Mary Jane Seacole (; 23 November 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a Jamaican nurse and businesswoman. She was famous for her nursing work during the Crimean War and for publishing the first autobiography written by a woman of African descent in Britain.
Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Creole mother who ran a boarding house and had herbalist skills as a "doctress". In 1990, Seacole was (posthumously) awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2004, she was voted the greatest Black Briton in a survey conducted in 2003 by the black heritage website Every Generation.
Seacole went to the Crimean War in 1855 with the plan of setting up the "British Hotel", as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers". However, chef Alexis Soyer told her that officers did not need overnight accommodation, so she instead made it into a restaurant/bar/catering service. It proved to be very popular and she and her business partner, a relative of her late husband, did well on it until the end of the war. Her 1857 memoir, Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, includes three chapters of the food she served and the encounters she had with officers, some of them high-ranking, and including the commander of the Turkish forces.
Seacole missed the first three major battles of the war, as she was busy in London attending to her gold investments—she had arrived from Panama, where she had provided services for prospectors going overland to and from the California Gold Rush. She gave assistance at the battlefield on three later battles, going out to attend to the fallen after serving wine and sandwiches to spectators.
In her memoir, Seacole described several attempts she made to join that team; however, she did not start her informal inquiries until after both Florence Nightingale and her initial team, and a later one, had left. When Seacole left, it was with the plan of joining her business partner and starting their business. She travelled with two Black employees, her maid Mary, and a porter, Mac.
She was largely forgotten for almost a century after her death. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), was the first autobiography written by a Black woman in Britain. The erection of a statue of Seacole at St Thomas' Hospital, London, on 30 June 2016, describing her as a "pioneer", generated some controversy and opposition, especially among those concerned with Nightingale's legacy.The Nightingale Society – Correspondence on the Seacole Statue.
Early career and background Mary Jane Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant on 23 November 1805 in Kingston, in the Colony of Jamaica, as a member of the community of free Black people in Jamaica. She was the daughter of James Grant, a ScottishScotland on Sunday, 16 May 2010, p. 10. Lieutenant in the British Army.Seacole, Chapter 1. Her mother, Mrs Grant, nicknamed "The Doctress", was a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal medicines. Mrs Grant also ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7, East Street.Robinson, p. 22."Mary Seacole (1805-1881)", National Library of Jamaica. Retrieved 4 April 2019.
In the 18th century, Jamaican doctresses mastered folk medicine, including the use of hygiene and herbs. They 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.Robinson, p. 10. At Blundell Hall, Seacole acquired her nursing skills, which included the use of hygiene, ventilation, warmth, hydration, rest, empathy, good nutrition and care for the dying. Blundell Hall also served as a convalescent home for military and naval staff recuperating from illnesses such as cholera and yellow fever.
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.Robinson, p. 24.Rappaport, Helen, "Mary Seacole", Women, The British Empire. In Jamaica in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, neonatal deaths were more than a quarter of total births. However, Seacole, using traditional West African herbal remedies and hygienic practices, boasted that she never lost a mother or her child.Chang, Kevin O'Brien. "Black Woman Pioneer Mary Seacole", Jamaica Gleaner, 26 July 2012. Retrieved 4 April 2019.
Seacole was proud of both her Jamaican and Scottish ancestry and called herself a Creole. In her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, she writes: "I am a Creole, and have good Scots blood coursing through my veins. My father was a soldier of an old Scottish family."The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, 1857. Her biographer Jane Robinson speculates that she may technically have been a quadroon.Robinson, p. 7. Seacole emphasises her personal vigour in her autobiography, distancing herself from the contemporary stereotype of the "lazy Creole".Ramdin, p. 5.Salih, Chapter I, footnote 3, p. 183. 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."Seacole, Chapter II.
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.Robinson, p. 12. 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.Robinson, p. 13.
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,Ramdin, p. 8, estimates 10,000 in 1820, compared with an Inner London population of 1,263,975 as recorded in the United Kingdom Census 1821. 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.Ramdin, p. 8. She returned to London approximately a year later, bringing a "large stock of West Indian pickles and preserves for sale". Her later travels were without a chaperone or sponsor – an unusually independent practice at a time when women had limited rights.Robinson, p. 18.
In the Caribbean, 1826–51 After returning to Jamaica, Seacole cared for 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 provide nursing assistance 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 abolition of slavery in 1833,Robinson, p. 34. and the abolition of "apprenticeship" in 1838.Salih.
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 Lord Nelson and his mistress, Emma Hamilton, who was adopted by Thomas, a local "surgeon, apothecary and man midwife"Robinson, footnote 1c chapter 6. 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.Robinson, footnote 1 to Chapter 6, p. 209. 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".
Seacole absorbed herself in work, declining many offers of marriage. She later became known to the European military visitors to Jamaica who often stayed at Blundell Hall. She treated and nursed patients in the cholera epidemic of 1850, which killed some 32,000 Jamaicans.Robinson, p. 36.
In Central America, 1851–54 In 1850, Seacole's half-brother Edward moved to Cruces, Panama, which was then part of the Republic of New Granada. There, approximately 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.Robinson, p. 42.
Cruces was the limit of navigability of the Chagres River during the rainy season, which lasts from June to December.Robinson, p. 61. Travellers would ride on donkeys approximately along the Las Cruces trail from Panama City on the Pacific Ocean coast to Cruces, and then down-river to the Atlantic Ocean at Chagres (or vice versa).Robinson, p. 48. 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, Chapter IV. 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 (mercurous chloride), sugars of lead (lead(II) acetate), and rehydration with water boiled with cinnamon.Robinson, p. 53. While she believed 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 Catholic Church.