Mary Jane Seacole (née Grant; 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a
British-Jamaican business woman and nurse who set up the "British
Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as
"a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent
officers", and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the
battlefield. Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West
African "doctresses", Seacole used herbal remedies to nurse soldiers
back to health. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in
1991. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton.
She acquired knowledge of herbal medicine in the Caribbean.
When the Crimean War broke out, she was one of two outstanding nurses to tend
to the wounded, along with Florence Nightingale. Hoping to assist, Seacole
applied to the War Office but was refused, so she travelled independently and
set up her hotel and tended to the battlefield wounded. She became extremely
popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced
destitution after the war.
After her death, she was largely forgotten for almost a
century but today is celebrated as a woman who made a success of her career,
despite experiencing racial prejudice. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of
Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a
mixed-race woman, although some aspects of its accuracy have been questioned by
present-day supporters of Nightingale. The erection of a statue of her at St
Thomas' Hospital, London on 30 June 2016, describing her as a "pioneer
nurse", has generated controversy and opposition from supporters of Nightingale.
Earlier controversy broke out in the
United Kingdom late in 2012 over reports of a proposal to remove her from the
UK's National Curriculum.
Early life, 1802-25
Mary-Jane Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston,
Jamaica, the daughter of James Grant, a Scottish Lieutenant in the British
Army, and a free Jamaican woman. Her mother, nicknamed "The
Doctress", was a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal
remedies and ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7 East Street, considered
one of the best hotels in all of Kingston.
Jamaican doctresses mastered folk medicine, had a vast knowledge of
tropical diseases, and had a general practitioner's skill in treating ailments
and injuries, acquired from having to look after the illnesses of fellow slaves
on sugar plantations. At Blundell Hall, Seacole acquired her nursing skills,
which included the use of hygiene and herbal remedies. Seacole's autobiography
says she began experimenting in medicine, based on what she learned from her mother,
by ministering to a doll and then progressing to pets before helping her mother
treat humans. Because of her family's close ties with the army, she was able to
observe the practices of military doctors, and combined that knowledge with the
West African remedies she acquired from her mother. In Jamaica in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, neonatal deaths were more than a quarter of total births,
at a time when British-Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood wrote about European
doctors employing questionable practices such as mercury pills and the bleeding
of the patient. However, Seacole, using traditional West African herbal
remedies and hygienic practices, boasted that she never lost a mother or her
child.
Seacole was proud of both her Jamaican and Scottish ancestry
and called herself a Creole, a term that was commonly used in a racially
neutral sense or to refer to the children of white settlers with indigenous
women. In her autobiography, The
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, she records her bloodline thus: "I
am a Creole, and have good Scots blood coursing through my veins. My father was
a soldier of an old Scottish family." Legally, she was classified as a mulatto, a
multiracial person with limited political rights; Robinson speculates that she
may technically have been a quadroon. Seacole
emphasizes her personal vigor in her autobiography, distancing herself from the
contemporary stereotype of the "lazy Creole", She was proud of her black ancestry, writing,
"I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related –
and I am proud of the relationship – to those poor mortals whom you once held
enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns."
The West Indies were an outpost of the British Empire in the
late 18th century, and the source or destination of one-third of Britain's
foreign trade in the 1790s. Britain's
economic interests were protected by a massive military presence, with 69 line
infantry regiments serving there between 1793 and 1801, and another 24 between
1803 and 1815. This meant that large
numbers of British troops succumbed to tropical diseases for which they were
unprepared, providing West Indian nurses such as Seacole with large numbers of patients
on a regular basis. In 1780, one of
Seacole's predecessors, Cubah Cornwallis, was a Jamaican mixed-race
"doctress" who nursed Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, back to
health in Port Royal after two-thirds of his force succumbed to tropical
disease. In contrast to the Jamaican
Maroons, whose populations experienced regular growth, the white population of
Jamaica was constantly ravaged by diseases and illnesses. While the Maroons relied on the
"doctresses" such as Queen Nanny to provide for their healthcare
needs, the white planters depended on the questionable treatments provided by
European doctors.
Mary Seacole spent some years in the household of an elderly
woman, whom she called her "kind patroness", before returning to her
mother. She was treated as a member of her patroness's family and received a
good education. As the educated daughter
of a Scottish officer and a free black woman with a respectable business,
Seacole would have held a high position in Jamaican society.
In about 1821, Seacole visited London, staying for a year,
and visited her relatives in the merchant Henriques family. Although London had
a number of black people, she records that a companion, a West Indian with skin
darker than her own "dusky" shades, was taunted by children. Seacole
herself was "only a little brown"; she was nearly white according to
one of her biographers, Dr. Ron Ramdin. She
returned to London approximately a year later, bringing a "large stock of
West Indian pickles and preserves for sale". Her
later travels would be as an "unprotected" woman, without a chaperone
or sponsor—an unusual practice.
In the Caribbean,
1826–51
After returning to Jamaica, Seacole nursed her "old
indulgent patroness" through an illness, finally returning to the family
home at Blundell Hall after the death of her patroness a few years later.
Seacole then worked alongside her mother, occasionally being called to assist
at the British Army hospital at Up-Park Camp. She also travelled the Caribbean,
visiting the British colony of New Providence in The Bahamas, the Spanish
colony of Cuba, and the new republic of Haiti. Seacole records these travels,
but omits mention of significant current events, such as the Christmas
Rebellion in Jamaica of 1831, the partial abolition of slavery in 1834, and the
full abolition of slavery in 1838.
She married Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole in Kingston on 10
November 1836. Her marriage, from betrothal to widowhood, is described in just
nine lines at the conclusion of the first chapter of her autobiography. Robinson reports the legend in the Seacole
family that Edwin was an illegitimate son of Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount
Nelson and his milady Hamilton]], who was adopted by Thomas, a local
"surgeon, apothecary and man midwife" (Seacole's will indicates that Horatio Seacole
was Nelson's godson: she left a diamond ring to her friend, Lord Rokeby,
"given to my late husband by his godfather Viscount Nelson", but
there was no mention of this godson in Nelson's own will or its codicils.) Edwin
was a merchant and seems to have had a poor constitution. The newly married
couple moved to Black River and opened a provisions store which failed to
prosper. They returned to Blundell Hall in the early 1840s.
During 1843 and 1844, Seacole suffered a series of personal
disasters. She and her family lost much of the boarding house in a fire in
Kingston on 29 August 1843. Blundell Hall burned down, and was replaced by New
Blundell Hall, which was described as "better than before". Then her husband died in October 1844,
followed by her mother. After a period
of grief, in which Seacole says she did not stir for days, she composed
herself, "turned a bold front to fortune", and assumed the management
of her mother's hotel. She put her rapid recovery down to her hot Creole blood,
blunting the "sharp edge of [her] grief" sooner than Europeans who
she thought "nurse their woe secretly in their hearts". She absorbed herself in work, declining many
offers of marriage. She later became
widely known and respected, particularly among the European military visitors
to Jamaica who often stayed at Blundell Hall. She treated patients in the
cholera epidemic of 1850, which killed some 32,000 Jamaicans. Seacole attributed the outbreak to infection
brought on a steamer from New Orleans, Louisiana, demonstrating knowledge of
contagion theory. This first-hand
experience would benefit her during the next five years.
In Central America,
1851–54
In 1850, Seacole's half-brother Edward moved to Cruces,
Panama, which was then part of New Granada. There, approximately 45 miles (72
km) up the Chagres River from the coast, he followed the family trade by
establishing the Independent Hotel to accommodate the many travellers between
the eastern and western coasts of the United States (the number of travellers
had increased enormously, as part of the 1849 California Gold Rush). Cruces was
the limit of navigability of the Chagres River during the rainy season, which lasts
from June to December. Travellers would
ride on donkeys approximately 20 miles (32 km) along the Las Cruces trail from
Panama City on the Pacific Ocean coast to Cruces, and then 45 miles (72 km)
down-river to the Atlantic Ocean at Chagres (or vice versa). In the dry season, the river subsided, and
travellers would switch from land to the river a few miles farther downstream,
at Gorgona Most of these settlements have now been submerged by Gatun Lake,
formed as part of the Panama Canal.
In 1851, Seacole travelled to Cruces to visit her brother.
Shortly after her arrival, the town was struck by cholera, a disease which had
reached Panama in 1849. Seacole was on
hand to treat the first victim, who survived, which established Seacole's
reputation and brought her a succession of patients as the infection spread.
The rich paid, but she treated the poor for free. Many, both rich and poor, succumbed. She
eschewed opium, preferring mustard rubs and poultices, the laxative calomel
(mercuric chloride), sugars of lead (lead(II) acetate), and rehydration with
water boiled with cinnamon. While her
preparations had moderate success, she faced little competition, the only other
treatments coming from a "timid little dentist", who was an
inexperienced doctor sent by the Panamanian government, and the Roman Catholic
Church.
Sketch of Mary Seacole's British Hotel in Crimea, by Lady
Alicia Blackwood (1818–1913), a friend of Florence Nightingale's who resided in
the neighboring "Zebra Vicarage"
The epidemic raged through the population. Seacole later
expressed exasperation at their feeble resistance, claiming they "bowed
down before the plague in slavish despair".[56] She performed an autopsy
on an orphan child for whom she had cared, which gave her "decidedly
useful" new knowledge. At the end of this epidemic she herself contracted
cholera, forcing her to rest for several weeks. In her autobiography, The
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, she describes how the
residents of Cruces responded: “When it became known that their "yellow
doctress" had the cholera, I must do the people of Cruces the justice to
say that they gave me plenty of sympathy, and would have shown their regard for
me more actively, had there been any occasion."
Cholera was to return again: Ulysses S. Grant passed through
Cruces in July, 1852, on military duty; a hundred and twenty men, a third of
his party, died of the disease there or shortly afterwards en route to Panama
City.
Despite the problems of disease and climate, Panama remained
the favoured route between the coasts of the United States. Seeing a business
opportunity, Seacole opened the British Hotel, which was a restaurant rather
than an hotel. She described it as a "tumble down hut," with two
rooms, the smaller one to be her bedroom, the larger one to serve up to 50
diners. She soon added the services of a barber.
As the wet season ended in early 1852, Seacole joined other
traders in Cruces in packing up to move to Gorgona. She records a white
American giving a speech at a leaving dinner in which he wished that "God
bless the best yaller woman he ever made" and asked the listeners to join
with him in rejoicing that "she's so many shades removed from being
entirely black". He went on to say that "if we could bleach her by
any means we would ... and thus make her acceptable in any company, as she
deserves to be". Seacole replied firmly that she did not "appreciate
your friend's kind wishes with respect to my complexion. If it had been as dark
as any nigger's, I should have been just as happy and just as useful, and as
much respected by those whose respect I value." She declined the offer of
"bleaching" and drank "to you and the general reformation of
American manners". Salih notes
Seacole's use here of eye dialect, set against her own English, as an implicit
inversion of the day's caricatures of "black talk". Seacole also
comments on the positions of responsibility taken on by escaped American slaves
in Panama, as well as in the priesthood, the army, and public offices, commenting
that "it is wonderful to see how freedom and equality elevate men". She also records an antipathy between
Panamanians and Americans, which she attributes in part to the fact that so
many of the former had once been slaves of the latter.
In Gorgona, Seacole briefly ran a females-only hotel. In
late 1852, she travelled home to Jamaica. Already delayed, the journey was
further made difficult when she encountered racial discrimination while trying
to book passage on an American ship. She was forced to wait for a later British
boat. In 1853, soon after arriving home,
Seacole was asked by the Jamaican medical authorities to minister to victims of
a severe outbreak of yellow fever. She
found that she could do little, because the epidemic was so severe. Her memoirs
state that her own boarding house was full of sufferers and she saw many of
them dies. Although she wrote, "I was sent for by the medical authorities
to provide nurses for the sick at Up-Park Camp," she did not claim to
bring nurses with her when she went. She left her sister with some nurses at
her house, went to the camp (about a mile, or 1.6 km, from Kingston), "and
did my best, but it was little we could do to mitigate the severity of the
epidemic."
Seacole returned to Panama in early 1854 to finalize her
business affairs, and three months later moved to the New Granada Mining Gold
Company establishment at Fort Bowen Mine some 70 miles (110 km) away near
Escribanos. The superintendent, Thomas Day, was related to her late husband.
Seacole had read newspaper reports of the outbreak of war against Russia before
she left Jamaica, and news of the escalating Crimean War reached her in Panama.
She determined to travel to England to volunteer as a nurse, to experience the
"pomp, pride and circumstance of glorious war" as she described it in
Chapter I of her autobiography. A part of her reasoning for going to the
Crimean was that she knew some of the soldiers that were deployed there. In her
autobiography she explains how she heard of soldiers that she had cared for in
the 97th and 48th regiments were being shipped back to England in preparation
for the fighting on the Crimean Peninsula.
Crimean War, 1853–56
The Crimean War lasted from October 1853 until 1 April 1856
and was fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the United
Kingdom, France, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire. The majority
of the conflict took place on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea and
Turkey.
Many thousands of troops from all the countries involved
were drafted to the area, and disease broke out almost immediately. Hundreds
perished, mostly from Cholera. Hundreds more would die waiting to be shipped
out, or on the voyage. Their prospects were little better when they arrived at
the poorly staffed, unsanitary and overcrowded hospitals which were the only
medical provision for the wounded. In Britain, a trenchant letter in The Times
on 14 October triggered Sidney Herbert, Secretary of State for War, to approach
Florence Nightingale to form a detachment of nurses to be sent to the hospital
to save lives. Interviews were quickly held, suitable candidates selected, and
Nightingale left for Turkey on 21 October.
Seacole travelled from Navy Bay in Panama to England,
initially to deal with her investments in gold-mining businesses. She then
attempted to join the second contingent of nurses to the Crimea. She applied to
the War Office and other government offices, but arrangements for departure
were already underway. In her memoir, she wrote that she brought "ample
testimony" of her experience in nursing, but the only example officially
cited was that of a former medical officer of the West Granada Gold-Mining
Company. However, Seacole wrote that this was just one of the testimonials she
had in her possession.[66] Seacole hinted that her offers were turned down
because of racial prejudice, writing in her autobiography, "Now, I am not
for a single instant going to blame the authorities who would not listen to the
offer of a motherly yellow woman to go to the Crimea and nurse her
"sons" there, suffering from cholera, diarrhea, and a host of lesser
ills. In my country, where people know our use, it would have been different;
but here it was natural enough – although I had references, and other voices
spoke for me – that they should laugh, good-naturedly enough, at my
offer."
Seacole also applied to the Crimean Fund, a fund raised by
public subscription to support the wounded in Crimea, for sponsorship to travel
there, but she again met with refusal.[68] Again, Seacole questioned whether
racism was a factor in her being turned down. She wrote in her autobiography,
"Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root
here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed
beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?" An attempt to join the contingent of nurses
was also rebuffed, as she wrote, "Once again I tried, and had an interview
this time with one of Miss Nightingale's companions. She gave me the same
reply, and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should
not have been chosen to fill it." Seacole did not stop after being rebuffed by
the Secretary-at-War, she soon approached his wife, Elizabeth Herbert who also
informed her “that the full complement of nurses had been secured”. This furthered her belief that racial
differences were the reasons for her not being able to formally serve with the
nurses.
Nightingale reportedly wrote, "I had the greatest
difficulty in repelling Mrs Seacole's advances, and in preventing association
between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question!)...Anyone who
employs Mrs Seacole will introduce much kindness - also much drunkenness and
improper conduct".
Seacole finally resolved to travel to Crimea using her own
resources and to open the British Hotel. Business cards were printed and sent
ahead to announce her intention to open an establishment, to be called the
"British Hotel", near Balaclava, which would be "a mess-table
and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers". Shortly afterwards, her Caribbean
acquaintance, Thomas Day, arrived unexpectedly in London, and the two formed a
partnership. They assembled a stock of supplies, and Seacole embarked on the
Dutch screw-steamer Hollander on 27 January 1855 on its maiden voyage, to Constantinople.
The ship called at Malta, where Seacole
encountered a doctor who had recently left Scutari. He wrote her a letter of introduction
to Nightingale.
Seacole visited Nightingale at the Barrack Hospital in
Scutari, where she asked for a bed for the night. Seacole claimed that Mrs
Bracebridge, Nightingale's helper, received her suspiciously. Seacole wrote,
"Mrs. B. questions me very kindly, but with the same look of curiosity and
surprise. What object has Mrs. Seacole in coming out? This is the purport of
her questions. And I say, frankly, to be of use somewhere; for other
considerations I had not, until necessity forced them upon me. Willingly, had
they accepted me, I would have worked for the wounded, in return for bread and
water. I fancy Mrs. B— thought that I sought for employment at Scutari, for she
said, very kindly – "Miss Nightingale has the entire management of our
hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy –”
Seacole interrupted Bracebridge to inform her that she
intended to travel to Balaclava the next day to join her business partner. In
her memoirs, she reported that her meeting with Nightingale was friendly, with
Nightingale asking "What do you want, Mrs. Seacole? Anything we can do for
you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy." Seacole told her of her "dread of the
night journey by caique" and the improbability of being able to find the
Hollander in the dark. A bed was then found for her and breakfast sent her in
the morning, with a "kind message" from Bracebridge. A footnote in
the memoir states that Seacole subsequently "saw much of Miss Nightingale
at Balaclava," but no further meetings are recorded in the text.
After transferring most of her stores to the transport ship
Albatross, with the remainder following on the Nonpareil, she set out on the
four-day voyage to the British bridgehead into Crimea at Balaclava.
Lacking proper building materials, Seacole gathered
abandoned metal and wood in her spare moments, with a view to using the debris
to build her hotel. She found a site for the hotel at a place she christened
Spring Hill, near Kadikoi, some 3 1⁄2 miles (5.6 km) along the main British
supply road from Balaclava to the British camp near Sevastopol, and within a
mile of the British headquarters.
The hotel was built from the salvaged driftwood, packing
cases, iron sheets, and salvaged architectural items such as glass doors and
window-frames, from the village of Kamara, using hired local labour. The new
British Hotel opened in March 1855. An early visitor was Alexis Soyer, a noted
French chef who had travelled to Crimea to help improve the diet of British
soldiers. He records meeting Seacole in his 1857 work A Culinary Campaign and
describes Seacole as "an old dame of a jovial appearance, but a few shades
darker than the white lily". Seacole requested Soyer's advice on how to
manage her business, and was advised to concentrate on food and beverage
service, and not to have beds for visitors because the few either slept on
board ships in the harbor or in tents in the camp.
The hotel was completed in July at a total cost of £800. It
included a building made of iron, containing a main room with counters and
shelves and storage above, an attached kitchen, two wooden sleeping huts,
outhouses, and an enclosed stable-yard. The building was stocked with provisions
shipped from London and Constantinople, as well as local purchases from the
British camp near Kadikoi and the French camp at nearby Kamiesch. Seacole sold
anything – "from a needle to an anchor"—to army officers and visiting
sightseers. Meals were served at the Hotel, cooked by two black cooks, and the
kitchen also provided outside catering.
Despite constant thefts, particularly of livestock,
Seacole's establishment prospered. Chapter XIV of Wonderful Adventures
describes the meals and supplies provided to officers. They were closed at 8 pm
daily and on Sundays. Seacole did some of the cooking herself: "Whenever I
had a few leisure moments, I used to wash my hands, roll up my sleeves, and
roll out pastry." When called to "dispense medications," she did
so. Soyer was a frequent visitor, and
praised Seacole's offerings,[84] noting that she offered him champagne on his
first visit.
To Soyer, near the time of departure, Florence Nightingale
acknowledged favorable views of Seacole, consistent with their one known
meeting in Scutari. Soyer's remarks—he knew both women—show pleasantness on
both sides. Seacole told him of her encounter with Nightingale at the Barrack
Hospital: "You must know, M Soyer, that Miss Nightingale is very fond of
me. When I passed through Scutari, she very kindly gave me board and
lodging." When he related Seacole's
inquiries to Nightingale, she replied "with a smile: 'I should like to see
her before she leaves, as I hear she has done a deal of good for the poor soldiers.'"
Nightingale, however, did not want her
nurses associating with Seacole, as she wrote to her brother-in-law.
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