Mary Seacole

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (Dodo Press) Mary Seacole

Mary Jane Seacole (1805-1881), sometimes known as Mother Seacole or Mary Grant, was a Jamaican-born multiracial British nurse best known for her involvement in the Crimean War (1854-1856). Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is a vivid account of her experiences, and is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman. In her autobiography she records her early experiments in medicine, imitating her mother by ministering to a doll, then progressing to pets before helping her mother to treat humans. She was proud of her Scottish ancestry and called herself a Creole, a term which was commonly used in a racially neutral sense or to refer to the children of white settlers. Legally, she was classified as a mulatto, a multiracial person with limited political rights. She travelled around the Caribbean, visiting the English colony of New Providence in The Bahamas, the Spanish colony of Cuba, and new republic of Haiti. During the Crimean War, Seacole travelled from Navy Bay, in Panama, to England, bringing letters of recommendation from doctors in Jamaica and Panama.