Who was she, this woman Milbourne Marsh took to wife? And how had she come to be in Port Royal before marrying her first husband in 1728? The name ‘Elizabeth Bouchier’ does not appear in lists of indentured servants and convicts from Britain coming to Jamaica around this time, though this does not prove she was not amongst them.24 Nor can she be conclusively identified from the surviving Jamaican parish registers – but then, these too are incomplete documents. No record of baptisms for Port Royal seems to have survived, for instance, earlier than 1722. More unusually, the Family Book that was compiled much later by Milbourne Marsh’s younger brother, George Marsh, yields no information about this woman. It was George Marsh’s custom, after introducing individual family members in the Book, to allocate a brief sentence to their spouses, especially if this could illustrate his clan’s respectability and upward mobility. Thus, while he set down his cousin Warren’s wife as ‘a very bad woman’, he was much more concerned to record how his own father had married ‘the best of women’, and how his niece Margaret Duval’s husband was a ‘most worthy sensible good man’, and so forth. In the paragraphs of the Family Book he devoted to Milbourne Marsh, however, the relevant sentences where a judgement on his elder brother’s spouse might have been expected have been inked out.25 The Marsh family’s surviving correspondence also reveals nothing about this woman, and only very occasionally acknowledges her existence. Virtually the only extant formal record of the Elizabeth Bouchier who became first Elizabeth Evans and then Elizabeth Marsh, after her brief appearance in Kingston’s marriage register, is her (now removed) memorial tablet in a church in Chatham, Kent. ‘She was’, Milbourne Marsh had engraved there, ‘a good Christian wife and mother.’ But after this careful testimonial, he supplied no details of her parentage or place of origin.26
She remains a question mark in this story, therefore, but there are at least two possible answers. A widow called Margaret Boucher is listed in the Port Royal vestry minutes as living in a rented house in the town in the late 1730s, and as in receipt of occasional charity. Given the casualness with which surnames, especially those of the poor, were recorded at this time, Milbourne Marsh’s new wife may have been this woman’s daughter. If so, she was white or passed for such, since Margaret Boucher’s name is included in ‘A List of the white inhabitants of this parish’ compiled in Port Royal in 1738.27 If this particular ‘Margaret Boucher’ was her widowed mother, the woman who had once gone under the name of Elizabeth Bouchier clearly left her behind in Jamaica when she escaped to England in 1735, and she made no effort to perpetuate Margaret Boucher’s first name when she came to christen her own daughter.
There is however another possibility. There were Bourchiers – and not just Bouchers – resident in Jamaica at this time. The former, whose surname was also spelt in various ways and who seem to have arrived on the island in the 1660s, were planters. If she did possess some blood relationship with this family, the woman who went on to become Elizabeth Marsh’s mother is unlikely to have been a legitimate child. Daughters of Caribbean planters born in wedlock did not customarily go on to marry shipwrights. She might conceivably have been a mulatto, the mixed-race, possibly christened child of a white landowner – perhaps Charles Bourchier, who died in 1726 – and an African slave mother.28 Or there may have been no blood relationship, just a plantation past at some point. Manumitted slaves in Jamaica sometimes took and kept the surnames of their former owners.
It was widely believed that incoming mariners established easier, more equal relations with members of Jamaica’s black and mulatto population than most of the island’s white residents were willing or able to do. ‘Sailors and negroes are ever on the most amicable terms,’ a one-time resident in Jamaica wrote later:
This is evidenced in their dealings, and in the mutual confidence and familiarity that never subsist between the slaves and the resident whites. There is a feeling of independence in their intercourse with the sailor, that is otherwise bound up in the consciousness of a bitter restraint … In the presence of the sailor, the Negro feels as a man.29
This was an overly sentimental verdict. At least one of the reasons for incoming British sailors cultivating members of Jamaica’s black population was crudely exploitative: the number of single white women in the island’s port towns who were of artisan or servant status, and therefore potentially available as seamen’s companions, was very limited.
Nonetheless, this kind of socializing rested on more than sex, money and loneliness. Visiting sailors and blacks tended to come together on this and other Caribbean islands because they shared a consciousness of difference. If blacks and mulattos were divided from Creole settlers by their skin colour, culture of origin, belief systems and, usually, their un-freedom, sailors too were a people apart, ‘a generation differing from all the world’.30 Tanned, often with long pigtails and amateurish ‘tattoos’ made with ink or gunpowder, markedly agile, and frequently mutilated in some way, sailors looked very different from men who spent all their lives on land. They walked, moved and dressed differently. They possessed, like Jamaica’s black population, their own distinct vocabularies, songs and magical beliefs; and crucially they were transients, men who had left home, family and country, or been torn away from them by press gangs. That they should sometimes have gravitated towards men and women who had also been snatched, even more brutally, from their homelands, was scarcely surprising. In Kingston parish, where Milbourne Marsh married Elizabeth Evans in December 1734, two graveyards ‘to the westward and leeward of the town’ were reserved for ‘free people of colour’ on the one hand, and for ‘soldiers, seamen, and transient people of every description’ on the other.31 Even in death, mariners, mulattos and blacks might be set apart from everyone else, and placed together.
They also came together at sea. Rather like Jamaica itself, the Royal Navy was at once violent, dangerous, cosmopolitan and innovating: ‘a new kind of power, which must change the face of the globe’.32 Some of the most complex and expensive machines of their age, the navy’s ships were relatively tolerant and – to a controlled degree – even meritocratic spaces. The skills involved in maintaining and sailing these vessels were so specialized, and in such high demand, that possessing them could sometimes trump a man’s skin colour, just as it often trumped social class.33 Like most navy men, Milbourne Marsh was accustomed to working alongside sailors who were free blacks. Such men enjoyed the same rights and earned the same wages as their white counterparts. In the Caribbean, the navy also employed black slave seamen, who did the same job as equivalent whites and free blacks, and worked and lived alongside them, but whose wages were paid to their owners. This was the case with a close comrade of Milbourne’s, John Cudjoe. He worked as one of the two servants allowed Milbourne in his capacity as ship’s carpenter: ‘servant’ in this context meaning an apprentice under training. Both servants earned the same wage, just under £14 per annum on