spain. The old rivalry between Britain and France raises its head again in the Seven Years War. With the war spilling over into parts of Asia, the Caribbean and North America, stretched resources of the Royal Navy preclude adequate protection of the small island of Menorca. In Gibraltar Elizabeth Marsh charts her own path; and sets sail for England alone the commencement of her many journeys to distant horizons.
Her first experience comes soon enough. The ship transporting her and three other British men to England is captured by Moroccan corsairs. Once her father comes to know of the event, he as do the other two men on board "their first instinct is to make contact with public figures who are possessed of influence….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." None of her letters from Morocco or India have survived. Pre-judged of inconsequential value, this is one of the reasons why there is paucity of historical documentation by and of women. Furthermore, according to Linda Colley: "In the ancient, medieval and early modern world, such individuals, especially if they were female, rarely left an extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event: a trial for murder or heresy, say, or a major rebellion, or a massacre, or a conspiracy, or a slaver's voyage."
Captured by the ships of Morocco's acting Sultan, Sidi Muhammad; the four captives are held in the royal court at Marrakech. A young woman on her own, she is fearful of her security. Yet she manages to forestall becoming a European slave of the Sultan. One of the male captives, James Crisp is self-appointed as 'her cousin.' Her sojourn in Morocco results in her journal The Female Captive (her given title). It was published anonymously in 1769 and titled by the publisher as A Narrative of Facts which happened in Barbary. She is the first woman in history to write at length about Morocco in the English language. In the account, her biographer notes: "She (Marsh) 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." The only copy and that too a draft copy (1769) is to be found at the Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
"…an extended game of epistolary diplomacy, hard bargaining and naval posturing" and the assurance that a full-time British consul in Morocco to facilitate trading relations between the two countries would be appointed assured their release. Subsequently, James Crisp "her cousin' becomes her husband. Once again she is caught up in a world of "sea, empire, war and the ambitions of contending states. Crisp's intricate commercial existence involves transcontinental trade while based in London. Interestingly, the trade in Barcelona silk handkerchiefs for a niche market proves to be most lucrative. "They were favoured as luxury fashion accessories by both sexes. They were also perfect articles for smuggling, being light, easy to transport in large numbers, and yielding a very good price."
A bad investment in Florida brought Crisp financial ruin, whereby he set sail alone in 1769 for the Indian subcontinent to once again seek his fortune. His wife, son and daughter lived with her parents in Chatham, Kent, England where she wrote The Female Captive. With considerable insight, Colley remarks, The world was both widening and shrinking, and both of their lives had been twisted out of customary moulds in the process…It was commonplace that bankruptcy and a loss of credit-worthiness dishonoured a man in much the same way as loss of sexual virtue, or the imputation of it, dishonoured a woman. Directly, in Morocco, and now indirectly because of her husband's far-flung business failures, she had been exposed to shame and ruin twice over. Hers was 'story of real distress…"
Crisp's childhood connections proved valuable as Eyre Coote was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Company's armed forces in Madras. Crisp eventually landed the post of salt agent in Bhulua "that approximates now to the Noakhali district of Bangladesh." The boundaries and nature of his employment were provincial, tough and ultimately unsatisfying. Always a merchant and or a smuggler, he had for some time been trading with Persia an important market for Bengal cloth and also for its subsequent access to Ottoman territories. Both East India Company factories and private individual workshops produced "superlative, brilliantly coloured cloth for Western markets."
The couple's living standard improved. "It helped that living stylishly in Dhaka was relatively cheap. The difference in outlay for a European resident between there and Calcutta, one visitor calculated in 1765, bore the 'same proportion as between country and city in England. Maintaining a fashionable house in Calcutta could cost a merchant up to 1000 Pounds Sterling every year. But the substantial house that the Crisps acquired in Dhaka, together with its compound, was valued at 9010 rupees,,,"
However, Crisp's treading on commercial turfs of the East India Company incurred displeasure in high quarters. Furthermore, the impact of the American Revolution reverberated far and wide, whereby by 1779, both the volume and the value of textile exports from Bengal were plummeting. So was Crisp's physical and mental state. He died in Dhaka in 1779. If any monument was ever erected to him, it no longer exists. His wife and daughter were in England. His son Burrish moved from Calcutta to Dhaka to take care of his ailing father and following his father's demise, the deceased's meager estate.
Burrish early childhood reads like a story in itself. At the age of nine, he made the six month sea journey from England to Madras on his own. In Madras, within a year; a merchant "who may have been British, or Dutch, or Armenian, or Bengali, or Persian. Whoever he was, he took the boy into Persia for 'a considerable time', and whatever else happened to him there. Burrish Crisp did indeed learn Persian. By the age of twelve, he spoke and wrote the language perfectly." Not yet sixteen, Burrish Crisp secured in 1778 a Writership in the East India Company, ranking third out of a new intake of twenty-one candidates. Based at Fort William, Calcutta, Burrish joined a stable of bright young men who were translating Hindu and Persian legal and administrative texts into English for the Company. He soon caught the eye of Governor-General Warren Hastings. A promising career faltered for familial responsibilities; as he shifted to Dhaka to look after his father. A minor judicial official in Dhaka was Burrish's future. Yet his natural talent in languages made him a founding member of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He married an Indian woman. Transcontinental and Indian ties continued into the second generation. Elizabeth and her daughter Elizabeth Maria arrived in Madras from England in 1771. Elizabeth Maria at the age of seven was sent back to England 'to become well educated and accomplished' and was brought up by her grand-parents. She married George Shee, an East India Company covenanted servant in 1783 in Hooghly. He took up a Company judicial post in Dhaka.
Elizabeth Marsh having joined her husband in Dhaka in 1771 characteristically undertook a sea journey from Calcutta to Madras in 1774. The reason was ill-health. She was 'in a very languid state experiencing much pain in my side.' While later British residents took to the hills to escape the heat or recuperate; most unwell Britons in Elizabeth's time "sailed southwards for fresher costal breezes that might effect a recovery." Her protracted Indian journey continued for over eighteen months. She returned to Dhaka overland; passing through what are now Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in the company of Indian sepoys, coolies and palanquin-bearers and her young single 'cousin' Captain George Smith. In her Journal of a Voyage by sea from Calcutta to Madras, and of a journey from there back to Dacca,' she declared: 'She would pursue my journey by land, on a route, which no European lady had ever undertaken…before.' She did it and lived to write about it as well. The sole surviving copy of her Journal is also to be found at the Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. A brutal account of her radical mastectomy in Calcutta in 1785 is not for the faint-hearted. "…I then felt the Knife rackling against the breast bone scraping it." A few months later she passed away and lies buried in South Park cemetery, Calcutta. Her gravestone has long since disappeared, state the records of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA).
The woman who maintained her maiden name all her life was challenged and molded by forces and events well beyond her control. Much of her life was spent in motion and much of it on her own. In the words of her biographer, "In retrospect, it is possible to view Elizabeth Marsh's life as poised on a cusp between phases in world history." The rise of British naval power, the global reach of maritime-based commerce, slavery, the imperial diaspora, The American Revolution, the Anglo-French Seven Years War; all impacted the family unit, social structure and the independent spirit and natural resolve of Elizabeth Marsh. Her marriage a hollow shell and 'not-to-the-manor-born', she consistently sought security for her son and daughter. Her residence in Calcutta and Dhaka in the l770s and 1780s provides us with an uncommon insight into the places. The framework that the author has chosen to present is the product of extensive and intensive international research involving libraries across the world. A distinguished British historian, she has been associated with Princeton, Cambridge, Yale Universities and the London School of Economics and maintains numerable other affiliations.
What of the term 'ordeal' in the title? As the last page of an immensely engaging and informative book was turned, I had to concur with Paul Theroux in The Tao of Travel (2011), "Yet the travel book that recounts an ordeal is the sort that interests me most, because it tests the elemental human qualities needed for survival: determination, calmness, rationality, physical and mental strength."

Raana Haider is a writer who travels. Her forthcoming book is India: Beyond the Taj and the Raj. University Press Limited, Dhaka is forthcoming.