The moral that family members were encouraged to draw from these stories – and Elizabeth Marsh certainly grew up believing this – was that they were marked out in some fashion, and deserving of more than their immediate, circumscribed surroundings and conditions of life. The stories also reveal something else about how she grew up. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, long-distance migration was not an aspect of the coming of modernity. Frequently, it was a practice that was learnt and adopted by a family’s members over successive generations, and that often increased in scale and duration in the process. Elizabeth Marsh’s restlessness, it is clear, was in part an inherited trait. Her father Milbourne Marsh took ship to the Caribbean, but his forebears were also sailors and migrants. His father and grandfather were mariners familiar with European waters. His mother’s family moved between northern England and Scotland, and then down to southern England. And whether Elizabeth’s own mother’s roots lay in West Africa or in England, she too must have been of voluntary or involuntary migrant stock, before sailing herself across the Atlantic to England in 1735.
From Milbourne Marsh’s family – and perhaps from her mother’s – Elizabeth Marsh also inherited good looks and physical toughness. Milbourne’s father, George Marsh senior, was described as a ‘remarkable fine person’, ‘upwards of six feet high … very upright and well proportioned, [and] amazingly strong and healthy’. Although the Navy Board awarded him a pension in the mid-1740s, he seems to have continued working part-time as a shipwright, and was seventy when he was killed in an industrial accident in 1753.54 Married in 1707, he and Elizabeth Milbourne produced nine children and, unusually for their time and social level, eight of them reached adulthood. What were then untreatable diseases, and maritime accidents, killed off five of these Marsh progeny before they reached the age of forty, but the life spans of the remaining three confirm a family tendency towards physical vigour and good health. Milbourne Marsh (b.1709) lived to be almost seventy; George Marsh the younger (b.1722) made seventy-eight; while their sister Mary Marsh (b.1712) reached her eighties. It is striking too how, in different ways, and in conformity with the family’s stock of stories, all three of these longer-lived Marsh siblings constructed for themselves richer, more varied existences than their parents. Even Mary Marsh’s life, hampered by her gender, illustrates this. Once in her teens, she went to London to find work, and married a French Huguenot, Jean Duval. He worked as a baker in Spitalfields, a once semi-rural suburb in the east of London that has always attracted a disproportionate number of refugees and immigrants. This alliance with a family of French origins, attached to another form of Protestantism, made more than Mary’s own life more diverse. Visits to aunt Mary and uncle Duval in London in the 1740s and early ’50s seem to have allowed Elizabeth Marsh to learn to speak and read French, one of the prime accomplishments that normally connoted gentility.55
The ‘industrious revolution’, as the marked changes in family aspirations at this time have been called, a rising level, throughout Europe and North America and possibly beyond, of individual and clan desire, expectations, and household expenditure, also affected Milbourne Marsh, and to a more spectacular degree his brother, George Marsh the younger.56 The temperaments and changing fortunes of these two men, Elizabeth Marsh’s father and her uncle, are important because both men played crucial roles in her development, influencing what she came to be, and what she came to do.
Like most mariners in the age of sail, Milbourne Marsh had gone to sea very early. He recalled in middle age how, when just eleven years old and already sailing the Mediterranean, he was regularly handling explosives. He would be sent on shore from whatever vessel he was on at the time, and ordered to blow up rocks into small stones so as to provide ballast for the ship’s hold.57 Yet to view him simply as a manual labourer would be quite wrong. Thomas Rowlandson’s sensitive study of a ship’s carpenter was made more than a decade after Milbourne’s death, but the tools the artist gives his figure – an adze in one hand and a drawing instrument in the other – accurately convey the occupation’s composite quality. As suggested by the adze (an axe with a curved blade), it involved hard physical effort. Timber had to be cut to size, a ship’s rotten wood and any cannon shot embedded in it cut out and made good. As indicated by the drawing instrument, however, this was only part of the job. Milbourne was fully literate, and he had to be. A ship’s carpenter was expected to write ‘an exact and particular account’ of his vessel’s condition and propose solutions to any defects. He needed to know basic accounting so as to estimate the cost of repairs, and keep check of his stocks of timber and other stores. And he required mathematical and geometrical skills: enough to draw plans, calculate the height of a mast from the deck, and estimate the weight of anchors and what thickness of timber was required to support them.58
Looked at this way, it becomes easier to understand why the foremost English shipwright of the late seventeenth century, Anthony Deane (c.1638–1720), was knighted and made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Because of increased transoceanic trade, expanding empire, the growth of European and of some non-European fighting navies, and recurrent warfare, skills of the sort that Milbourne Marsh commanded were in urgent national and international demand. Not for nothing do we refer today to ‘navigating’ and ‘surfing’ the web. Rather like cyberspace now, the sea in Milbourne Marsh’s time was the vital gateway to a more interconnected world. Consequently, those in possession of the more specialist maritime skills were in a position to rise economically, and often socially as well. ‘The Ship-Carpenter … to become master of his business must learn the theory as well as practice,’ Britain’s most widely read trade directory insisted in 1747: ‘it is a business that one seldom wants bread in, either at home or abroad.’59
The nature of her father’s occupation was of central importance in Elizabeth Marsh’s life. At one level, and along with her many other seafaring relations, Milbourne Marsh gave her access to one of the few eighteenth-century organizations genuinely possessed of something approaching global reach: the Royal Navy. This proved vital to her ability to travel. Long-distance oceanic journeying was expensive, but over the years Elizabeth’s family connections repeatedly secured her free or cheap passage on various navy vessels. She also gained, by way of these maritime menfolk, a network of contacts that stretched across oceans: in effect two extended families, her own, and the navy itself. ‘A visit from Mr. Panton, the 1st Lieutenant of the Salisbury,’ she would record while sailing off the eastern coast of the Indian subcontinent in 1775: ‘he seemed well acquainted with most of my family.’60
But her father’s occupation also impacted on her in less enabling ways. It is conceivable that she grew up aware that her mother was different in some manner, or looked at askance by her relations. She certainly seems to have been perpetually insecure about her own and her family’s social position. Milbourne Marsh was from a self-regarding maritime dynasty that encouraged ambition, and he was a master craftsman in a global trade; but his was still an interstitial, sometimes vulnerable existence, lived out between the land and the sea, and between the labouring masses on the one hand, and the officer class on the other. Some of the tensions that could ensue can be seen in two crises that threatened for a while to engulf them all.
In April 1741, six of Milbourne’s workmen in Portsmouth dockyard sent a letter to its Commissioner accusing the carpenter of embezzlement. He had kept back new beds and bedding intended for his current ship, the Cambridge, his accusers claimed, and arranged for them to be smuggled out of the yard at midday, ‘when all the people belonging thereto are absent’. He had used naval timber to make window