Cape May MAC Book Club: The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands
by Evelyn Maguire
The summer is in full swing, and we’ve officially read two (out of six) books for the Cape May MAC inaugural book club. For our second discussion, we read the fascinating memoir, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, written by, as you might guess, Mrs. Mary Seacole. If you missed our live discussion, check out the recording here. And to stay up to date with book club news, follow our Facebook Event Page and subscribe to the Cape May MAC blog!
Quite a stylistic departure from our first read — The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë — this 1857 autobiography details the life of a little-known Crimean war hero, pioneering nurse and entrepreneur, and a truly funny woman, Mary Seacole. Born in Kingston, Jamaica to a Jamaican mother and a Scottish father, Mary Seacole life was, as her title suggests, full of adventure.
Like her mother, Mary became a “doctress,” an outdated term often used to refer to women who combined traditional herbalist remedies with more modern medicinal practices. Her expertise would prove direly needed. As she traveled from Jamaica to Panama to England and back again, she would face off against Cholera — at the time, such a formidable disease that officially trained doctors would tend to flee from it, leaving Seacole often as the one medical provider in town. So beloved by her patients, when Seacole herself contracted Cholera, she writes in her memoir that barely a half-hour would pass without someone dropping off supplies or paying her a kind word.
There’s so much of Seacole’s life that is worth delving into — her gold rush exploits to her numerous successful hotels all over the world to her near-death escape from a ship caught fire in the Atlantic — but you’ll have to read the book for all of those details that lead up to her entry into the Crimea War, the event that earns the most space in her memoir.
What I found to be so compelling about Seacole was her utter persistence in the face of adversity. As a mixed-race woman in the 1850s, her medical expertise and competence was continuously doubted — official British medical forces claimed to have no spot for her despite more soldiers dying of disease than gunfire. Yet so convinced that she was destined to serve at the frontlines, she not only booked her own fare to the Crimea, but she also set up her very own “British Hotel,” to tend the wounded a few miles from the battlefront. The hotel, though little more than a few rooms strung together with whatever building material could be found, became a hub of trade and healing, known through the British and French forces as a home-base of operations captained by a resourceful woman.
Yet despite detailing the hardships she faced and atrocities she witnessed, Seacole tone rarely wavers from humorous and happy-go-lucky. She’s funny! I was truly surprised at the number of times I laughed out loud reading this memoir. Upon release, her autobiography was a resounding success, and Seacole was named a British hero. As we discussed in the livestream, it feels like The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands would be a fantastic addition to an academic curriculum as it documents — in a very lively, engaging manner — a rather complex war from the perspective of a black woman on the frontlines.
If you haven’t read this one, I highly encourage all history buffs to pick it up!
Our third book club selection, to be discussed on July 18 at 11am, is Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. One of my favorite books of all time, Carmilla is a vampire novella which — believe it or not — predates Dracula! When hapless Lady Laura meets Carmilla, an enticing — if strangely off-putting — young woman, the two become intimate confidantes. But little does Laura realize, Carmilla has bloodthirsty secrets…Predating Dracula by over two decades, this eerie novella by Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu is one of the earliest works of vampiric fiction, a masterful gothic tale with a startling female villain…
See you in two weeks!
