In 1756, a young Englishwoman was taken hostage by Barbary pirates. This is her story

Taken hostage by a Barbary ship’s captain in the 18th century, a young Englishwoman found herself fighting for her freedom in Marrakech. Adam Nichols introduces a brave captive who later wrote a book about her dramatic experiences

A purple and blue illustration shows a young woman in a long dress with frilly sleeves, holding a red book. Around her, there is a pirate ship and a man dressed in white robes, sitting crossed-legged on a rug

Published: January 9, 2026 at 3:00 PM

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The Barbary corsair ship appeared suddenly on the horizon, bristling with cannon. Its decks swarming with armed men, it sliced through the waves at a clip that its quarry – the British merchant ship Ann – could not match. At that time, in the mid-18th century, such pirate attacks were violent, bloody affairs; if the Ann’s captain tried to resist, he would be risking the lives of his crew, his passengers and himself, and would likely see his ship sunk. He surrendered.

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The corsair captain swaggered aboard the British vessel without firing a shot, and surveyed his captives. He was one of the infamous Sallee Rovers operating out of Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, who sold any Europeans they captured into slavery. The captain ordered the Ann’s four passengers to be taken to his ship, along with the crew, who were chained up in the hold. One of the passengers was a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Marsh, barely 21 years old. It is because of her that we know these details. She later published an account of her experiences: The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts Which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, Written by Herself.

The corsair attack occurred in August 1756, a few months after the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Marsh’s father, an administrator for the Royal Navy, had moved his family from their home in Menorca to Gibraltar, which he considered safer. To further protect his daughter, he then booked her a berth on the Ann, which set sail for England in late July.

Marsh’s family aspired to be “respectable people”, and she had received a genteel education. The future planned for her was typical of young women of her position and era: to marry a well-to-do man and bear his children.

Now, torn from that sheltered life, she faced a very different fate. As a young, attractive European woman, Marsh would have been a highly sought-after commodity in north African slave markets – one that any Moroccan sultan would be very interested in acquiring for his harem. The corsair captain kept Marsh isolated – not for her comfort but to keep her safe and unmolested. One of the other passengers, an English merchant named James Crisp, had been tasked by Marsh’s father with looking after her; he convinced the corsairs that he was her brother, so they permitted him to stay by her side.

African captivity

After a week at sea, the corsairs reached Salé. There, the British party was housed in a dilapidated building for several uncomfortable and uncertain days. Their situation was complicated. In 1750, England and Morocco had concluded a treaty of mutual cooperation, and were trading partners, with Morocco supplying beef to the British garrison in Gibraltar. However, the Moroccans found the treaty unsatisfactory, and had also been incensed by what they considered to be the disrespectful actions of a British emissary who had attended an audience with the sultan while wearing muddy boots.

A black and white illustration of a port with many boats in it

A 1782 depiction of Tunis, a primary port city in Barbary. Marsh was held in Salé, another major port city for corsair pirates | Credit: Getty Images

Marsh and her companions were, technically, hostages rather than outright captives. But the British feared that Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, the Moroccan sultan’s son and heir, might live up to his reputation and take an amorous interest in Elizabeth Marsh. And that is what happened. Marsh and her companions were taken to Marrakech, Sidi Mohammed’s home city – a journey of some 300 miles across rough, mountainous country. On the way, Marsh and Crisp received some advice from a friendly slave: they should now claim to be husband and wife.

Sidi Mohammed was in his forties. His father was aging and sick, and Sidi Mohammed would soon inherit the sultanate. For all his power, though, he could not force Marsh into his harem. The Qur’an’s Chapter 4, Verse 24 decrees: “Forbidden to you are women already married, except those whom your right hand possesses” – that last clause being a euphemism for slaves. Marsh was not a slave so, if she and Crisp successfully maintained the fiction of their marriage, Sidi Mohammed could not take her for his harem.

Before the acting sultan

In Marrakech, Marsh was housed with the other English captives in a house in the town, hostages in the ongoing negotiations between the Moroccans and the English. She was quickly brought before Sidi Mohammed, though, alone and still dishevelled from her long journey. He grilled her about her marriage, observing that married English women customarily wore wedding rings – which she did not. Marsh declared that she had taken off her ring for safety during her voyage. He was not convinced, but he allowed her to depart and rejoin the other captives.

At their next meeting, Sidi Mohammed – dressed in a pink satin vest with diamond buttons – presented Marsh with “a great collection of rarities” and told her that, as she recounted it, “he did not doubt of my preferring, in time, his palace to the confined way of life I was then in… and that the curiosities I had seen should be my property”.

Marsh declined this offer. Sidi Mohammed, used to having his own way, was not pleased. But then something unexpected occurred. A woman who was in the room started talking to Marsh, using a phrase in Arabic and making encouraging gestures for her to repeat it, which Marsh did. “Too late,” she wrote, “I discovered that I had renounced (completely innocently) the Christian religion by saying in Morisco: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet’.”

Marsh was now in real trouble, having unintentionally recited the Shahadah – and thus converted to Islam. According to Qur’anic law, this automatically invalidated her Christian marriage to Crisp, making her fair game for Sidi Mohammed. The Prince, as Marsh refers to him, then resorted to threats. Here is her account:

“Throwing off the mask he had hitherto worn, he cruelly informed me that I had renounced the Christian faith and turned Mohometan [Muslim], and that a capital punishment – namely burning at the stake – was, by their laws, inflicted upon all who recanted from... their religion.

“The shock of this pronouncement was severe... I assured the Prince that, if I was an apostate, it entirely proceeded from my being tricked, and not from my own inclination, and that if my death would give him any satisfaction, I no longer desired to avoid that last and final remedy to all my misfortunes, for to go on living under the terms he proposed would only add to my misery.

“The Prince seemed greatly perplexed by my resolute declaration, and, though he continued his importunities, yet it was now more with the air of a supplicant than that of a sovereign.”

Marsh’s language does not really do justice to the drama of the situation. Sidi Mohammed, the second most powerful man in Morocco, threatened to have her burned at the stake if she refused to join his harem. Alone and defenceless, Marsh faced him down and dared him to do it. Baffled by such unexpected and indominable resistance, Sidi Mohammed capitulated and let her rejoin the other captives.

Release and return

The political tensions between Britain and Morocco were eventually resolved – in part by the arrival of a British warship – and Marsh and her companions, along with the Ann’s crew, were allowed to depart.

Marsh returned to England, where she married James Crisp. However, Crisp went bankrupt and fled to India to try to revive his fortunes, leaving Marsh behind with two small children. Without any means of support, she went to live at her parents’ home in Chatham, Kent. Desperate for money, she resorted to writing a memoir of her captivity in Morocco. Marsh eventually joined her husband in India, where she travelled widely. She died there of breast cancer at the age of 50, surviving a mastectomy without anaesthetic but then succumbing to the disease.

Her memoir, The Female Captive, is the first full-length Barbary corsair captivity narrative written by a woman in English. The book enjoyed some notoriety when it was first published but was never a bestseller, and only a single copy is known to survive. If that copy had disappeared, we would likely never know Elizabeth Marsh’s remarkable story.

Marsh was not famous. She played no role in world events. Hers was a private life. Yet the courage she showed during her Moroccan ordeal is an example of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Adam Nichols is a historian and writer. His latest book is Corsairs and Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates (Pen & Sword, 2024), featuring Marsh’s full account

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This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

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