Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

by Mary Seacole, William L. Andrews

Overview

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is the autobiography of Mary Seacole. Recognized for her pioneering healthcare work for soldiers and citizens around the world, Seacole was also the first Black Briton to publish an autobiographical work. Although Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands underwent editing by an anonymous person, it is a first-person account of Seacole’s experiences during outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and war. “As I grew into womanhood, I began to indulge that longing to travel which will never leave me while I have health and vigour. I was never weary of tracing upon an old map the route to England; and never followed with my gaze the stately ships homeward bound without longing to be in them, and see the blue hills of Jamaica fade into the distance.” Adventurous and energetic, empathetic and kind, Mary Seacole was a pioneering traveler and healer who saved countless lives and cared for the sick and dying on both sides of the Atlantic. From her early work with cholera and malaria patients in the Caribbean to her famous British Hotel, opened on the outskirts of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, Seacole served the suffering without regard for her own health or finances.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195052497
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/14/1988
Series:	The ^ASchomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.82(w) x 4.96(h) x 1.01(d)

About the Author

Mary Seacole (1805-1881) was a British-Jamaican nurse and healer. Born in Kingston to a Scottish father and a free Jamaican mother, Seacole was raised in a family of healers and doctresses skilled in the use of Caribbean and African herbal medicines. Seacole learned about hygiene, ventilation, and nutrition while working as a nurse at Blundell Hall, a home for injured and convalescent military and naval personnel. Legally classified as mulatto, Seacole identified herself as a Creole woman and remained proud of her Scottish and African ancestry throughout her life. After decades of experience in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the Bahamas, Seacole used her own resources to travel to Crimea, where she opened the British Hotel and took care of soldiers and officers injured during the brutal Crimean War. Although her service to England has been recognized by generations of historians and public figures alike—due in no small part to the success of her popular memoir Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857)—Seacole has faced hostility from figures associated with Florence Nightingale, who disparage her unorthodox style of nursing. After the Crimean War ended in 1856, Seacole returned to England a bankrupt woman, having put the entirety of her earnings back into the upkeep of the British Hotel, which went under following the Treaty of Paris. Over the next several years, she became the center of a national fundraising campaign, which culminated in a public gala in 1857 attended by a crowd of 80,000 supporters. Largely forgotten by the end of her life, Seacole’s reputation and contribution to British society was recognized by historians and commemorative organizations in the late-twentieth century, culminating in her being awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991.