ABSTRACT
The free-born daughter of a Scottish father and a Jamaican Creole mother, Mary Seacole was an enterprising businesswoman and ‘doctress’ who slaked her selfconfessed thirst for adventure by journeying to such untraditional travel destinations
as Panama and Cuba.2 There, she eked out a living running a variety of stores and small hotels offering room and board while honing her medical skills on the steady supply of patients those places also frequently afforded her. But it was her work as a ‘doctress’ and nurse during the Crimean War that propelled her into the spotlight of British public attention. In 1854, convinced that she could be of critical use to the British army fighting the Russians in the Crimea, Seacole made her way to the warfront, and thence metaphorically into British households as the ‘Crimean heroine’ and the ‘Black Florence Nightingale’. As a sutler and the proprietor of the appropriately christened British Hotel in Balaclava near the warfront, she tended to injured and dying British soldiers, often venturing into the battlefield to provide whatever assistance she could. The abrupt conclusion of the war, however, dealt her a financially ruinous blow and she was compelled to write and publish Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands in 1857 to recoup some of her losses.
