ABSTRACT
Nancy Gardner Prince is Mary Seacole’s U.S.-born counterpart as a female “Black Atlantic” writer. Toward the end of her life, she penned A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Nancy Prince. 105 In one critics view, Prince’s narrative is “one of the few surviving autobiographical accounts by a free black woman in the pre-Civil War North.… None can match hers for exotic settings and remarkable happenings.” 106 Like Seacole, Prince is an explorer who cherishes world-wide physical mobility. In Princes case, she inherited this love from a variety of male relatives. From an early age until adolescence, she listened to her grandfather and her mother’s third husband reciting the history of their ancestors. Several of her male relatives (stepfather, a brother, husband) worked as sailors. During the War of 1812 her second stepfather had been impressed into the British navy. 107
