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WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF MRS SEACOLE IN MANY LANDS: Autobiography as literarygenre and a window to characterAuthor(s): CHRISTINE CRAIGSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2, Caribbean lives (JUNE 1984), pp. 33-47Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653534 .

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WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF MRS SEACOLE IN MANY LANDS

Autobiography as literary genre and a window to character

by

CHRISTINE CRAIG

Autobiography is the literature that most immediately and deeply engages our interest and holds it and that in the end seems to mean the most to us because it brings an increased awareness, through an understanding of another life in another time and place, of the nature of our own selves and our share in the human condition.

James Olney: Metaphors of Self

Introduction The ladies told me strange stories of the influence of the black and yellow women, and Mrs Bullock called them serpents.1 Mrs C. is a perfect Creole, says little, and drawls out that little and has not an idea beyond her Penn!2

Mrs S. is a fat, good humoured Creole woman saying dis, dat and toder; her mother a vulgar old Scotch dame . . .3

(On an observation that the air was cooler than usual, the Creole lady replied:) Yes, ma-am, him rail-ly too fraish!4

Such were Lady Nugent's observations on the nature of Creole women in Jamaica in the early nineteenth century. Boring conversationalists, most with an inadequate grasp of English and some, along with black women, were a threat to morality. In Jane Eyre Rochester's mad wife is a Creole and he speaks of her thus:

I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her. I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature ... I found her nature totally alien to mine; her tastes obnoxious to me; her cast of mind common, low, narrow and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger . . . Bertha Mason - the true daughter of an



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infamous mother. - dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and un- chaste.5

The reference to Bertha's mother suggests that the wickedness of character is in- herited and this, coupled with a sub-normal brain, defines the nature of Creole women.

Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea out of, one feels sure, a strong desire to vindi- cate that particular Creole woman and all the other Creoles who, like Rhys herself, were born 'on the other side'. Perhaps my interest in Mary Seacole is a similar wish to counter the 'bad press' Lady Nugent gave to Jamaican women. While the Journal has little to recommend it in terms of literary style it has had three reprints and is generally held to be an interesting and useful reference to people, places and attitudes of the early nineteenth century. In contrast, Mary Seacole's book was printed only once. There are two copies of it at the National Library and I have not seen another copy in any other Jamaican Library.6

Who is a Creole woman? Reviled in the nineteenth century and in contemporary theatre, much parodied in Jamaica, drawling away in a dreadful accent and showing her ignorance and class prejudice in every sentence. Lady Nugent and Jean Rhys were probably using the term to mean local-born whites. Charlotte Bronte's character is 'dark' and we are to imagine that such evil could not come from someone entirely white. Mary Seacole uses it to mean 'mixed blood', that is a European parent and a black or 'mixed blood' parent. It has never been a widely used term in Jamaica, as it is in the French West Indian islands, hence the difficulty in defining exactly its meaning. The only useful defini- tion that holds for both Lady Nugent and Mary Seacole is that it refers to local-born, free people of fair to perhaps light brown complexion. Mary Seacole was referred to as the 'yellow doctress' but she refers to herself as light brown. Her autobiography provides a valuable insight into the values and mores of a Creole woman. A woman, visibly neither black nor white, who could, therefore, to some extent, experience both worlds.

Mary Seacole was also Jamaica's first published woman writer: a woman of confidence and action, she provides for us an eye, recording outside events while unfolding facets of her own character in a most readable and enjoyable book. This latter, double effect of autobiography opens up some interesting questions on the nature of history and the place of the individual within the process of history. Mary Seacole was in the Crimea for some of the heaviest engagements of that war. Her presence there in no way affected its start or its end. She was in fact, and was very aware of it, a very minor player on the war stage. But the process of history is as much a composite of the experiences of the minor players as it is of the decision-makers who figure so predominantly in traditional history books. History, as the name implies, has mainly been the story of the doings of high status men, recorded by men. So, to have the views of a female player, in an otherwise all male epic, is particularly valuable. Her view is also interesting as coming from a woman who was attracted to the ethos of a foreign culture while remaining strongly rooted in a sense of her own self. The nature of this self, as shown through her writing, is the main subject of this paper. In which Mrs Seacole reveals her own character through her style of relating incident

I was born in the town of Kingston, in the island of Jamaica, some time in the present century. As a



35

female, and a widow, I may be well excused the precise date of this important event. But I do not mind confessing that the century and myself were both young together, and that we have grown side by side into age and consequence, p. 2

With confidence, an engaging openness of style and a gentle touch of humour, Mary Seacole opens her story. Her father was Scottish, her mother Creole - 'and was like very many of the Creole women, an admirable doctress*. (p. 2) By the second page she has established her racial background and her pride in it. Her mother ran a hotel-cum-nursing home, so Mary grew up helping her mother to look after the invalided officers and their wives from Up Park Camp. She was so interested in nursing that she used to practise on her dolls and later on her pets. While still a young girl she went to London, she doesn't say why, came back to Jamaica and returned there with West Indian pickles and preserves. That a young girl in the early nineteenth century should start her own mini export- marketing business is intriguing in the light of Lady Nugent's observations, only a few years earlier, that the women knew of very little outside their own Penn. On her return journey fire broke out on ship and:

Although considerably alarmed, I did not lose my senses, but during the time when the contest between fire and water was doubtful, I entered into an amic- able arrangement with the ships cook, whereby, in consideration of two pounds - which I was not however to pay until the crises arrived - he agreed to lash me on to a large hen coop. p. 5

Mercifully they were all rescued by a passing ship and she did not have to sail home on a hen coop! The incident illustrates her ingenuity and her love of travel for in spite of it she continued with her buying and selling with trips to New Providence, Hayti and Cuba:

. . . until I couldn't find courage to say 'no' to a certain arrangement timidly proposed by Mr Seacole, but married him, and took him down to Black River, where we established a store, p. 5

Mr Seacole was 'sickly' and died not very long after they were married. Even allowing for a quite natural reticence in unveiling the details of her married life, it is remarkable how little she does tell us of her life at this time. She is married on page 5 and widowed by page 6, motherless too, so she was quite alone 'to battle with this world as best [she] might'. She grieved for them both but in her manner of expressing her grief she notes the difference of emotional expression that exists between Creoles and presumably Euro- peans. She effectively concurs with a cliche' only to turn it against those who use it in a derogatory sense.

I do not think that we hot-blooded Creoles sorrow less for showing it so impetuously, but I do think that the sharp edge of our grief wears down sooner than theirs who preserve an outward demeanour of calm- ness, and nurse their woe secretly in their hearts.

Mary Seacole was comfortable with her subsequent single state and it perhaps helps



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to explain her strong sense of self. She had neither husband, children nor parents to tell her how she should live her life and so she got on confidently with the business of being how she defined herself. Of her appearance she tells us: Ί was always a hearty, strong woman - plain spoken people might say stout . . .' (p. 7) Yet she did not lack for suitors and although she was 'rich one day, poor the next' apparently re -marriage did not tempt her either for love or security,

And here I may take the opportunity of explaining that it was from a confidence in my own powers, and not at all from necessity, that I remained an unpro- tected female. Indeed, I do not mind confessing to my reader, in a friendly confidential way, that one of the hardest struggles of my life in Kingston was to resist the pressing candidates for the late Mr Seacole's shoes, p. 8

The humorous hyperbole with which it ends does not mask that all important self-confidence with which the passage begins. This soft -tempered feminism was an intrinsic part of Mary Seacole's character. She devoted her life to caring for the sick, usually men, and as her book reveals, she had many warm and special relationships. Most often she was in the role of 'aunty' or 'mother' but there were other relationships in which her feelings were not perhaps entirely maternal. She clearly had no antipathy towards men but she chose early to manage her life for herself.

In 1850 there was a cholera outbreak in Jamaica and while gaining experience in nursing this savage disease, she watched the doctors closely to learn as much as she could. She then set off to visit her brother in Colon which she described as a 'lawless zone', 'a luckless, dreary spot'. She got there to discover that fever, ague and dropsy 'were having it all their own way at Navy Bay'. Her brother Edward's 'Independent Hotel' turned out to be a 'sleazy, depressing place', with not even a bed available for her or her black maid Mac and a little girl who were her travelling companions. Not in the least bit fazed she took an oilskin off the table, pinned it around the table legs and retired for the night.

It was a novel bed, and required some slight strength of the imagination to fancy it a four-poster, p. 23

Her autobiography contains other such quick-witted responses to the business of survival and always told lightly, without a touch of complaining self-pity such as well might be expected from a sister who has travelled so far to find her brother's hospitality woefully inadequate.

This first half of her book is taken up with her adventures in Navy Bay and Cruces. She nursed the local people through a cholera outbreak, she opened a hotel there, closed it and returned to Jamaica, came back some time later to go prospecting for gold and, in short, lived a most varied life in that difficult place. Three aspects of her stay there are worth special attention: her increasing skills as 'doctress', her attitude towards Americans and the insight this affords us of her own racial self-image, and her attitude towards the native people.

I have long suspected that our general neglect of this fascinating woman lies in the fact that she is primarily remembered, if she is at all, for her nursing stint in the Crimea.



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Yet she worked through a cholera outbreak in Jamaica and again in Panama. She had, it is true, a decided penchant for English soldiers. Part of this fascination was probably the result of her colonial upbringing, part was the example set by her mother, part was a romantic attachment to a certain young surgeon but a very important part was scientific. She had a sort of personal animosity towards cholera and yellow fever and she made every effort to improve her knowledge of these diseases. Since the avenues for formal medical learning were closed to her she had to augment her knowledge in whatever way she could. An incident in Cruces will serve to illustrate this. After a particularly horrible night in a muleteers' Kraal, where cholera claimed several victims, she determined to increase her knowledge of the way in which the disease worked. Whereupon she bribed a man to carry off for her the body of a year-old victim. She found a secluded spot by a river and there performed a post mortem. This highly unethical incident did however give her valuable insight into the nature of the disease and certainly the people there came to rely on and value 'the little yellow woman from Jamaica with the cholera medicine'. Later, when she offered her services in the Crimea it was with the confidence that she knew about these diseases and had developed good medicines for all sorts of tropical ail- ments. Testimonials as to their efficacy are included in the second half of the book.

That she disliked dirt, poverty and ignorance is early established. Her attitude towards the Indians, who seemed to have occupied the lowest stratum of that mixed society, is a fine amalgam of amused superiority towards their life-style and a belief that they had a right to decide their own way without the bullying interference of Americans. In one passage she has to embark on a perilous boat trip and she described the crew.

The master of the boat, the padrone, was a fine tall negro, his crew were four common enough specimens of humanity, with a marked disregard for the prejudices of society with respect to clothing. Perhaps, however, the thick coating of dirt which covered them kept them warmer than more civilized clothing, besides being indisputably more economical, pp. 14, 15.

In her reaction to the Indians one could easily infer that, whatever the parlous situation existing in Jamaica, Jamaicans never had such low self-esteem that they would exist in such dirt and go about with so little clothing. In general, she found the Indians treacherous, passionate and indolent and greatly in need of civilizing, but she was quite clear that American pretensions in that regard were simply self-serving. While writing the book, she had news that the Government of the USA had succeeded in finding 4a reasonable excuse for exercising a protectorate over, or in other words annexing, the Isthmus of Panama', (p. 71) This perceptive piece of irony brings us to the question of her attitude towards Americans. In which Mrs Seacole deals with Pride and Prejudice

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. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is,



38

having seen with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors - let others affect to doubt them if they will - is it surprising that I should be impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me? Mind, I am not speaking of all. I have met with some delightful exceptions, p. 14

One suspects that that last line was a sop thrown to her editor for she only once, very briefly, referred to an American merchant friend. Since the book is mainly addressed to British readers we have to assume that the diatribe against slavery and those who affect to doubt its horrors includes them. Mary Seacole grew up seeing English people in her mother's home, she married an Englishman and until she tried to enlist for the Crimea it seems that she did not suspect them of any prejudice towards herself. This is that 'both worlds' of the Creole. She could be comfortable in a white world but she knew herself to be part of a black world and she identified herself with its suffering through slavery. While Jamaicans were still only conditionally free it was a highly valued freedom and it would seem that, on the surface at least, 'free people of colour' were treated with civility by the British.

Her experience with Americans was to be otherwise. For 'Americans' one has to read 'white Americans', for she never seemed to have included black people under the stain of that title! Mary Seacole does not simply record her encounters with them, she draws several 'portraits' of individual Americans so that she arrives at a composite picture of them and what their presence meant in that part of the world. At that time, they were streaming to California in the big 'gold rush' and Colon was something of a stop-over point on their journey. These travellers were a rough, lawless lot whose main diversions seem to have been fighting and gambling.

A Dr Casey - everybody familiar with the Americans knows their fondness for titles - owned the most favoured table in Cruces; and this although he was known to be a rough and unscrupulous villian. (He had been hunted out of San Francisco) . . . and at that time ... a man too bad for that city must have been a prodigy of crime ... p. 40

What makes this passage so damning is. the way in which she inserts (asserts) the general with the particular so that the reader is bound to come to the conclusion that Dr Casey, in particular, is a bad man but what can one expect when he comes from such a generally bad country! If we were left in any doubt she goes on to refer to 'these free and independent filibusters, who would fain whop all creation abroad as they do their slaves at home', (p. 41) Neatly, she uses their own language, 'whop' against them. At the same time she was well aware that Cruces relied heavily on American tourism. Since this was to become a contemporary Jamaican problem her view is specially interesting. The combination of disapproval and understanding is carefully balanced and the construction of this passage is particularly fine.

Daylight would find the faro-tables, with their piles of silver and little heaps of gold-dust still surrounded



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by haggard gamblers; daybreak would gleam sickly upon the tawdry finery of the poor Spanish singers and dancers, whose weary nights' work would enable them to live upon the travellers' bounty for the next week or so ... and while their transitory sun shone I will do them the justice to say they gathered in their

hay busily, p. 22

Mary Seacole detested white Americans and admired tremendously those escaped slaves who had gone to the New Granada Republic and done well in every area of the society.

In the priest-hood, in the army, in all municipal offices, the self-liberated negroes were invariably found in the foremost rank. p. 51

That term 'self-liberated' shows how clearly she understood the position of the American

Negro and how carefully she chooses language which will improve her readers' conscious- ness' of the situation.

American women were as bad as the men and the following story serves to illustrate this while highlighting the role of the self-liberated negro. A young American woman, whose character she says 'can best be described as vicious', fell ill. Her companions went on with their journey leaving her with 'a young negro slave woman'. This woman beat the

negro slave so badly that the citizens intervened and took them to court. The alcalde, 'himself a man of colour', told the black woman that, by their laws, she was free to leave her mistress. The whole courthouse broke out in cheers. 'Then with demoniac refinement of cruelty, she bethought herself of the girl's baby at New Orleans still in her power and threatened most horrible torture to the child if its mother dared to accept the alcalde's offer.' (pp. 52- 53) The people felt she would not damage her own 'property' but immedi-

ately raised a subscription to buy the child. Mary Seacole didn't know the outcome of the story as the young woman was taken into the interior for her own safety.

Mary Seacole detested white Americans, men as well as women, for their cruelty, racial prejudice, low morals and for the economic dependence that their presence fos- tered. She also saw the dangers of their imperialist designs and tells us that the people of Granada feared their bullying habits and dreaded their schemes for annexation. She gave the following example. The American Railway Company took possession of Navy Bay and renamed it Aspinwall, after their chairman.

The native authorities refused to recognize their

right to name any portion of the Republic and per- tinaciously returned all letters directed to Aspinwall with 'no such place known' marked upon them in the very spot for which they were intended, p. 51

Further, the courts wouldn't handle cases 'residing in that unrecognized place'. Navy Bay came to be called Colon so, in that battle at least, the Americans lost. The modern politi- cians who talk about American imperialism as if they have just uncovered it and are thus able to reveal all to those of us quite ignorant of it, might be embarrassed to know that a Creole woman said it all in the middle of the nineteenth century! And said it so well, not by empty declamations but by carefully reporting experiences, that the Americans



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are revealed in a realistic and credible manner.

Mary Seacole had had enough of Panama and had given up hope of persuading her brother to leave. Various hotel-keepers entertained her and made much of the services she had rendered them during the cholera epidemic. Her brother, likewise, invited her to dinner and it happened to be American Independence Day so the Americans were much in evidence and wished also to toast the good lady. The following passage, with its echoes of Dickens's style, needs no comment!

The spokesman was a thin, sallow looking American with a pompous and yet rapid delivery, and a habit of turning over his words with his quid before delivering them, and clearing his mouth after each sentence, perhaps to make room for the next. I shall beg the reader to consider that the blanks express the time expended on this operation. He dashed into his work at once, rolling up and getting rid of his sentences as he went on: So, I say, God bless the best y aller woman he ever made -, for Jamaica, gentlemen -, from the Isle of Springs. Well, gentlemen, I expect there are only two things we're vexed for -, and the first is, that she ain't one of us -, a citizen of the great United States -, and the other thing is, gentlemen -, that Providence made her a yaller woman. I calculated, gentlemen, you're all as vexed as I am that she's not wholly white -, but I du reckon on your rejoicing with me that she's so many shades removed from being entirely black -, and I guess, if we could bleach her by any means we would -, and thus make her acceptable in any company as she deserves to be -. Gentlemen, I give you Aunty Seacole.

At this point her brother had to beg her to restrain herself during her response. She thanked them for drinking her health:

But I must say that I don't altogether appreciate your friend's kind wishes with respect to my complexion. If it had been as dark as any nigger's, I should have been just as happy and as useful, and as much respec- ted by those whose respect I value; and as to his offer of bleaching me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without any thanks. As to the society which this might gain me admission into, all I can say is, that, judging from the specimens I have met with here and elsewhere, I don't think I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink to you and the general reformation of American manners, pp. 47,48



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In which Mrs. Seacole experiences war In 1853 Mary returned to Jamaica where yellow fever was raging.

the yellow fever never made a more determined effort to exterminate the English in Jamaica than it did in that dreadful year. So violent was the epidemic, that some of my people fell victims to its fury, a thing rarely heard of before, pp. 59, 60

She witnessed many English deaths 'in vain contest with a climate that refused to adopt them. Indeed, the mother country pays a dear price for the possession of her colonies', (p. 60) In spite of her clear-sightedness as regards American expansionist designs she seems not to have questioned English colonialism. In this regard she sees the one as radiat- ing out of their domestic system of greed and prejudice, the other she sees as coming from a system which is basically 'civilizing'. As her autobiography shows how strong her own maternal instincts were, one can imagine that the term 'mother country' was deeply internalized. However, as we have already seen, the 'mother' culture was not uncritically assimilated but accepted only so far as it did not run counter to her own Creole sense of self.

During the epidemic Mary felt deeply for a young surgeon who died in her arms. She confesses:

I used to call him "my son - my dear child", and weep over him in a very weak and silly manner perhaps.

His mother later wrote to her and sent her a small gold brooch with a lock of his hair in it, and she treasured this keepsake always. The mother's gesture suggests that the attachment must have been in some way reciprocated as he must have written to his mother about her. Although throughout the book one sees Mary Seacole as very warm and caring, it is rare that one gets even such a tantalizingly brief glimpse of her soft and sentimental side. Yet her reticence is part of her womanly charm, for while one doubts that her feelings towards him were wholly maternal, what she chooses to tell is told simply and intensely and leaves the impression of the quality of her love without telling us the exact nature of it. This incident also helps to explain her drive to get to the Crimea. She felt acutely the loneliness and homesickness of the young surgeon and she admired the brave way in which he faced his death. When she heard that soldiers from the regiments sta- tioned in Jamaica had been sent there she determined to go and give her services as a nurse.

Before she went to London she made one more trip to Colon to wind up her affairs there. She got side-tracked into prospecting for gold and she met Mr Day, a distant connection of her late husband with whom she was later to go into partnership.

By the autumn of 1865 Mary Seacole was in London trying to enlist in the war effort.

So I made long and unwearied application at the War Office, in blissful ignorance of the labour and time I was throwing away.

She tried to enlist as a nurse's aid with as little success and at last she had to face the



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nature of the problem. Was it possible that American Prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat darker skin than theirs? p. 79

She decided then to go on her own steam and she met again with Mr Day who was bound for Balaclava on shipping business. They planned to open a store and she also laid in medicines so that she might be able to do some nursing. Travelling out on the 'Hollander', she met none other than the brother of her young surgeon who had died and wherever the ship docked she met with old friends. In the market in Gibraltar she heard - 'Why bless my soul old fellow, if this is not our good old Mother Seacole.' In Malta another old friend gave her a letter of introduction to Florence Nightingale:

then hard at work, evoking order out of confusion and bravely resisting the despotism of death, at the hospital of Scutari, p. 85

Her attitude in making the visit was not one of awe towards a woman who was already quite a heroine in England, but one of purely professional interest as between equals. It was an attitude not quite reciprocated by the English nurses, but needless to say our heroine was not in the least daunted and shrugged it off with the observation that she had never found women as quick to understand her as men.

The ship was in Constantinople for six days so she did not hesitate to explore, sometimes by boat.

The caicques . . . might be made more safe and com- modious for stout ladies, even if the process inter- fered a little with their ornament. Time and trouble combined have left me with a well filled out, portly frame - the envy of many an angular Yankee female - and, more than once, it was in no slight danger of becoming too intimately acquainted with the temp- erature of the Bosphorus. pp. 85, 86

Mary Seacole's adventurous spirit leads her confidently into new situations and, throughout it all, she maintains a humorous and unsentimental view of herself. Her self-image is so strong that she wears her Jamaican fashions proudly and, tongue in cheek, well aware that her colour is also the point of interest, assumes that the curiosity she evokes is based totally on admiration.

I accepted it all as a compliment to a stout female tourist, neatly dressed in a red or yellow dress, a plain shawl of some other colour and a simple straw wide- awake with bright red streamers. I flatter myself that I woke up sundry sleepyeyed turks, who seemed to think that the great object of life was to avoid showing surprise at anything; while the Turkish women gathered around me, and jabbered about me, in the most flattering manner, p. 86



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She arrived eventually in Balaclava with 'its population villains of every nation'. With great difficulty she established her 'British Hotel' at Spring Hill where thieves, both 'biped and quadruped', made life both dangerous and difficult. Her hotel was very popular but she made the time to take her homemade delicacies and her medicines to sick soldiers. She took herself to the battlefield and gave whatever comfort and assistance she could. Of one such scene she wrote:

It was a fearful scene, but why repeat this remark. All death is trying to witness . . . but on the battlefield, where the poor body is torn and rent in hideous ways and the scared spirit struggles to loose itself from the still strong frame that holds it tightly to the last, death is fearful indeed, p. 165

In that fearful struggle she saw that often all she could offer was the presence of a woman, the touch of a woman's hand. In this she had no false sense of her own importance but was prepared to act as a substitute for all the mothers far away in England. There is in that compassionate, asexual giving of herself, something very moving. And in that meet- ing of the lone brown woman, thousands of miles from her home, with white men in the extremity of pain and loneliness, there is something fine that transcends cultures and races and more shallow concepts of male/female need. For indeed she did not minister only to British soldiers, many a Frenchman and Russian felt her hand changing a bandage or offering a drink of water.

Her story there was not all so serious. The social life around her hotel was varied. Once she helped some soldiers dress up for theatricals. At other times her guests were of high status such as 'a prince of the Imperial family of France'. On one occasion he com- mented on her coolness towards a group of Americans. Quite forgetting his own connection with America «[he was a Rochefoucauld] she explained her prejudice against Ameri- cans. He listened for a while then interrupted - "Tenez! Madame Seacole, I too am American a little.' 'What a pity (she comments) I was not born a countess'. I am sure L should have made a capital courtier. Witness my impromptu answer:- "I should never have guessed it, Prince." - and he seemed amused.'

After the sacking of Sebastopol the war ended suddenly. Mrs Seacole and Mr Day had to sell their quantity of stock and the hotel itself at great loss. She returned to England poor and in ill health but firmly established in the affectionate regard of many. Punch magazine published a poem in her honour and some of her Crimean friends, now back in England in influential positions, formed a committee to help her. She closes her book with the names of this committee but not before she affirms that hers is still a happy life as she would meet with old friends in all sorts of unexpected places.

Inez Sibley in an article in The Gleaner Sunday Magazine of 1 December 1963 says that she died in Jamaica in 1881. That is the date usually given as her death but she is buried in North West London in St Mary's Catholic cemetery. Another letter to The Gleaner of 5 February 1938, reprinted from The Sunday Times (London) of 16 January 1938, from A. C. Whitehorne (major) of Bournemouth, throws light on her later years.

She addresses everyone of whatever rank as 'my son'. Thirty years after the Crimea she was described as "a



44

little yellow woman, dressed in several bright colours and wearing a dozen medals!" She was then making a good living as a "rubber" (the forerunner of the masseuse). She had used her skill on the Princess of Wales when the latter was suffering from lameness.

Form and Style The book is 200 pages, has a linear, chronological development over 19 chapters

and a short Conclusion. There is a short preface by W. H. Russell who was The Times correspondent in the Crimea, in which he refers to her as a 'plain, truth-speaking woman!'. It is, of course, written in the first person for an imagined English readership.

In style there is something of Jane Austen, particularly in her opening sentence and in her report of her decision to be married. She has a gift for understatement which suggests a large and complex situation briefly. In referring to the guests at her hotel in Colon, many of whom were from the Southern states of America, she says - 'with very few exceptions, those who were not bad were very disagreeable', (p. 50) Of the men, she leaves what is unsaid as even more threatening than what is said:

The great majority of the travellers were rough, rude men, of dirty, quarrelsome habits; the others were more civilized and more dangerous.

Her sense of humour is ironic and satirical, as in this example where she ends up parodying a house agent's advertisement.

It was a mere tumble-down hut, with wattled sides and a rotten thatched roof containing two rooms, one small enough to serve as a bedroom. For this charm- ing residence - very openly situated, and well venti- lated - twenty pounds a month was considered a fair and by no means exorbitant rent.

Mary Seacole always conveys a positive self-image. She likes and approves of herself and engages the reader, as has already been shown, by direct appeal. In the following example, she uses a sort of euphemistic hyperbole to invite the reader to be amused with her at her own discomfort. In Scutari, the hospital was so full the only bed to be had was that of a washerwoman. She opens the passage with some general felicities on washer- women so that we are sure that what ensues does not reflect on the washerwoman herself. She got to bed and found that:

unbidden and most unwelcome companions took the washerwoman's place, and persisted not only in divid- ing my bed, but my plump person also. Upon my word, I believe the fleas are the only industrious creatures in all Turkey. Some of their relatives would seem to have migrated into Russia, for I found them in the Crimea equally prosperous and ubiquitous. In the morning a breakfast is sent to my mangled remains, p. 91

She can create humour by the judicious choice of simile. At Spring Hill her neigh-



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bour was a Turkish officer of high rank whom she simply called the Pacha. He became a frequent and appreciative visitor.

Like a Scotch Presbyterian on the Continent for a holiday, he threw aside all the prejudices of his edu- cation, and drank bottled beer, sherry and champagne with an appreciation of their qualities that no thirsty souled Christian could have expressed more gratefully, p. 110

More succinctly she will rely on one carefully chosen adjective to explode an otherwise innocuous sentence. The Pacha again, here he is sitting in her storeroom trying to learn English - [he] 'would try hard to sow a few English sentences in his treacherous memory!'

Mary Seacole had a talent for drawing small, vivid portraits of people by combining highly connotative language suggesting character from details of appearance. In this way they and her attitude to them are swiftly given.

Came one day, Lola Montes, in the full zenith of her evil fame, bound for California with a strange suite. A good-looking, bold woman, with fine, bad eyes and a determined bearing, dressed ostentatiously in perfect male attire . . . black hat, French unmentionables, and natty, polished boots with spurs, p. 40

Carefully balanced throughout the book is the author as a recording eye and the author as a reflective individual. As can be expected, these moments of reflection are marked by a change in style and this style varies with the subject of her reflection. In writing of the natural barriers there were in joining the Atlantic and Pacific, she observed,

It was reserved for the men of our age to accomplish what so many had died in attempting, and iron and steam, twin giants subdued to man's will, have put a girdle over rocks and rivers, so that travellers can glide as smoothly, if not as inexpensively, over the once terrible Isthmus of Darien as they can from London to Brighton, p. 11

The personification of iron and steam linked with man's will gives a strong, masculine image which is balanced immediately with the feminine image of 'a girdle over rocks and rivers'. The grandeur of the opening is brought down to earth by the reference to Brighton, associated for most readers with jolly, day trips. This homely association serves to highlight the achievement of man conquering nature and reducing the dangers of what was previously a terrible journey.

In the following passage she draws a picture of both her emotional and physical situation in London after days of trying to be accepted as a recruit. Nature seems to mirror and amplify her feelings.

Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets, tears of grief that any should doubt my motives - that Heaven should deny me the opportunity that I sought. Then I stood still, and



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looking upward through and through the dark clouds that shadowed London, prayed aloud for help. p. 80

How well she expresses what so many, many Jamaicans, years later, passing through London would feel at one time or another. Exactly those feelings of being beaten by Heaven, London and the English system. For such a short book, the variety of her literary expression is extraordinary. Yet the persona remains constant so that style in this book is never showy or obstrusive. Arriving in Navy Bay, Mary Seacole seems to be anticipating Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

As we arrived, a steady down pour of rain was falling from an inky sky; the white men who met us on the wharf appeared ghostly and wraith like, and the very negroes seemed pale and wan. p. 1 1

Her arrival in Balaclava is totally different. We slowly wind through a narrow channel and emerge into a small land-locked basin, so filled with shipping that their masts bend in the breeze like a wintry forest.

As will be noted above, she sometimes switched into the present tense to give a feeling of immediacy and so heighten the reader's involvement.

Mary Seacole was equally adept at using dialogue. The following exchange is remarkable for its terseness, accuracy in language differences and the way in which it conveys the character of the speakers. The situation is briefly this: she took passage for Kingston from Colon on an American steamer, which an American friend had suggested she not use. She boarded with her little entourage and seated herself in the saloon.

Before I had been long there, two ladies came to me and in their cool, straightforward manner, questioned me. Where air you going? To Kingston. And how air you going? By sea. Don t be impertinent yaller woman. By what convey- ance air you going? By this steamer of course. I've paid for my passage.

The women backed off temporarily but others joined them and the whole scene became so vicious that Mary got her money back and took her little entourage off to wait for a British ship. The episode ended with the neat statement - "My American friends were vastly annoyed, but not much surprised." Conclusion

Mary Seacole's The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands was published in 1857. It seemed to have evoked in Jamaica not the slightest flicker of interest. In between reprints of Lady Nugent's Journal the Institute did not see fit to issue even one reprint of this first Jamaican book which ought to occupy a place of honour in our literature. The University of the West Indies has a women's hall of residence named after



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her, but no copies of her book. Scholars in West Indian literature have never heard of her as other than a nurse.

Mary Seacole's book is immensely well written, very readable and gives us, so far as I know, the only record of the life and character of a Jamaican woman in the nineteenth century. Quite apart from the fact that she was a woman of action and courage, she was also an extremely well-rounded, well-integrated personality. With so many contemporary West Indian novelists writing of the sick, split West Indian psyche, such a work should have a unique and valued place in our literature.

NOTES

1. Lady Nugent*s Journal ed. Frank Cundall published for the Institute of Jamaica by the West India Committee - London 1939 edition - 3rd. reprint, p. 18.

2. Ibid, p. 27. 3. Ibid, p. 102. 4. Ibid, p. 132. 5. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre edited with an introduction by Margaret Smith. Oxford University

Press, London 1973. pp. 309-310 6. The book has since been re-published by the Falling Wall Press, Bristol, February 1984.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, Oxford University Press, 1973.

Lady Nugent's Journal ed. Frank Cundall. Published for the Institute of Jamaica by the West India Committee. London. 1939 edition, 3rd. reprint., Olney, James Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton University Press.

Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea, Penguin Books. England 1968.

Seacole, Mary The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, ed. W.I.S. James Blackwood, London, 1857 and Falling Wall Press,. Bristol, February, 1984.



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