Amelia Edwards on the Nile in the mid-1870s. Alexandra David-Neel in Tibet in 1923. Winifred Stegar in Mecca in 1927. Freya Stark in what is now Yemen in 1934.
I’ve long been fascinated by the memoirs of intrepid women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I recently read “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands” by Mary Seacole, the most intrepid of them all. Skillful, enterprising and optimistic, Seacole, an African-Caribbean who was born in 1805, overcame racism as well as the sexism faced by Edwards, David-Neel and Stegar, who were white.
Seacole, using traditional therapies she learned from her mother, nursed patients through a cholera epidemic in her native Jamaica. She ran a hotel in Panama, where she also put her nursing skills to use. She wanted her life to have purpose, a desire that led her to the Crimea during the 1853-1856 conflict that Russia lost to the allied Ottoman, British, Sardinian and French armies.
Seacole, who was light-skinned, occasionally wrote mockingly of those darker than her. That she could sound racist was no protection from racism.
She wrote in her autobiography of Americans celebrating the Fourth of July at her hotel in Panama, and one of them taking the opportunity to thank her for saving several of his countrymen from death by cholera. Even in expressing gratitude, he tries to make clear that he sees himself as superior because Seacole is not white, saying in a public toast that “if we could bleach her by any means we would.”
Seacole responded with a sharper toast of her own: “As to his offer of bleaching me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without any thanks. As to the society to which this process might gain admission into, all I can say is, that, judging from the specimens I have met with here and elsewhere, I don’t think that I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink to you and the general reformation of American manners.”
Seacole saw herself as a citizen of an empire – Britian’s – she judged superior to the United States in part because of an 1833 act of Parliament that abolished slavery in most British colonies, including in the Caribbean. It took another 33 years and a civil war to end slavery in the United States.
Seacole’s autobiography provides contemporary accounts of slaveholders’ cruelty and violence. A recurring theme is her antipathy toward slaveholding white Americans she encountered in her travels who treated her with open racism. Once in Panama she had to delay a journey because white American passengers refused to travel with a Black woman who was neither servant nor slave. She admired the British, even on those occasions when she wondered if they were treating her with a more polite form of the racism than she had suffered from Americans.
Florence Nightingale, lauded as the founder of modern nursing because of her work during the Crimean War, rebuffed Seacole’s attempts to join her nursing corps. Nightingale, who came from a wealthy British family, later spoke ill of Seacole with damning, ladylike lack of candor, merely hinting at some impropriety and leaving the rest to her readers’ imaginations. A mixture of racism and classicism colored Nightingale’s perception of Seacole.
Seacole went to the Crimea on her own, without the government support afforded Nightingale. Seacole set to work as soon as she reached Balaclava, a Crimean port settlement from where the war-wounded were stabilized before they could be transferred for treatment at hospitals further from the fighting.
“The very first day that I approached the wharf, a party of sick and wounded had just arrived,” Seacole wrote. “Here was work for me, I felt sure. With so many patients, the doctors must be glad of all the hands they could get. Indeed, so strong was the impulse within me that I waited for no permission, but seeing a poor artilleryman upon a pallet, groaning heavily, I ran up to him at once and eased the stiff dressings. Lightly my practiced fingers ran over the familiar work, and well was I rewarded when the poor fellow’s groans subsided.”
While Nightingale had been condescending, soldiers who saw Seacole in action loved and admired her. They were too busy trying to stay alive, and too thankful for her efforts to help them, to be swayed by prejudice.
Had she been a man, particularly a white man, Seacole would have been universally embraced as courageous and compassionate. Instead, her motives were constantly questioned by people whose judgment was swayed by prejudice. I wonder how many more lives would have saved had Seacole not faced so many obstacles. Those whose lives she was able to touch have her stubbornness to thank.
Seacole wrote: “Of course, had it not been for my old strong-mindedness (which has nothing to do with obstinacy, and is in no way related to it – the best term I can think of to express it being ‘judicious decisiveness’) I should not have given up the scheme (of going to the Crimea) a score of times in as many days; so regularly did each successive day give birth to a fresh set of rebuffs and disappointments.”*
That line sums up what I admire about Seacole, and why I am drawn to books by such pioneering women. Their reminiscences taught me that it’s not about setting out for a particular destination, but seeking a place – or a state of mind – where you cannot be denied the right to define yourself.
*The parentheses are Seacole’s.