Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands – Mary Seacole

This book was first published in 1857 and re-published by Penguin Classics in 2005. It brings to mind books like The Aran Islands by J.M. Synge or Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by R.H. Blythe in the sense that it is unclassifiable. It is a travel memoir, war memoir, medical history, and issues of identity. And told in an inimitable voice, full of energy and warmth.

Mary Seacole was a Creole Jamaican woman born in Kingston.  Her father was a Scottish officer in the British Army. Her mother, a free Jamaican Creole woman, ran a house whose boarders were invalid soldiers and sailors, so it was necessary for her to employ doctoring and nursing skills to take care of people with injuries due to accidents as well as dreaded diseases like yellow fever and cholera.  Mary Seacole learned these skills from her mother.

She married young but lost her husband in 1844. Having to fend for herself, in 1851, Seacole went to Cruces, Panama to help her brother run his hotel. Her descriptions of frontier life on the isthmus are full of life and death. Prospectors for gold and the merchants who wanted to strike it rich lead busy lives filled with the activities that come natural to men on their own: drinking, gambling, brawling and killing. The place was subject to floods that took tolls on life and property. She treated victims of tropical diseases and cholera. The government of Jamaica requested that she return in 1853 to assist during an outbreak of yellow fever, which was probably brought in by travelers.

Like Caribbean blacks react even in our times, Mary Seacole was shocked at the overt, vicious racism of whites in the United States. She could not help but wonder if racism was the reason she was rejected by heads of groups of nurses going to the Crimea.

Moved by patriotism and the profit motive, she used her own resources to gather medical supplies and travelled to the Crimea in 1855. With her military connections from Jamaica, she met army officers who helped her to navigate the terrible ineffective bureaucrats that were administering the Crimean War from London.

She opened The British Hotel, which charged for its catering and restaurant services and provided medical care. She supplied alcohol but did not allow gambling. Florence Nightingale hinted that she ran something like a brothel, but any reader of Eminent Victorians may sniff and shrug at that. Seacole's stories of nursing under fire during the siege of Sebastopol and the appreciation of patients are quite moving.

The war ended suddenly in 1856, leaving Seacole with stores of provisions that nobody wanted to buy. Though she became a bankrupt, she did not regret her experience serving her country. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in the early modern era, the Crimean War, readable memoirs, or strong women.