Marsh, Elizabeth

Biography

Elizabeth Marsh, a middle-class Englishwoman, was born in 1735 to a naval dockyard manager and his wife. She was living with her parents in Minorca when the start of the Seven Years' War in 1756 forced the family to relocate to Gibraltar. On a sailing voyage to visit friends in England, her ship was attacked by corsairs. Marsh, along with the other passengers and sailors, was taken captive and sent to Sallee (Salé) and then Marrakesh (Marrakech), Morocco. Her sufferings were politically motivated; the soon-to-be sultan, Sidi Mohammed, had responded to the insulting behavior of an envoy of the British government with a wave of aggressive captive-taking. Marsh was ransomed by the British government after several months, and returned safely to Gibraltar.

During her initial voyage, she was traveling (she states) under the protection of a family friend, a young merchant named James Crisp. The two claimed to be siblings upon the commencement of their captivity, and later claimed to be married, ostensibly to protect Marsh from the sexual interest of Sidi Mohammed. Marsh narrates that, by repeating some words spoken to her by one of his women, she converted or was tricked into converting to Islam. It took a great deal of tears and pleading to convince Mohammed to respect her preference of remaining a "married" Christian woman. After her release, Marsh returned to her parents and married Crisp legally. The pair settled in England until financial troubles forced Crisp to relocate to India, where his wife eventually joined him and where the two remained until the ends of their lives. If her journal of her tour of the Indian coast is any indication, her traumatic Barbary experience did not quash her taste for adventure, and she seems to have enjoyed traveling despite the dangers and discomforts she sometimes faced. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter. Both their son and son-in-law worked for the East India Company.

Some of the details of Marsh's life as she gives it in these works have indeed been verified (see Linda Colley's work), although this does not mean that all aspects of her narratives are invariably true.

From the guide to the Elizabeth Marsh Narrative of her Captivity in Barbary [...et al.], [between 1760 and 1795], (University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections.)