Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is a classic Crimean war history memoir/autibiography by Mary Seacole. I should have thought that no preface would have been required to introduce Mrs. Seacole to the British public, or to recommend a book which must, from the circumstances in which the subject of it was placed, be unique in literature. If singleness of heart, true charity, and Christian works; if trials and sufferings, dangers and perils, encountered boldly by a helpless woman on her errand of mercy in the camp and in the battle-field, can excite sympathy or move curiosity, Mary Seacole will have many friends and many readers. Mary Jane Seacole OM (1805 - 14 May 1881) was a British-Jamaican business woman and nurse who set up the British Hotel behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers," and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton. She acquired knowledge of herbal medicine in the Caribbean. When the Crimean War broke out, she applied to the War Office to assist but was refused. She travelled independently and set up her hotel and assisted battlefield wounded. She became extremely popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war. After her death, she was largely forgotten for almost a century but today is celebrated as a woman who successfully combated racial prejudice. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman, although some aspects of its accuracy have been questioned, with it being claimed that Seacole's achievements have been exaggerated for political reasons. The erection of a statue of her at St Thomas' Hospital, London on 30 June 2016, describing her as a "pioneer nurse,"[8] has generated controversy. Earlier controversy broke out in the United Kingdom late in 2012 over reports of a proposal to remove her from the UK's National Curriculum. Mary Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica, the daughter of James Grant, a Scottish Lieutenant in the British Army, and a free Jamaican woman. Her mother was a "doctress," a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal remedies, who ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7 East Street, considered one of the best hotels in all Kingston. Here Seacole acquired her nursing skills. Seacole's autobiography says she began experimenting in medicine, based on what she learned from her mother, by ministering to a doll and then progressing to pets before helping her mother treat humans. Seacole was proud of both her Jamaican and Scottish ancestry and called herself a Creole, a term that was commonly used in a racially neutral sense or to refer to the children of white settlers with indigenous women.[18] In her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, she records her bloodline thus: "I am a Creole, and have good Scots blood coursing through my veins. My father was a soldier of an old Scottish family."Legally, she was classified as a mulatto, a multiracial person with limited political rights; Robinson speculates that she may technically have been a quadroon. Seacole emphasises her personal vigour in her autobiography, distancing herself from the contemporary stereotype of the "lazy Creole," She was proud of her black ancestry, writing, "I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related - and I am proud of the relationship - to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns."