A creole from Jamaica, she starts out by nursing British troops stationed in Jamaica, becoming something of an expert in dealing with bowel problems, then moves on to keeping a store for the gold diggers crossing the Panama isthmus on their way to California. When the Crimean war gets under way she goes to London to offer her services as a nurse, but spurned there despite her experience, she pushes onto the Crimea where she keeps another store, just behind the front lines, while freelancing as a battlefield nurse. She was clearly quite something, and justly popular with the troops with which she came into contact, to the point where there were plenty with title or rank or both who were prepared to write testimonials for her. But not Florence Nightingale, who seemed to think that she was rather a nuisance, keeping what more or less amounted to a disorderly house. I suspect that Mrs. Seacole was a bit too full of fun and zest for life for her - but she must also been tough, as life for a women more or less in the line with the troops cannot have been easy. Interesting that such a woman also had the skills needed to get the right sort of memoir out onto streets while the public were still interested. I seem to recall Stendhal has one in 'Le Rouge et Le Noir', one of a caste called a vivandière in the French army of the time, kindly but tough, probably not usually given to memoirs.
The penguin includes full apparatus; that is to say an introduction from an associate professor at Toronto University, 40 pages of notes and a glossary. An introduction which seems to think that it was just as well that she went bust at the end of the Crimean War, having mistimed a major stock building exercise, as rich she might have been seen as a profiteer, rather than as the heroine she was. All in all a very good read.
Given Mrs. Seacole's comments on the way people of colour were treated by Yankees, I thought I would ask http://www.dp.la/ about her, to find no knowledge there of 'mrs seacole', 'mary seacole' or even 'seacole'. The search term 'nurse jamaica' turned up 11 hits, all from the State University of Montana at Billings (on the Yellowstone River), all from the student rag there 'The Retort'. I got the hits because the university has a school of nursing and the rag sometimes had an advertisement for holidays in Jamaica. And I can download, for free, a good quality .pdf file, all 15Mb of it.
But then, using my knowledge that there is a portrait bust in the J. Paul Getty museum, I go to http://www.getty.edu/ where I rapidly turn the bust up. And I can download a good quality picture of it for free, against a simple declaration that it is for personal use rather than commercial gain. The version they sent me was 18Mb, so the version above has been chopped down to a decency preserving 200Kb. Not like our National Gallery, sufficiently poverty stricken that they make a substantial charge for their digital images.
A handsome bust, but one which the catalog entry says has been taken from a picture, rather than from life, so who is to say whether it is any nearer the real thing than the image on the front of the penguin, taken from the original book, back in 1860 or so.
PS: poking the Getty a bit harder I turn up 'the Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required'. They are quite happy for me to make money out of the thing. Perhaps only fitting considering how much money Mr. Getty must have made in his day.
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