Customer Reviews

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Penguin Classics)

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Mary Seacole's reputation after the Crimean War certainly rivalled that of her counterpart Florence Nightingale but for a very long time she was a forgotten footnote in history, and this probably had a lot to do with the fact she was not a white middle class woman, but was instead the offspring of two races, that of a Scottish father and a black Jamaican mother.

She was a born healer and a woman of tremendous energy, she overcame official indifference and racial prejudice as she strove to prove her worth as a Nurse on par with Nightingale herself.

Seacole got herself out to the war by her own efforts and at her own expense, she risked her life to bring comfort to the wounded and dying soldiers; and became one of the first black woman to make a mark on British public life.

But while Florence Nightingale has gone down in history, Mary Seacole was relegated to obscurity until very recently.

This book tells her story in her own words, of her travels, her experiences, her life as a woman in colour living in a time of bigotry, prejudice and racial hatred.

It's a fantastic book and brings to life in its many pages a woman of courage and moral conviction that what she was doing with her life was the right thing to do. To me Mary Seacole optimises the Crimean War in a way that Nightingale never can. A book worthy to be read in schools in the way that Anne Frank is read even now in the 21st century.

We all know Florence Nightingale, but what about Mrs. Seacole, the Creole nurse who also served the wounded and dying in the Crimean War?

Mrs. Seacole was born in Jamaica in 1805, half black, half Scottish, and equally proud of both bloodlines. She learned Creole medicine from her "doctress" mother. During some of her adventures in lawless Panama, she became adept at tending knife and gunshot wounds.

Hearing of the miserable conditions among the wounded in the Crimean War, she longed to help. Florence Nightingale, however, refused to accept the brown-skinned Mrs. Seacole as a nurse, despite her ideal qualifications.

And so Mrs. Seacole sponsored herself, setting up a combination shop and restaurant near the siege grounds of Sevastopol and dividing her time between business and the battlefield.

An upbeat narrator full of fascinating anecdotes, Mrs. Seacole is humorous, motherly and audacious by turns. An inveterate traveler to dangerous places, she never ceases to amaze us with her entrepreneurial chutzpah and her passion for healing.

This complex woman was too colorful a personality to be defined by her color. She simply refused to be daunted by the deep racism of society. To read her autobiography is to feel very close to her. Mrs. Seacole was a charmer as well as a great humanitarian, and it's easy to see why she was so beloved by the sick and wounded and the soldiers who saw her in action.

The Wonderful Adventures make wonderful reading, but more importantly, the book presents us with a heroine who has been strangely eclipsed by Florence Nightingale, yet deserves to be just as famous.

The introduction is also an excellent read and gives background on the Crimean War that I sorely needed, not being up on history.

Highly recommended!

Great read.
Mary Seacole leads readers to question nationalist paradigms when she defines herself as Jamaican and Scottish then British. The reader starts to question nationality, location, identity and history memory and starts to reevaluate how absolute these descriptions are. In Seacole's book, she shows criss-crossing of the the black atlantic population with the West.
A loss of purity in essence at her time.