Welcome to the History Extra podcast.
In 1756, Elizabeth Marsh set sail from Gibraltar to Britain with the intention of meeting her fiancé.
Instead, she was captured by Barbary corsairs and taken to a Moroccan prince.
But could she win her freedom?
Here talking to Spencer Mizzen.
Adam Nicholls tells a story of lust trickery, a fake marriage and the delicate relationship between Britain and the power brokers of North Africa.
Adam, you wrote a feature for the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History magazine on Elizabeth Marsh, a young English woman taken captive by Barbary pirates in the 18th century.
Can you start by introducing us to Elizabeth?
What is it about her life that made it so extraordinary?
The most interesting thing about Elizabeth Marsh is that she was a woman of her time.
She was captured by Barbary Corsairs, but she wasn't just a woman on a ship who got caught by pirates.
She was caught up in what we would think of today as large-scale geopolitical events.
Her dad was a ship's carpenter, and he was an ambitious man.
And he went to Jamaica with the Navy in hopes of bettering himself.
And while he was in Jamaica, he managed to marry a widow who had some property.
She owned a tavern.
And she conceived Elizabeth in Jamaica.
And the two of them went back to England.
So she was an international person right from the get-go.
And she grew up in Portsmouth which, in those days, was full of all sorts of people from all corners of planet.
So she was familiar with a far broader range of cultures and languages and religions and types of people than an ordinary young woman of her generation.
And she was connected with the Navy.
So her father was a ship's carpenter, and he was often away on ships and came back with stories.
And she had, although her physical world It was a very restricted one.
The world that came to her door was way broader than we would normally think.
So she'd have known about this wider world via the stories her father told her when he returned from his travels.
Right.
And the people she saw wandering the streets of Portsmouth.
They were like I say.
They're all kinds of people, including North Africans.
Traders, not corsairs, of course, but traders and merchants.
So she had a far broader mental horizon than we would probably think.
As I said earlier, she was taken captive by Barbary corsairs.
How did she end up on a ship in the Mediterranean for that to happen?
Her uncle was part of the Navy.
He was a clerk.
But he was a clerk in a fairly serious job.
And he managed to pull some strings and he got his brother, Elizabeth Marsh's father, a job in the Mediterranean, on the Balearic Islands.
And they were there a year or so when war broke out between France and England.
And the English could not hold the islands together.
And so the people there were evacuated to Gibraltar, at which point it even began to look like Gibraltar might not stand.
And so she wanted to get out.
There's an almost pride and prejudice side to this.
I think of Elizabeth Marsh as a kind of real life version of Elizabeth Bennett.
And she has that plucky aspect to her, wedded with the sort of typical 19th century delicate feminine aspect.
She had a fiancé, a young naval captain, and they were affianced, as they used to say, and she was going to England to meet up with him.
And so she arranged a passage aboard a ship.
And they went out on a convoy to be protected from the French and, of course, the Corsairs as well.
And they hit a fog bank, and everybody lost everybody.
And then, when the fog lifted, they could see the warship that was their protection sailing off in the distance.
They tried to catch up but couldn't.
They were a little merchant ship and they sprung a leak and there was six feet of water in the hold before they knew it.
So they fixed the leak.
And there they were, on their own in the middle of the Mediterranean, when they spotted a sail.
And the sail, of course, was the Sale Corsair.
But they weren't captured and enslaved.
North African corsairs did that.
They captured European ships and the people in them took the merchandise, sold it at auction in the souks, the markets in North Africa, and sold the people into slavery.
But Elizabeth Marsh and her companions were not enslaved.
They were part of this.
As I say, this larger geopolitical setup where the North African states were in a constant series of treaties wars truces betrayals, just like Europe at the time right.
Everybody was making these arrangements and breaking them and new arrangements.
And so the Moroccans were in the process of trying to renegotiate the details of her treaty with England.
So she was kind of a pawn in this relationship.
She was exactly that.
Right.
Exactly that.
Which gave her a certain protection because you don't want to destroy your pawn.
Otherwise, your pawn has no more use.
The reason we know what we know about Elizabeth is that she wrote a book the female captive in the mid-18th century about her experiences.
Can you tell us a little bit about that book, and how unusual was it for a woman to write about her experiences in this way?
This is the kind of book that at the time would have had a certain notoriety.
Europeans, particularly the English, always had this sort of lurid sexualized fantasy about North Africa and what happens to young English women who get taken by North Africans.
So there was a certain titillation aspect about the whole thing.
It was never a bestseller.
But as I understand it, it had a certain notoriety in its time.
And it was new.
This is the first English female narrative about North Africa.
She's the first one to do it.
And I think one of the reasons she was able to do that is because of her background, because she was not the usual sort of cosseted young woman.
Her family.
In terms of the socioeconomic scale of the day, they were the top end of the bottom end, if that makes sense, right?
One of her aunts married a French Huguenot, so she learned French, which was, if you were a cultured young woman in those days, you spoke French.
So she knew French.
She knew some Spanish.
She certainly knew geography.
She heard a lot of stories.
She could do math.
She could do bookkeeping.
She was quite an accomplished young woman.
So writing a novel was not by any means an impossible task for her.
And what sort of woman emerges from the pages of the book?
Do we get a sense of, you know, Elizabeth's personality from reading the book?
Well, that's another very interesting question, because that book suffers from the same problem that many books suffer from.
It was edited, and it was edited in order to make it a successful publication and earn money for the publisher.
And so she comes across in the book as a delicate, young Christian female in need of protection, prone to fainting and having the vapors.
But at the same time, she stands up to the Moroccan sultan.
So there's a kind of Declan.
Hyde is perhaps too strong a way of putting it, but there's a split personality here.
So you said just now that she stood up to the Sultan.
I mean, I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit.
What happens next?
What happens next is the Sultan, who has a reputation for fancying European women, especially young, pretty European women, wants to see her.
So they arrive in Saleh on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, but he's in Marrakesh.
And he's not actually yet the sultan.
He's the sultan to be.
So he wants to see Elizabeth.
He's very interested in her.
He gives orders and they march over land to Marrakesh, where he immediately demands that she come into his chambers.
And he meets her and is impressed.
He can have any woman he wants, but he cannot have married women.
The Koran forbids that.
You can't sleep with another man's wife.
That's out of, you can't do that.
But if the woman is Christian and married to a Christian husband and she converts to Islam, the marriage is automatically annulled and she's fair game.
So that's why her companion pretended to be her husband to protect her from the sultan.
And as long as they could keep up that pretense, Sidi Mohammed, the sultan, couldn't just take her.
And although he's a complete despot, he does play by the rules.
So as long as she is married, he can't touch her.
So there is this scene where, according to Elizabeth Marsh, she's tricked.
And just saying you know there is no God but Allah, which is all you have to do if you convert to Islam.
In those days, all the stories are you hold one finger up, you point to the sky and you repeat that and you have converted.
So the story she told you, she was tricked into converting.
That means she's eligible for the harem.
So there's this great flurry of enthusiasm.
And all the other wives who were in the room seemed perfectly happy with this.
But in the end, Sidi Mohammed backstabbed, doesn't he?
He had all the power in this relationship.
And it seems to me that, you know, if we believe Elizabeth, she had very few cards to play.
So what happened next?
How did she outwit him?
We have to trust that she's telling the truth.
Sure.
We don't know.
We have to take her out of her word, right?
The card she had to play was that she was a pawn, that she was valuable to Sidi Mohammed as long as the English believed they could get her back intact.
He could keep her if he could get her to tell the English that she had willingly chosen not to return.
Then he could keep her.
But if he kept her by force...
He had this much larger political deal going.
He wanted to change the details of the treaty with the English to get a better deal for Morocco.
And one of his lovers were these captives, not just Elizabeth, but the others as well.
It was James Crisp and there was an Irishman and his son.
So it was four passengers plus the captain and crew of the ship they've been traveling on.
He had to keep them healthy and alive and available.
And it worked.
He'd managed to change the terms of the treaty and the captives were returned.
But basically, they were hostages in this negotiation.
So T.J.
Muhammad's only option here. was to try and convince Elizabeth to willingly stay.
And so he presented her with this vast array of goodies and said, they're all yours, baby.
Thinking that how could she possibly refuse?
Because no Moroccan woman would refuse this.
It's just beyond his imagination to think that somebody would say no.
And then if the story is to be believed.
In a fit of petulance, he said well, I'm going to burn you at the stake if you don't do this.
I'm not sure anybody was still being burned at the stake in Morocco at the time.
It could be that Sidi Mohamed knew that this was a threat that Europeans could take to heart, because it was part of European history.
But when she just said go ahead, I don't know whether she knew he couldn't go through with that threat, because that would ruin her value as a pawn.
And she was the most important pawn, right?
So she called his bluff effectively then.
And it was a bluff.
She had the gumption to stand up to him, but it wasn't her individual action so much as the larger context.
It was more important to him, no matter how much you might fancy the girl, It was more important to him to achieve his political aims rather than his personal.
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So we did achieve those political aims and Elizabeth was eventually allowed to travel home.
Just briefly, what happened to her after that?
I mean, what did the rest of her life have in store for her?
She and James Crisp got married because the naval captain withdrew from the engagement because her reputation in polite society had been stained.
She had been alone unchaperoned, in the private chambers of a Moroccan sultan, and who knew what dastardly things might have happened.
So in polite society, she was a questionable commodity.
So the naval captain said, that's it, I'm out of here.
I don't want anything more to do with you.
At which point, Crisp seemed the best option.
He had in fact proposed to her, On the Balearic Islands, and she'd turned him down.
She'd gone with this handsome young naval captain instead.
And there's some possibility that, in fact, Crisp was pressured into marrying her to save her reputation.
We don't really know, but that's a possibility.
In any case, she married him.
He was a merchant and a smuggler.
And they moved to England.
And for a while, things went well.
And then again, these larger geopolitical realities, there was a bad combination of these things.
And he went bankrupt.
And to escape that, he fled to India to try and start anew.
It was a place where there were all sorts of opportunities for a merchant.
And Elizabeth had to move in with her parents at Chatham Docks.
She had two kids and no money.
And that's when she wrote the book.
She needed money.
And it was the only thing she could think of to get some income.
So she wrote the book and got some money for that.
And her husband began to prosper in India.
He wasn't getting rich, but at least he was surviving and making a living.
And he brought her and the two kids out to India.
And, as far as we can tell, this manuscript that contains a version of the book is bound together with another manuscript that contains a journal of her time in India that has never been published.
And that is very interesting.
It's the real Elizabeth Marsh, you know, this much more self-assertive and independent woman.
And she took off.
She left her husband, the kids were put in school and she traveled India for like a year and a half.
She and a young army soldier.
Which, of course, raises interesting questions.
But she took off and just traveled all around India.
And then she had the horrible misfortune to get breast cancer.
It's hard to imagine, but she somehow survived a mastectomy without anesthetic.
Just think of that for a moment.
So she survived that. but she didn't survive the disease.
And she and her husband both died in India.
Yeah.
So it's quite a sad ending to her story then, basically.
Okay Adam, I'm going to broaden this out a little bit, because you've written widely on Barbary Corsairs over recent years.
You wrote a book called Corsairs and Captives.
Narratives from the Golden Age of Barbary Pirates, which was published only last year.
So I wonder if I could just ask you to tell us a little bit about Barbary Corsairs.
What made the North African coast such a fertile hunting ground for these vessels?
Large scale geopolitical events.
And we can pin it down to the beginning of it, to one particular year 1492, which seems unlikely, right.
That's the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
What does that have to do with North African pirates?
But it's also the year that the Spanish reconquista, the reconquering of Spain from the Muslims.
That finally succeeded and the last Muslim sultanate in the Iberian Peninsula, in Granada, was overrun.
And that was it.
Islam was finished in Spain.
A huge number, hundreds of thousands of Muslims fled and went to North Africa, and they were pissed.
They'd been there for the better part of eight centuries.
That was their home.
They'd just been evicted from their home.
And they wanted to get back.
And if they couldn't get back, at least they wanted revenge.
And one of the ways that they could get revenge was piracy.
Also, from the Spanish point of view, they'd want to battle, but not the war.
Because this is not just Spain.
It's the Spanish Habsburg Empire that, at this point, took in a lot of Europe what is now the Netherlands and Belgium, parts of Italy, parts of what are now Germany.
And they were in an existential struggle for dominance with the Ottoman Empire.
And so the Spanish authorities felt themselves under existential threat.
And so they decided that they needed to take the fight to the enemy in order to protect the homeland.
And so they invaded North Africa.
And they took a series of towns, moving down from Tangier and moving eastwards across the Mediterranean coast of Africa, taking one town after another and occupying it.
And of course, they created this huge blowback.
And so now it wasn't just the ex-occupants of Spain that were pissed at the Spaniards.
Everybody was.
But there's another aspect of this, too.
At this point, North Africa was in chaos.
At this point there were two sets of indigenous inhabitants the Berbers, who'd been there forever, and the Arabs, come boiling out of the Middle East in the eighth century and had settled all throughout North Africa.
And they were all duking it out for supremacy.
It was a hornet's nest of all sorts of things.
And dynasties were rising and collapsing and new ones were showing up.
It was a land of opportunity for ambitious men.
And then the Spaniards get involved in the mix.
And then the Barbarossa brothers get involved.
You know, the famous Barbarossa's.
Yes.
Can you tell us a little bit more about them then?
Because they're really big players in this story.
They really are.
Yeah.
They were European renegades.
Renegades were Europeans who converted to Islam.
They realized that there were opportunities available to them now in this chaos, in this power vacuum.
And they just didn't know.
What their entrance would be.
They knew the possibility was there.
They were just waiting for an entrance.
And then they got it.
The Spanish had not occupied Algiers, but they had occupied an island in the harbor.
And they built a fortress, put cannon in it, and they commanded the city.
And the residents of Algiers did not like this.
They wanted the Spanish out.
And they didn't have the resources to do it themselves.
And they looked around and they thought, ah, the Barbarosas, they're just the boys to do this.
So they contacted them and said, would you help us get rid of the Spanish?
And they were two brothers, Oroch and Herodin.
Oroch is the older one, Herodin is the younger one.
And Uruk, being the elder brother, was of course in charge.
And he said, no problem, we can do this.
So they picked up essentially an army and they marched into Algiers, fired a few cannon shots at the Peignan, at the fortress, and then gave up.
And the next step was that Uruk Barbarossa strangled the leader of the forces in Algiers.
In his bath and declared himself king of Algiers.
He didn't get rid of the Spanish.
He just got a kingdom for himself.
Was it from here then that they started attacking European shipping in the Mediterranean?
Was this the seeds of that?
It was the seeds, yeah, because they were pirates, right?
But they still had this problem with the Spanish.
On the pinyons, they call it on the island.
So Uruk Barbarossa sort of put that on the back burner for the moment and wanted to extend his empire, which he proceeded to do.
But in a town called Clemson, a couple of hundred kilometers west of Algiers, he was killed.
He was killed by the Spanish.
And his younger brother then had a problem.
Clearly, the empire that he and Uruk had imagined was not going to work.
They weren't going to be able to take over North Africa.
And he still had the Spanish on this island with guns aimed at the city.
So that was his first priority.
He had to get rid of them.
And unlike his brother, he focused on doing that.
And he bombarded the fortress for a couple of weeks, pounded it to rubble.
And then launched several boats full of guys onto the island and took the fortress.
It was helped by the fact that the Spanish were not supplying it properly.
They ran out of ammunition.
They didn't have any food or water.
They really didn't stand a chance.
But still, Herod and Barbarossa now had a problem.
What was he going to do?
The Spanish were going to come back.
It was too strategic a place for them to ignore.
And he didn't have the resources to resist the Spanish Habsburg Empire.
So he turned to the Ottomans and he said if you come and help me, I'll make Algiers one of your places.
We'll be part of your empire.
Geopolitical maneuverings, right?
And the Ottoman sultan said, sure.
Sounds like a great plan to me.
And so all of a sudden, Algiers gets the resources it needs.
Its leader is a pirate.
Many of its citizens are seriously pissed at the Spanish.
And that's the beginning.
That's the beginning of Algiers as the Corsair capital. of the Mediterranean.
Did they specifically target European shipping?
Or is it basically a case of preying upon any vessel that they happen to come across?
Oh no, it was specifically European.
Pirates are pirates.
You know, they'll attack anybody.
But it was European shipping.
And technically speaking, Barbary Corsairs aren't pirates.
They're privateers.
There's a legal difference.
A privateer is employed by a government or a monarch to attack and harass and sink enemy shipping.
And enemy is the key word.
They're part of a war effort.
And a privateer who's captured by the enemy is a prisoner of war.
A pirate who's captured by the enemy is a pirate and hanged outright.
They had letters of authorization from their governments and they went out and they only attacked the people, at least in theory.
They only attacked the people that they were permitted to attack by their letters of authorization.
How widely did they range?
Where would you find Barbary Corsairs attacking their prey?
They started out.
Just in the Mediterranean.
And they started out using oared galleys.
The oared galleys are essentially motorboats run by human muscle.
And oared galleys are great in a relatively placid sea like the Mediterranean, but useless on the open waters of the Atlantic.
So for the better part of a century, they were restricted to the Mediterranean.
And when were they at the height of their powers?
You said the words are better part of a century.
When exactly are we talking about?
The Barbarossas are the middle part of the first half of this 1500s, 1530s, 40s, that kind of stuff.
The Barbary Corsairs reached. their peak about 100 years later in the early mid-1600s.
But to understand what they're doing and why all this happened.
There's another side to it, and that's the religious side.
Slavery in Islam is okay, but there are rules.
And the rules are that the only people who can be legally enslaved Our prisoners of war.
And only when that war is a war that is authorized by Sharia law.
It can't be an illicit war.
It has to be a legally authorized war.
And the captives can be enslaved or ransomed or whatever you want to do.
Nobody else.
Offspring of slaves can be enslaved.
But that's it.
So the whole Barbara Corsair enterprise begins as a religious jihad against the Spanish, because the Spanish Muslims want to get their land back.
But it morphs into a business enterprise.
They start out.
It's a religious war.
It's not just piracy, it's war.
And so they fight the enemy, they take the captives.
Now these captives legally can be enslaved.
So they bring them back and they sell them at the slave markets.
And then they use the funds to make themselves rich, but also finance more expeditions.
And that process over the decades... becomes a huge economic driver of North Africa.
And cities like Algiers and Tunis and Tripoli and eventually Saleh.
That's their main source of income.
They're economically dependent on the Corsairing enterprises.
And so it becomes an international corporate business enterprise.
How much money were they making?
I mean, can it be So put into context in 21st century terms.
In the aggregate, huge amounts of money.
A city like Algiers taxed everything.
They got a lot of money from taxes, a little bit here and a little bit there, but it all amounted up.
But the individual corsairs themselves led a kind of hand-to-mouth existence.
Because a lot of what happened was determined just by luck.
You head off onto the ocean, who knows who you're going to find.
You might cruise around for two months and never encounter a good prey ship.
Or you might stumble across a Spanish galleon full of gold and silver.
You just don't know.
But unless you stumble across one of those prey ships that is full of treasure, you're just basically making a living.
If you, if you, get a ship that's full of sugar and you bring that back and you sell it and you have a cargo of you know five tons of sugar, the price of sugar is going to go way down because there's a glut on the market, So you're not going to get that much money.
And it's hugely expensive to run a Corsair ship.
You know, it's a struggle.
Some people got really rich.
Do we know how many Europeans were enslaved by Barbary Corsairs over decades or centuries?
They were in operation and how were they treated generally?
It's really hard to know how many people were taken captive.
The best estimate that I know of, it's about 300 years, early 1500s to early 1800s.
The best estimate I know is about a million.
That's a guesstimate, but it seems a quite reasonable one.
However, People also claim that there were about 2 million North Africans taken captive and enslaved in Europe.
In fact, there were more Muslim slaves in Europe than there were European slaves in North Africa.
I'm not sure if that was the case, but certainly everybody was doing it.
It wasn't just North Africans that were taking people captive and enslaving them.
The Europeans did exactly the same thing.
And how large did the Barbary Corsairs loom in the European imagination?
I mean, was there something that could be described as a Barbary Corsair panic?
Oh, yeah.
You remember back in the early 2000s, an inconvenient truth?
Yes.
Remember that phrase?
The Barbary Corsairs were an inconvenient truth.
They terrorized Europe for 300 years.
Sailing the Mediterranean was extremely risky.
I've written a series of books with an Icelandic colleague of mine, Carl Smaragd Hansen, about the attack on Iceland, Corsairs from Algiers and Saleh.
There's a lot of cooperation between the different Corsair cities.
They were everywhere and everybody was just terrified of them.
So finally, Adam, how did the age of the Barbary Corsairs come to an end?
What did the big European powers do in the end to sort of end what they saw as a scourge of the Barbary Corsairs?
One of the ironies in all of this is that The Barbary Courses taken individually Algiers Tripoli Tunis, Saleh they were relatively small city-states.
They didn't have the resources or the power of any individual European country.
If the European countries had just cooperated, they could have squashed them at any time.
But they didn't cooperate.
And the Barbary Corsairs had this knack of playing one power off against another.
And the French made treaty arrangements with the Algerians, but they were quite happy to have the Algerians attack the Spanish because that kept the Spanish busy.
And so this went on for the better part of 300 years, with the Corsairs playing one power off against another.
But gradually, the European powers got stronger and stronger and bigger and better financed.
They had access to the whole planet.
The Corsair city-states didn't.
And so the resources available to the European states were just getting exponentially more and more and more.
Until eventually, in the early 1800s, the individual European states had the resources simply to stamp out the Corsair city-states.
So 1830, thereabouts.
The French decided it had enough with the Algerians.
And they just invaded Algiers.
That was it.
Invaded the place, took over.
No more piracy was over.
And then everything else collapsed, the domino effect.
Everything else collapsed very quickly.
And by the mid-1800s, there were no more Barbary pirates.
They're just a memory.
That was Adam Nichols speaking to Spencer Mizzen.
Adam is a former associate professor at the University of Maryland, focusing on Barbary corsairs.
His books include Corsairs and Captives, Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates on big lives.
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