Mary Seacole’s West Indian Hospitality

Abstract

An itinerant Jamaican entrepreneur and "doctress," the colored Creole Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-81) (figure 1.1) ran combination lodging houses and taverns throughout the Ca rib bean and Central Amer i ca during the first half of the nineteenth century. 1 While in Jamaica, Seacole had always counted British soldiers among her most esteemed clients: as a result, she relocated mid-career to Turkey during the Crimean War (1854-56) to be of ser vice to the British Army. Setting up her " hotel" near the battlefield, she sold food and beverages to the soldiers while also treating their wounds, medicating their fevers, and providing comfort to the dying. Ironically, when the war ended sooner than expected in 1856, Seacole had to sell her Crimean business entirely at a loss. Now faced with bankruptcy, she moved to London and set about publishing in 1857 what she hoped would be a financially lucrative life story. Already universally acknowledged for the nursing care she provided to British troops away from home, she must have been further gratified by the popularity of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (it went into a second printing), as well as by the numerous efforts of officers and soldiers to stage fund rais ing events in her honor. However, even with her efforts and those of her supporters, it was not until the establishment in 1867 of the royally sanctioned "Seacole Fund" that she fi nally escaped poverty. 2 Inevitably, Seacole had her detractors. Writing in 1870 to her brother-inlaw, the politician Sir Henry Verney, no less a figure than Florence Nightingale disputed Seacole's contributions to nursing, arguing that in the Crimea, the