SOURCE: Judd, Catherine. “‘A Female Ulysses’: Mary Seacole, Homeric Epic and the Trope of Heroic Nursing (1854-1857).” In Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830-1880, pp. 101-21. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Judd criticizes Seacole's narrative for accepting her subject status from England. She explores Seacole's text as a Homeric epic and discusses how Seacole creates a heroic self.]

Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is a crucial and problematic text in the canon of both Caribbean autobiography and nineteenth-century black women writers. Unlike Mary Prince's seminal Afro-Caribbean autobiography The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831), Seacole's narrative refuses to critique the ravages of British colonialism. Sandra Pouchet Paquet has argued that Seacole's narrative “reflects an enthusiastic acceptance of colonialism in the aftermath of slavery. In her narrative, Seacole celebrates her subject status in an empire that had systematically exploited and abused her native land and the majority of its inhabitants since the British captured Jamaica in 1655” (651). However, Paquet argues, despite Seacole's explicit quest for English recognition and English approval, Seacole's “surrender” to the dominant culture is “not absolute”: “Seacole's revolt against the marginalization imposed by race and gender qualifies her embrace of the civilizing values she professes to honor” (652). In this chapter I explore the ways Seacole creates oblique resistance to her otherwise evident acceptance of “English values at the margins of Empire” (Paquet 662). Through her rewriting of both Homeric epic and the popular hagiography of Florence Nightingale—icons of both British domesticity and imperialism—I argue that Seacole creates a heroic self that cannot be contained by the exigencies of her English audience.

SEACOLE AND THE CRIMEAN WAR

On July 5, 1856, a brief notice appeared in the London Times. Situated between two advertisements—one for the Unity Joint-Stock Mutual Banking Association and another for a new military adventure novel, The Green Hand or, Adventures of a Naval Lieutenant—the announcement read: “Mrs. Seacole, the celebrated proprietress of the provision store in the Crimea, intends setting up a similar establishment at Aldershott [sic]. Her fame in this particular department of business is as well known among all military men that success in her new speculation is almost certain” (Times (London), 5 July 1856, p. 10).¹ However, contrary to the Times optimistic predictions, Mary Seacole's provision store in Aldershot did not flourish. Rather, Seacole and her business partner Thomas Day appeared before the London Bankruptcy Court on November 6th of that year.² Although the Times had overestimated Seacole's financial serendipity, they were not exaggerating her renown. If anything, the Times depreciated Seacole's fame by limiting it to “all military men”—for by 1855 Seacole emerged, along with William Howard Russell, Alexis Soyer, and Florence Nightingale, as one of the most celebrated heroes of England's disastrous Crimean War.

Each one of these public figures makes an unexpected war hero, but then the Crimean War was an unusual war. A failure for the government despite Britain and her allies's ultimate victory over Russia, Britain entered the Crimean War with expectations of a swift conquest that would reassert to the world her incontrovertible supremacy.³ Instead, due to the ineptitude of her aged aristocratic military leaders, astounding bureaucratic mismanagement in London, and the subsequent starvation, mistreatment, and deprivations suffered by the largely working-class soldiers, the war reflected the immense social problems brought about by the Industrial Revolution and Britain's colonial enterprises. Out of 20,000 dead British soldiers, only 3,000 died as a direct result of battle wounds: the remaining 17,000 perished from starvation, exposure, and disease, particularly cholera and yellow fever.⁴ The scandalous abuse of the British troops served to trigger a serious crisis in government and a loss of the general public's faith in Britain's military and political leadership.⁵ As prominent heroes of the Crimean War, and in contrast to the martial exploits upon which the fame of more traditional military heroes rests, Russell, Soyer, Nightingale, and Seacole were seen to share attributes of self-sacrifice, compassion, and philanthropy, and as a group they projected a sense of their working towards the exposure and correction of corruption and incompetence in England's government. They were, in other words, heroes of reform.

Russell, the war correspondent for the London Times, decried the calamities of the front. Serious errors such as furnishing the soldiers with green coffee beans and other inedible supplies and failing to provide basic health care or warm clothing so that many soldiers froze to death during the first harsh Crimean winter were duly chronicled by Russell and dispatched back to an indignant English readership.⁶ Soyer, the world-renowned French chef who had already achieved fame with the soup kitchens that he opened and supervised in Dublin during the Irish Famine (1845-49), traveled to the Crimean Peninsula in order to establish similar kitchens for the British troops stationed at the front.⁷ Florence Nightingale, by far the most prominent of the Crimean heroes, gained global fame for what was seen as her Christ-like ministrations to the working-class soldiers at Britain's military hospital in Scutari. Nightingale's role of national and international secular saint generated a hagiographical rhetoric that often obscured her real aims and accomplishments, aims that were firmly aligned with pragmatic, Benthamic programs of public health and institutional reforms, and the administration of the general health of the British army. Like Nightingale, Seacole's fame derived from her compassionate treatment of infirm British soldiers. The ongoing comparison between Seacole and Nightingale was immediate and long-lasting. For example, a letter to the Times signed by “Da Meritis” queries whether the “humbler actions of Mrs Seacole [are] to be entirely forgotten” while the “benevolent deeds of Florence Nightingale are being handed down to posterity with blessings and imperishable renown” (Times (London), 24 November 1856, p. 24).⁸

Mary Jane Grant Seacole was born in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. Her mother was a free black Jamaican and her father was a Scotsman and an officer in the British Army. From her mother, Seacole learned the art of both medicine and hotel management and, widowed at a young age, she used these skills to ensure her economic survival. At the time of the outbreak of the Crimean War, Seacole had recently finished nursing British soldiers and Jamaican citizens through a yellow fever epidemic in Kingston. In September of 1854, she sailed to England in order to volunteer to work with Nightingale nursing the wounded in Scutari. However, due to her race, Seacole's application was rejected despite her considerable qualifications. Seacole recounts going to Sydney Herbert's house in London to apply for a position as one of Nightingale's nurses: “many a long hour did I wait in his great hall, while scores passed in and out. … The flunkeys, noble creatures! marvelled exceedingly at the yellow woman whom no excuses could get rid of, nor impertinence dismay.”⁹ Upon finally securing an interview with “one of Miss Nightingale's companions,” Seacole was informed that “the full complement of nurses had been secured … and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it.” Upon meeting these rebuffs, Seacole wonders “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 duskier skin than theirs?” (79).

Although she avoids a direct critique of English racism at this point, earlier, Seacole described the racism encountered during her first trip to London undertaken when she was a young woman: “some of the most vivid of my recollections are the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at my and my companion's complexion. I am only a little brown—a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much; but my companion was very dark, and a fair (if I can apply the term to her) subject for their rude wit … [thus] our progress through the London streets was sometimes a rather chequered one” (4).¹⁰ Notwithstanding Seacole's disingenuous speculations about English color prejudice, she could not have been unaware, for example, of Britain's much debated “black wars,” that is, its genocidal policies then in progress in Australia and especially Van Diemen's Land or Tasmania as it came to be known. Further, the publication of Seacole's Wonderful Adventures coincided with the events of the Indian Mutiny, an event that inflamed British racism. The historian Thomas Macaulay writes in his diary in June of 1857 that “the cruelties of the Sepoy natives have inflamed the Nation to a degree unprecedented within my memory. Peace Societies [and] Aborigines Protection Societies … are silent” (quoted in Semmel 1963, 21). Indeed, Bernard Semmel characterizes the progress of British racism as one that began with “a kindly view of the native races” that had “taken hold upon the British public early in the century.” By 1857, the British inclined towards a distrust of different races, as any compassion was “whittled away by the apparently ceaseless wars which Britain was waging against coloured peoples, as part of their operations to safeguard what England already possessed and to extend commerce and the area of colonization” (Semmel 1963, 20).¹¹

It was in this climate that Seacole sailed to the Crimean Peninsula and set up the British Hotel, a canteen, club, and grocery store (or “sutler shop”) for soldiers and officers stationed at the front. At the time, sutlers had a deservedly poor reputation for overcharging their customers and thereby profiting from the agonies of war. Yet through her hospitality, and especially through her treatment of sick and wounded British soldiers, Seacole was seen to have “redeemed the name of sutler” as the journalist William Howard Russell characterized it in his preface to Seacole's memoirs (Seacole viii). Earlier, in his bulletins from the front, Russell had reported on the “hoards of sutlers” selling provisions in Gallipoli who did not bear “the highest character in the world” (W. H. Russell 45).¹² Both before and after her bankruptcy, many eyewitnesses attested to Seacole's skill and generosity on the battlefield, and her actions during the war prompted another newspaper correspondent to deem Seacole “both a Miss Nightingale and a Soyer” (Morning Advertiser, 19 July 1855).

When the war ended in March of 1856, Seacole was left with a large quantity of stock that was now useless and could be neither salvaged nor sold. Seacole records that at the end of the war: “we had lately made extensive additions to our store and out-houses—our shelves were filled with articles laid in at a great cost, and which were now unsalable, and which it would be equally impossible to carry home” (189). This overstock, along with her disastrous undertaking at Aldershot, led to her bankruptcy in November of 1856. Yet her plight did not go unnoticed by the English public. After a series of letters to the London Times and articles about her past deeds and her current dilemma in Punch magazine, a musical fund-raiser was planned in order to enrich the recently established “Seacole Fund.”¹³

THE SEACOLE FUND

The Seacole Festival took place over four evenings at the Royal Surrey Gardens in late July of 1857.¹⁴ On July 30, the Times reported that “on no previous occasion have the Royal Surrey Gardens been thronged by a greater multitude. The music-hall was literally crammed, many hundreds of persons being compelled to remain in the grounds, unable to penetrate into the interior of the building” (Times [London], 30 July 1857, p. 5). However, due to the September 1857 bankruptcy of the Surrey Gardens, Seacole received only a few hundred pounds from the proceeds of the concert and so continued to face financial difficulties.¹⁵

It was in the climate of these ongoing pecuniary mishaps that Seacole wrote and published her memoirs, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. While the originating momentum behind Seacole's narrative no doubt derived from her need to rescue herself from her monetary troubles, her autobiography is, of course, far more complex a work than simply a means of fund-raising. Despite her celebrity after the war, Seacole seems not to have sought fame, for aside from her memoirs and a few letters to the London Times and one to Punch during the height of the “Seacole Fund” affair, no extant writing appears to exist before or after 1856-57. Thus we can infer that Seacole did not place herself or her deeds before the public eye except during this year of financial upheaval: she seems to have been a seeker of fortune, but not necessarily of fame. Rather, her medical skills, her talent as a hostess, and her generosity during the war made her famous, perhaps despite her wishes. Yet, having once been propelled into public view, Seacole was not content to let others speak of her and for her without having her own say in the creation of her public persona. Indeed, she writes in her memoirs that “unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all” (147).

The media-created image of Seacole that appeared during her bankruptcy depicted her as someone who should receive equal measures of charity and esteem from the English public. When the London Times first announced Seacole's store in Aldershot, it described Seacole simply as the “celebrated proprietress of the provision store in the Crimean.” Once the store failed, however, Seacole became an object of both pity and veneration in the London popular press. The letters in the Times from “Da Meritis,” “A Friend to Merit,” and William Howard Russell, extol Seacole's past deeds while characterizing her as currently decrepit and pathetic. These letters repeatedly describe Seacole as a “good old soul,” an “old mother,” an “old lady,” a “good old lady,” “poor Mrs Seacole,” and “poor woman” (Times [London], 24 November 1856, p. 8 and 24 November 1856, p. 8). Russell's letter, for example, states his hope that the Times readership will “give enough to Mrs Seacole to set her up—late in life, poor soul, though it be” (Times [London], 11 April 1857, p. 8).

Punch was soon to follow the Times's lead, and in their poetry, articles, and comic dialogue published during 1857 and likewise aimed at eliciting donations for the Seacole Fund, Punch mixes great praise for Seacole's generosity, bravery, and skill with images of her as quite on her last legs. This is especially true in the long poem, a “Stir for Seacole,” which was written in imitation of “Old King Cole,” and hence repeated phrases such as “kindly old soul,” “good old soul,” and “jolly old soul” (Punch, 6 December 1856, p. 221). The article “The Mother of the Regiment” (Punch, 2 May 1857, p. 180) opens with the statement that “poor old Mrs Seacole is hard up,” and in the comic dialogue between Mr. Punch and Lord Palmerston, “Poking Up the Sea-Cole Fire,” Lord Palmerston states that he is very glad to hear of the success of the Surrey Gardens musical benefit because Seacole is a “most deserving old soul, and it will help to keep her deserving old body in comfort” (Punch, 5 September 1857, p. 102)¹⁶

This picture of a dottering and infirm Seacole contradicts not only her self-presentation in her autobiography but also Seacole's physical condition as far as it can be inferred. At the time of her bankruptcy, Seacole was only fifty-two years old and apparently in vigorous health. Indeed, she was to live for another twenty-four years, dying in London from a stroke in 1881. During this time, she not only recouped her losses from the Crimean and the failure at Aldershot, but left at her death an estate valued at £2,615, a sum equivalent to thousands of pounds in today's money. Seacole's subsequent accumulation of this respectable fortune underscores the fact that, above all, she was a businesswoman and an entrepreneur. Thus the public broadcasting of her bankruptcy in 1856-57 must have been a humiliating experience at some level. Seacole writes that “although I was not ashamed of poverty; beginning life again in the autumn—I mean the late summer of life—is hard up-hill work” (193).¹⁷ Furthermore, although she considered herself to be a British citizen, Seacole did not forget the fact of her race and her colonial status.¹⁸ As a black woman and a Jamaican, her self-presentation to a largely white British audience for the sake of raising money placed her in an obviously problematic position. Finally, the writing of her memoirs coincided with the Indian Uprising of 1857 (known to Victorian England as the “Indian Mutiny”), a momentous event that, among other things, revealed the depths of racial hatred in England, a hatred that Seacole alludes to encountering on several occasions.¹⁹ In seizing the terms of her own story, Seacole's literary self-representation displays several strategies of transformation that serve not only to defend her from her necessarily complex relationship with her white British audience, but also to place her in an unusual position of authority. Through the adaptation of male military memoirs, the popular hagiography of Florence Nightingale, and perhaps above all, Homeric epic, Seacole forges a self-image of personal strength, while further making claims for the unique powers of Jamaican women of African descent.

“QUITE A FEMALE ULYSSES”

In describing her “inclination to rove” and her “will powerful enough to carry out my wishes” at the beginning of her narrative, Mary Seacole recounts that “some people, indeed, have called me quite a female Ulysses.” In the jocular style that typifies her autobiography, Seacole dismisses this comparison: “I believe that they intended it as a compliment; but from my experience of the Greeks, I do not consider it a very flattering one” (2). Despite this disclaimer, however, Seacole's text does indeed evoke and retell Homeric epic. As we shall see, Seacole's affiliation with both Odysseus and Florence Nightingale helps to elucidate some of the most salient (and often problematic) aspects of her self-representation, especially with regards to her position as an independent Anglo-African woman, and her economic self-interest that is at odds with her claims of partaking in the self-sacrifice implicit in her role of army nurse.

Oblique or overt comparisons to Homeric epic are standard tropes in the adventure narrative genre, yet Seacole's Wonderful Adventures moves beyond generic convention to manifest correlations between Homeric epic and the Crimean War specifically. For the British, the Crimean War evoked both The Iliad and The Odyssey despite the fact that the English public ultimately viewed the war as an embarrassing and antiheroic conflict. That the Iliad and the Odyssey stood as fundamental texts of nineteenth-century British cultural identity set the stage for the easy association of the Trojan and Crimean wars.²⁰ For example, well before the Crimean War broke out, many ships in the British fleet had been christened with names from Greek mythology including the Aeolus, the Agamemnon, the Cyclops, the Euryalus, the Gorgon, the Penelope, and the Polyphemus.²¹

Furthermore, the British focus on Homeric epic was strongly exacerbated by the geographic situation of the Crimean Peninsula. Due to the peninsula's relative proximity to the Aegean Sea, many of the English who sailed through the Aegean on their way to the front were reminded of stories from Greek mythology. As his ship sailed past the Castles of the Dardanelles, for example, Russell meditated on the fact that “the mountains of the Morea, for the first time since they rose from the sea to watch the birth of Venus, echoed the strains of ‘God Save the Queen,’” and that this was “the first time that the blast of English light infantry trumpets broke the silence of those antique shores” (W. H. Russell 27-28).²² Additionally, the fact that the war's main objective was to capture and demolish Russia's great naval base at Sebastopol echoed the siege of Troy that had occurred at the west entrance of the Dardanelles. Hence references to Homeric epic and Greco-Roman literature were common in the memoirs of, and letters from, the Crimean War.²³ From this perspective, it is not surprising that Seacole should invite a comparison of her situation with Odysseus at the opening of her narrative, even if she quickly disavows this correlation.

One might wonder to what extent Seacole was familiar with Homeric epic and how deliberately she used the model of Odysseus to structure her story. At one point in her narrative, while describing the ease with which she found takers who wanted to purchase shares in her pigs' legs in Spring Hill, Seacole writes that “if the poor thing had possessed as many legs as my editor tells me somebody called the Hydra (with whom my readers are perhaps more familiar than I am) has heads, I should have found candidates for them” (119). Yet this is the only instance of Seacole claiming cultural naïvety. More typically, she alludes familiarly and unapologetically to literary works.²⁴ Further, she seems deliberately to enter into a mock-Odyssean mode when she recounts an “amicable arrangement” made with a ship's cook to “lash me on to a large hen-coop” when a fire breaks out in the hold on one of her voyages home from England to Jamaica (5).

While Seacole's comic tone and her emphasis on the legendary and the anecdotal places her war narrative firmly within a Homeric or Herodotean tradition, her specific situation invites further parallels between herself and Odysseus.²⁵ Like Odysseus when he washes ashore on Scheria, Seacole is alone and “naked” (that is, bankrupt) before her British readers, and like Odysseus, she possesses only the news she brings of foreign countries, offering exotic tales to her readers in exchange for provisions.²⁶ We learn that Seacole has a gift for wandering, and that she has mastered the secrets of travel. Paul Zweig characterizes Odysseus as one who like the shaman “crosses over into the mythic realm and returns with stories of his journeys—he is shipwrecked in a world of strangeness and magic. … The adventurer brings back news of the gods. The lands of myth, Hades, even death and Elysium have been within his reach. His story recreates this distant world, enlarging the boundary of what men know” (23). Like Odysseus, Seacole brings back news from what her British audience would have seen as the margins of the world, margins that seem to be either disintegrating (Jamaica or the Crimea) or inchoate (Panama), and whose chaos has been generated especially through the exigencies of British imperialism.

For Odysseus and for Seacole, their stories will become the source of their fortune. Aiolos keeps Odysseus “one full month to hear the tale of Troy,” and “when in return” Odysseus “asked his leave to sail and asked provisioning,” Aiolos “stinted nothing” (Homer 164). Yet the seeking of patronage does not address the question of why Seacole and Odysseus are wanderers. George Dimock notes that the name “Odysseus” derives from a verb that translates to mean a “general sort of hostility.” Dimock interprets the name of Odysseus as “trouble”: simultaneously making it for others and suffering it at the hands of others (quoted in Zweig 25). As a persecuted figure both blessed and cursed by the gods, we can see how Odysseus would offer a powerful analogy for the situation of nineteenth-century African-Americans. Indeed, in her novel Beloved, set in the mid-nineteenth century, Toni Morrison bespeaks this parallel in her reworking of Odysseus through the character of Paul D.²⁷ By comparing herself to Odysseus, Seacole's narrative becomes in a sense a rewriting of the Odyssey, thereby putting into play what Henry Louis Gates describes as the trope of the “talking book,” that is, the way that nineteenth-century African-American writers make the “white (written) text ‘speak’ with a (black) voice” (55).²⁸

Yet unlike many nineteenth-century African-American autobiographers, Seacole does not seem directly to address the pain and chaos of black colonial experience. In his introduction to the Schomburg Library edition of Wonderful Adventures, William Andrews argues that Seacole appeared to be “well protected from the tentacles of slavery,” and that to obtain an “intimate view” of West Indian slavery, one would do better to read Mary Prince's History (1831). Seacole shares with many nineteenth-century African-American writers a propensity to leave painful scenes unwritten: Bernard Bell has attributed the silences in the slave narratives to the writer's relationship with both the “white audiences and … self-masking from a painful past” (8). In Beloved, the narrator describes Ella, a worker on the underground railroad, as one who “listen[s] for the holes—the things the fugitives did not say,” and Seacole's narrative exhibits a similar penchant for narrative gaps (Morrison 187). For example, as readers, we know only that her mother was a free black and her father a Scotsman, her family history remaining otherwise undelineated. Tellingly, at the end of her description of a cholera epidemic in Cruces, Panama (then New Grenada), Seacole writes that: “life went on as briskly and selfishly as ever with the Cruces survivors, and the terrible past was conveniently forgotten. Perhaps it is so everywhere; but the haste with which the Cruces people buried their memory seemed indecent” (35, my emphasis). If Seacole censors her past in her narrative, it does not necessarily indicate that she has forgotten that past. In describing the Kingston cholera epidemic, Seacole writes that “I do not willingly care to dwell upon scenes of suffering and death, but it is with such scenes that my life's experience had made me most familiar” (60).²⁹

That Seacole is “most familiar” with “scenes of suffering and death” is not surprising considering the continued discrimination against people of African descent in post-manumission Jamaica. This, coupled with the moribund state of Jamaican economy in the nineteenth century, an economy characterized as being plagued by “debt, disease and death,” amplified the agonies of black colonial experience. Although England abolished slavery in Jamaica in 1834-38, the structures of a slave society remained—especially in the continued exploitation of Jamaicans of African heritage by a white racist minority. Notwithstanding the probability of Seacole being removed at least one generation from slavery, the racism she would have encountered in Jamaica would nonetheless have been extreme. For example, ten years before slavery ended in Jamaica, the Lewis Lescene and John Escoffery case, which was debated in England's Parliament on June 16, 1825, became a cause célèbre that exposed the mistreatment by whites of the free blacks of Jamaica. During this trial, Stephen Lushington argued before Parliament that the whites of Jamaica could not be “speedily brought to view the importance of the people of mixed blood” in Jamaican society because “the prejudices which had for so many generations led them to consider the blacks as an inferior race, naturally extended to all who had a mixture of African blood in their veins” (quoted in Hurwitz 108).³⁰

Like other nineteenth-century African-American writers, Seacole displays what Bell characterizes as the “complex double vision of Americans of African descent whose humanity and culture had been historically devalued and marginalized by people of European descent” (7). A part of this struggle involves creating a subjectivity in a dominant culture that seems to say, as Franz Fanon describes it, “turn white or disappear” (100). From this perspective, we can see how the figure of Odysseus would offer one of the most salient examples of the heroic struggle for recognition and selfhood in the face of a threatened obliteration or denial of subjectivity. Zweig, for example, notes that Odysseus spends his life avoiding engulfment, whether by the sea, by the narcotic lotus flower, by Charybdis, by the Cyclops, or by Calypso's grotto. Odysseus must “struggle from trouble to trouble, adventure to adventure, for that is the only defense he knows against the oblivion of No Name” (31).

For Seacole, this “engulfment” or oblivion bespeaks her experience both in the face of the alienating diaspora of post-manumission Jamaica and in her encounters with American and European racism that cast doubt upon the humanity of anyone with African blood. Gates has argued for the crucial role the production of literature had for African-Americans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:

what seems clear on reading eighteenth-century texts created by black writers in English or the critical texts that responded to these black writings is that the production of “literature” was taken to be the central arena in which persons of African descent could, or could not, establish and redefine their status within the human community. Black people … had to represent themselves as “speaking subjects” before they could even begin to destroy their status as “objects,” as commodities, within Western culture. In addition to all the myriad reasons for which human beings write books, this particular reason seems to have been paramount for the black slave. At least since 1600, Europeans had wondered aloud whether or not the African “species of men,” as they most commonly put it, could ever create formal literature, could ever master “the arts and sciences.” If they could, then, the argument ran, the African variety of humanity and the European variety were fundamentally related. If not, then it seemed clear that the African was destined by nature to be a slave.

(53)

In his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (1856) published a year earlier than Seacole's Adventures, Samuel Ringgold Ward addresses the issue of the continued doubts expressed by many American and European whites over the status of black humanity: “it is perhaps admissible to step aside to profane history for a few passages of testimony concerning the ancient Negro … Carthage was not the meanest of countries, though Hannibal, like his subjects, was black.”³¹ Ward refers to a white America that is “exceedingly unwilling to believe that anything good or great ever emanated from one wearing a black skin,” and he urges his readers to “trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and where do you find it? We received it from our European ancestry; they from the Greeks and the Romans; those from the Jews; but whence did the Jews receive it? From Egypt and Ethiopia—in one word from Africa!” (274-75). Ward points out that due to the “superior learning of ancient Africans … those stirring spirits, Homer, Pythagoras, and others, travelled among those Africans, as did the sons of the wealthy Greeks and Romans, to acquire the completion of their education, and to give the finishing touch to their verses, just as our sons and poets now travel in Germany and Italy for a like purpose …” (275). Thus Seacole's allusion to Ulysses, however brief, is potentially weighted with the sense that Ward conveys of needing to establish the historical links between ancient and modern civilizations in order to establish Anglo-African identity, and the possible centrality of Homeric epic within the establishment of those links.

We could interpret Seacole's self-presentation as Ulysses as partaking of the classic paradigm of bourgeois individualism, especially in her embodiment of the opposition, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno characterize it, of the “surviving individual” pitted against a “multifarious fate” that threatens to swallow her.³² Indeed, in describing her recently widowed condition at the beginning of her memoirs, Seacole asserts that “I was left alone to battle with the world as best I might. The struggles which it cost me to succeed in life were sometimes very trying … but I have always turned a bold front to fortune” (6). Seacole further posits herself as a universal example of homo economis when she declares that “my fortunes underwent the variations which befall all. Sometimes I was rich one day, and poor the next” (7). Yet Seacole's paradigm of individual survival in the face of shifting fortune takes on a historical specificity that bespeaks not simply a universally shared experience of bourgeois individualism, but further the distinctive disintegration, fragmentation, and confusion of colonial experience itself.

At times, Seacole's representation of colonialism suggests a celebration of its modernity, an intimation that colonial expansion symbolizes the progress of civilization itself. For example, in describing the newly developed trade routes through the isthmus of Panama, Seacole avows that “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 … over the once terrible Isthmus of Darien, as they can from London to Brighton” (10).³³ Yet Seacole does not unequivocally celebrate the modernity and “progress” that the newly plotted trade routes embody. Rather, the images of chaos and disorder contained within Seacole's text invoke a specific critique of expanding world markets at the same time that Seacole seems to commemorate them.

This critique is often aimed xenophobically at the residents and refugees of the newly created marketplaces: “not yet, however, does civilization rule at Panama. The weak sway of the New Grenada Republic, despised by lawless men, and respected by none, is powerless to control the refuse of every nation which meet together upon its soil” (10).³⁴ However, Seacole simultaneously recognizes the human cost of colonial expansion. Seacole's narrative is filled with displaced wanderers, refugees from the exigencies of war, famine, slavery, and plague. For example, in describing the construction of the Panamanian railroad, Seacole recounts that “beneath leaky tents, damp huts, and even under broken railway waggons, I saw men dying from sheer exhaustion. … Every mile of that fatal railway cost the world thousands of lives. I was assured that its site was marked thickly by graves, and that so great was the mortality among the labourers that three times the survivors struck in a body, and their places had to be supplied by fresh victims from America …” (11-12).

Seacole survives this colonial chaos thanks to what she characterizes as fortune or fate. But her dependence on fate raises the issue of the double valence of the word “fortune” not only in its meaning of luck, chance, or fortuna, but also in its economic register: fortune as a species of mercenary exploitation or plunder. In his reading of the Odyssey, Zweig notes that Odysseus is “no less a brutal pirate at the end of the poem than at the beginning,” and he claims that for Nietzsche, the “essential accomplishment” of the Homeric poems was to express “energies of hatred and cruelty, while creating an integral human form which transmutes their nihilistic power” (208). Odysseus's often overlooked manifestation as a brutal pirate echoes the themes of domination and exploitation that permeate Seacole's narrative and remain its most disturbing elements: her bellicosity and jingoism, her racism (expressed especially against the “lazy” indigenous Panamanians and the Turkish and Greek troops and civilians in the Crimean Peninsula), her unabashed entrepreneurial spirit, her pillaging after the fall of Sebastapol, and her violence towards her own servants.³⁵ Like Odysseus, an integral part of Seacole's survival leads her into realms of doubtful ethics, and it is this ethical instability that creates Seacole's need to reconcile her economic with her heroic self: that is, her need to “redeem the name of sutler” as Russell characterizes it in his preface to her memoirs.

This redemption occurs above all through Seacole's role as a sick-nurse, and it is nursing alone that bolsters Seacole's declaration of purification from the economic taint inherent in her role as entrepreneur and “brutal pirate”: “my one and only claim to interest the public, viz., my services [as nurse and doctor] to the brave British army in the Crimea” (124). Yet Seacole's are not the ordinary avowals of cleansing based on domestic ideology—avowals used to fix Nightingale's position as the ultimate figure of purification for the Crimean War. Because Seacole is a product of colonialism, because she has lived through slavery, plague, and the exploitations of colonial life in Jamaica, Panama, Haiti, and Cuba as well as the Crimea, she can lay claim to being uniquely positioned to understand the horrors of colonialism, and therefore uniquely gifted at healing these very horrors. For example, in a letter that Seacole quotes in her narrative, John Hall, Inspector-General of the Hospitals during the war, writes that Seacole was “enabled to administer appropriate remedies” for the Railway Labourers' Army Works Corps and Land Transport Corps “during the winters of 1854 and 1855” due to the “knowledge she had acquired in the West Indies” (129).

In quoting John Hall in her narrative, one wonders to what extent Seacole was familiar with the intense conflict and rivalry between Hall and Nightingale that was a shaping force in the nursing policies creating during the Crimean War. Sue M. Goldie recounts the “bitter personal confrontation[s]” between Hall and Nightingale. When Nightingale fell ill during the war, Hall “hoped that she might be forced by ill health to retire. When it was apparent that she was not to be so easily got rid of, he set about making her position in the Crimea untenable” (6).³⁶ Although Seacole pays due reverence to Nightingale in her narrative, she nonetheless positions herself as an alternative nursing heroine: “I shall make no excuse to my readers for giving them a pretty full history of my struggles to become a Crimean heroine!” (Seacole's emphasis, 76).³⁷ Seacole bases her medical authority not only on the British domestic ideology that informed the avowal of woman's “sacred office of healer” as Charles Kingsley writes, but also upon her unique training in “masculine” European medical techniques such as surgery, pharmacology, and autopsy—training she received during her years working with the British Army surgeons stationed at the Up-Park and Newcastle army camps in Jamaica.³⁸

Above all, however, Seacole indirectly affirms her superior potency to both the female healing powers exemplified by Nightingale and the male medical skills of the military doctors due to her knowledge of Afro-Caribbean medicine learned from her mother and grandmother, for Seacole implies that Afro-Caribbean medicinal arts were especially suited to treating the “tropical” diseases that were at once the foe of the British army and the scourge of all of Europe, which felt the threat of a second “great plague” (especially vis-à-vis cholera) as trade routes with Asia, Africa, and India continued to expand. Thus the recurrent motif of Seacole restoring order in the midst of chaos is informed in part by the unique amalgamation of her European and Afro-Caribbean medical talents. Seacole devotes much of her narrative to recounting these singular medical abilities. In just one example, during the cholera epidemic in Cruces, Seacole puts her “medical skill and knowledge … to the test.” While everyone around her panics, Seacole diagnoses “the terrible truth” of the cholera epidemic with “a single glance” (24). All come to her “eager for advice,” and there is no other medical authority except a “little timid dentist who was there by accident and refused to prescribe for the sufferer[s]” (25) and a Spanish doctor who “was not familiar with the terrible disease he was called upon to do battle with, and preferred trusting to one who was [that is, to Seacole]” (27). While Seacole hopes that the “kind reader” will not think that “in narrating these incidents, I am exalting my poor part in them unduly” (25), or that “the account of what Providence has given me strength to do on larger fields of action be considered vain or egotistical” (26), she nonetheless presents herself as the sole hero of the Cruces cholera epidemic.

Seacole's frequent claim at the end of these stories of general crisis is that “at last I restored some order” (29) both in Panama and in the Crimean war zone: “mismanagement and privation there might have been, but my business was to make things right in my sphere, and whatever confusion and disorder existed elsewhere, comfort and order were always to be found at Spring Hill” (113). In her eagerness to manage and control the disorder and suffering incurred by colonialism, Seacole seems, like Nightingale, to be an apologist for the status quo. She does not appear to want to halt British imperial expansion and exploitation, but rather improve conditions and keep the colonial project on course. Indeed, in her narrative Seacole writes that she is ready to “take any journey to any place where a stout heart and two experienced hands may be of use,” a journey earlier reported by Punch to have the British army camps in China or India as its destination (198).³⁹

Yet there is a way in which the recurrent apocalyptic images contained in Seacole's narrative undermine her pro-imperialist stance: her fascination with fire and flood indicates an underlying impulse not to redeem Britain's colonialist project, but rather to destroy it. In discussing the aftermath of the yellow fever epidemic in Jamaica, Seacole asserts that “indeed, the mother country pays a dear price for the possession of her colonies” (60). Seacole has delineated this “price” in numerous places in her text: her discussion of U.S. slavery, her continuous expression of fears of privation, and the images of disease, mortality, and human misery work to bring home the magnitude of global suffering that accompanies imperialism—whether British, Russian, or American. In one telling example, Seacole is walking on the “wretched streets of Navy Bay [Panama]” when she notices “3 long boxes, loosely covered with the debris of a fallen house.” She asks her companion to explain these boxes and he replies “oh, they're only 3 Irish men killed in a row a week ago, whom its nobody's business to bury” (63-64). The “fallen house” evokes Ireland, devastated only a few years earlier by the Great Famine, and the unburied Irishmen, no doubt refugees from that very famine, are its “debris.” Yet the “house” of Ireland is ultimately the responsibility of the “mother country”—the famine being yet another “great price the mother country pays for its colonies.” Due to its rigid adherence to laissez-faire economics, England, as the world knew, refused for several crucial years to offer any relief during the famine, and what relief it did proffer came late and was inadequate. Thus England's irresponsibility is underscored by the laconic summation that “its nobody's business to bury” the dead Irishmen. Seacole inhabits a world where no one takes responsibility for the violence and the death colonialism brings about, neither in the Irish Famine, the Crimean War, nor the death of the navvies building the trade-routes of Empire.

Throughout her narrative, Seacole characteristically glosses over, represses, or denies the horrors of her world:

if I were to speak of all the nameless horrors of that spring as plainly as I could, I should really disgust you (135); my memory prefers to dwell upon what was pleasing and amusing, although the time will never come when it will cease to retain most vividly the pathos and woe of those dreadful months (136); we seldom talk about its horrors; but remem[ber] its transient gleams of sunshine (136); I could give many other similar instances [of war horrors], but why should I sadden myself or my readers? [The real history of the Crimean trenches] has never been written, and perhaps it is as well that so harrowing a tale should be left in oblivion (153); I have refrained from describing so many scenes of woe, that I am loath to dwell much on these (176).

Despite Seacole's vigilant repression of the atrocities underlying her text, an increasing tension builds within her narrative. Seacole symbolizes this explosiveness when she describes her stay on the British ammunition ship the Medora. Here she sleeps “over barrels of gunpowder and tons of cartridges” with the “by no means impossible contingency of their prematurely igniting, and giving us no time to say our prayers before launching us into eternity” (102). Although the ship's English captain orders all passengers to extinguish their lights every evening at eight o'clock, Seacole “evade[s] the regulation” by hiding her “lantern into a deep basin, behind some boxes” (102). In this anecdote, Seacole not only exemplifies her own bravery in the face of a profoundly unstable, potentially explosive world, she also illustrates that while being forced to “hide her light in a barrel,” she will defy British authority, a defiance that engenders possibly spectacular, incendiary consequences.

Similarly, after Britain has made peace with Russia, Seacole is forced to sell her stores to the Russians who will soon reclaim the Crimean Peninsula. Seacole states that “it makes my heart sick to talk of the really alarming sacrifices we made,” feeling that the Russians had come not to engage in fair trade but to plunder her supplies. Seacole responds to this exploitation by passionately destroying her valuable wine collection: “I could not stand this, and in a fit of desperation, I snatched up a hammer and broke up case after case [of wine], while the bystanders held out their hands and caught the ruby stream. It may have been wrong, but I was too excited to think” (196). Seacole's smashing of the wine caskets bespeaks both a re-creation of the bloodletting that she has witnessed and a release of the violent energies engendered during her horrific life experiences. Seacole justifies this symbolic bloodletting with the claim that “there was no more of my own people to give [the wine] to, and I would rather not present it to our old foes” (196). As readers, we are meant to interpret Seacole's reference to “my own people” as alluding to the British soldiers and “our old foes” as referring to the Russians. Yet Seacole's narrative raises the possibility that she regards her “own people” to be black Jamaicans, and the English as her “old foes,” and that the sort of economic exploitation engaged in by the Russians at the end of the war mirrors the centuries of exploitation experienced by black Jamaicans at the hands of English colonists.

As simultaneous relief, reenactment, and purification, Seacole's apocalyptic imagery echoes Odysseus's “cleansing” of his home hall with fire and brimstone upon his return home: “So I went out, and found Odysseus erect, with dead men littering the floor. … Now the cold corpses are all gathered at the gate, and he has cleansed his hall with fire and brimstone, a great blaze” (Homer 430). Seacole, too, views fire as “the great purifier”: “right glad was I one day when the great purifier, Fire, burnt down the worst of these places and ruined its owner” (162). Seacole's persona of “a female Ulysses,” conveys the implication that there is disarray back in her homeland, and like Odysseus, she must return home to restore order and purify her homeland by purging it of its parasitic and exploitative suitors.

For Seacole there can be no easy return to Jamaica. For economic reasons, her longing for home cannot be fulfilled. At the end of the Crimean War, Seacole recounts her identification with an enlisted (very likely Irish) soldier: “with him I acknowledged to have more fellow-feeling than with the others, for he, as well as I, clearly had no home to go to. He was a soldier by choice and necessity, as well as by profession. He had no home, no loved friends; the peace would bring no particular pleasure to him. … Was it not so with me?” (192). This theme of exile is a common trope in Caribbean literature. Sandra Paquet notes it in The History of Mary Prince and twentieth-century texts such as Aimé Césaire's Return to My Native Land, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, and V. S. Naipaul's Finding the Center. Exile is, of course, one of the fundamental issues at stake in The Odyssey as well, Horkheimer and Adorno registering the “unequivocal purposiveness of [Odysseus's] own self-preservation, and his return to his homeland and fixed estate” (47):

The sweet days of his life time were running out in anguish over his exile. … When day came he sat on the rocky shore and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet scanning the bare horizon of the sea … each day I long for home, long for the sight of home. If any god has marked me out again for shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it. What hardship have I not long since endured at sea, in battle! Let the trial come.

(Homer 85 and 87)

Yet as Zweig notes, The Odyssey differs from other quest stories because Odysseus will never reach his goal, his tribulation is perpetual in that he must leave Ithaka after a brief reunion with his wife and son and journey inland to appease the anger of the gods. Seacole, too, will continue to wander after the close of her narrative. She appears to have divided her time between Jamaica and London, and now lies buried in the Catholic section of London's Kensall Cemetery, in a state of permanent exile.

In the following chapter, I continue to explore the complications of nursing and female heroics. This chapter takes as its starting point the Victorian debate over defining a sphere of female heroics. While focusing on Florence Nightingale and George Eliot's implicit struggle for heroic eminence, I argue that the figure of the nurse played a crucial role within this struggle. In seemingly distinct ways, both Eliot and Nightingale appropriate the image of the nurse in order to structure a heroic self, and thereby a voice of social leadership: what I wish to explore in this chapter is the way these prominent social spokeswomen distinguished their partisanship at the contested site of the nurse. While Nightingale's employment of the nurse draws its power from an amalgamation of domestic and martial tropes, Eliot's use of the nurse seems born solely out of domestic melancholy—thereby suggesting a resignation to disillusionment encouraged by the realist ethic itself. However, by looking at those moments in her novels where the nurse embodies not sympathy and connection, but solipsism and aggression, I argue for a subtle convergence between the militancy of the Nightingale nurse and the humanitarian sympathy embodied in Eliot's nursing persona.

Notes

1. The announcement for her Aldershot store was placed fortuitously as Seacole's memoirs are remarkable in part because they represent female appropriation of a typically male genre—the war memoirs used by the author of the Green Hand, while the “Joint Stock” company echoes Seacole's own interest in entrepreneurial endeavors.

2. In 1856, Aldershot was a newly created army base located in an ancient Hampshire hamlet thirty-five miles southwest of London. As a garrison town, Aldershot was to be the site of one of the enactments of the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s.

3. See, for example, Gibbs 100. See, also Tennyson's famous propaganda for entering the war at the end of Maude and Punch's ironic reply to Maude in “The Laureate's View of the War.”

4. In his dispatches from the Crimean War, William Howard Russell comments that Scutari was “a place then about to acquire a sad notoriety as the headquarters of death and sickness and an immortal interest as the principal scene of the devoted labours of Florence Nightingale” (Russell's emphasis 1966, 34).

5. It was the criminal ineptitude of the Crimean War that inspired Dickens's angry tone in Little Dorrit (1857) as well as his creation of the satiric “office of circumlocution” in that novel. For a detailed account of Dickens's response to the Crimean War, see Ackroyd 707, 718-19, and 733-35.

6. The Crimean War is often considered the first “modern” war as not only was it the first photographed war, but the Black Sea Cable enabled journalists like Russell to send frequent bulletins from the front. An English surgeon, George Lawson, wrote to his family on April 30, 1855, that “the Electric Telegraph across the Black Sea has now been completed. It extends from St. George's Monastery on the shore, to some place near Varna. From there it is carried to Bucharest, where it becomes continuous with the line from Vienna. News will therefore be forwarded to England in a very short space of time, and you will be able to hear in the evening what we have been doing in the Crimea in the morning. The space of time to transmit a message will, I think, be 6 or 7 hours” (193, fn 6). See also Gernsheim and Savulêscu.

7. Soyer was the chef of the Reform Club, the bastion of London's Whig Progressives. In February 1848, he was officially invited to Dublin to establish and supervise the distribution of government soup (see Soyer). James Morris speculates that during the famine “perhaps never before, at least since the Middle Ages, had a corner of Europe been so horribly devastated. The hospitals, the workhouses, the prisons were packed with starving destitutes. … Probably a million people died in the Great Famine—most of them from the diseases of malnutrition” (Morris 154-55). Soyer's soup kitchens at the Crimean front no doubt evoked parallels in the English imagination between the mistreatment and mismanagement of the British troops during the war and the English government's insubstantial response to, and responsibility for, the Irish famine just a few years earlier. Ironically, many of the starving soldiers at the Crimean front were in fact Irish economic refugees: “perhaps a majority of the enlisted soldiers of the British Army were Irish Catholics—St Patrick's Day was the most familiar of all the Army's marching songs” (Morris, 159). Further, the £70 million spent by the British government on the Crimean War vastly overshadowed the £9 million spent in response to the Irish Famine.

8. Other famous, or notorious, women who participated in the Crimean War along with Seacole and Nightingale include Mrs. Duberly, Mrs. Rogers, Mary Stanley, Frances Margaret Taylor, Lady Alicia Blackwood, and Dr. James Barry. Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee note that Barry “qualified at Edinburgh in 1812 and joined the army as a Regimental Surgeon in the following year. Dr. Barry masqueraded as a man and kept her secret until her death. … At the time [of the Crimean War, Dr. Barry] was stationed on Corfu. … she defied her superiors by going to the front on three months' leave to care for the maimed and diseased in the camps” (17-18). See Summers 1988, Cooper, Blackwood, Wells, Taylor, and Duberly.

9. Sydney Herbert, characterized by G. M. Young as a “haughty Border lord” (4), was a Peelite, a talented Cabinet Member, and Secretary of War at the start of the Crimean conflict. Both Herbert and his wife Elizabeth were close friends of Nightingale, having known her for seven years before the outbreak of the war. It was at the Herberts' suggestion that Nightingale formulated her plan for nursing in Scutari. Nightingale shared with the Herberts a passionate commitment to civilian and military medical reform, and their partnership continued after the war's end.

10. See, also, Seacole 89-90. For discussions of English racial prejudice in the mid nineteenth century, see, for example Elsie Michie 46-78, Bolt, Gregory, Barker, and Ferguson. For race politics in the Caribbean, see Heuman and Sio.

11. Morris contends that “at heart … nearly every Briton considered as his organic inferior everyone who was not white—the less white, the more inferior. Even educated people seldom bothered to hide their racial prejudices” (448-49).

12. On the other hand, “the regular canteens … were kept by a better class of people” (41).

13. The “Seacole Fund,” started sometime around April 11, 1857, was administered by William T. Doyne, Esq. It seems never to have garnered a great deal of donations (see, for example, Thomas Day's letter to the Times on April 14, 1857, where he expresses fear that the donations will be limited to a few hundred pounds). This is in sharp contrast to the Nightingale Fund into which poured thousands of pounds. For a history of the Nightingale Fund, see Baly 1986.

14. For the festival, regimental bands combined with a conventional orchestra to play patriotic, military, and camp music, accompanied by a large chorus and several renowned soloists.

15. As many as 80,000 Londoners may have attended Seacole's musical benefit over its four-day run.

16. The Punch title the “Mother of the Regiment” is a play on Gaetano Donizetti's opera “La Fille du Regiment,” then having a record-breaking revival in London with Jenny Lind in the role of Marie the vivandière. Lind's popularity gave Punch more occasion for punning on names as they also insinuated comparisons between Florence Nightingale and “the Swedish Nightingale” as Lind was called.

17. Seacole writes that “we set to work bravely at Aldershott [sic] to retrieve our fallen fortunes, and stem off the ruin originated in the Crimea … at last defeated by fortune, but not I think disgraced, we were obliged to capitulate on very honourable conditions. … Perhaps it would be right if I were to express more shame and annoyance than I really feel at the pecuniarily disastrous issue of my Crimean adventures, but I cannot. … When I would try and feel ashamed of myself for being poor and helpless, I only experience a glow of pride at the other and more pleasing events of my career …” (197-98).

18. Alexander and Dewjee note that “from the 1830s, black Jamaicans were encouraged to consider themselves to be as British as any citizen in Yorkshire or Midlothian” (12).

19. For a discussion of English reaction to the Indian Mutiny, see Paxton.

20. Joseph Kestner asserts that classical mythology “permeated Victorian discourse” (5).

21. The Agamemnon, a new steam battleship, was one of the most important ships in the Crimean War. The naval siege of Sebastopol centered around this flagship.

22. The Dardanelles is the strait that connects the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara and divides the Gallipoli Peninsula of European Turkey from Asiatic Turkey. Also known as the Hellespont, it is the site of the legend of Hero and Leander. The strategic importance of both the Dardanelle and Bosporus straits have been crucial since antiquity. Ancient Troy flourished near the west entrance of the Hellespont.

23. Among other allusions, Russell evokes Thucydides to characterize the conduct of the English and French soldiers during the cholera epidemic as “recklessness verging on insanity” (W. H. Russell 1966, 54). Russell further describes the meadow frogs whose “concerts by day and night would delight the classical scholar who remembered his Aristophanes” (45); depicts the Turkish soil as “just as scratched up by ploughs rather inferior to those described by Virgil 1,800 years ago” (37); and states that Lord Raglan “was brave as a hero of antiquity” (80). In describing the construction of the English camp in Balaklava, Russell writes that “the English Hercules at last began to stir about the heels of the oxen of Augæus” (177), and compares the English siege-works to “a kind of Penelope's web” (178). See, also, Florence Nightingale's letters from Scutari where she images that Athena appears to her and where she compares the war to a Greek tragedy: “I saw Athena last night. She came to see me. I was walking home late … when Athena came along the cliff quite to my feet, rose upon her tiptoes, bowed several times, made her long melancholy cry, & fled away—like the shade of Ajax—I assure you my tears followed her” (1987b, 102) and “the whole of this gigantic misfortune has been like a Greek tragedy—it has been like the fates pursuing us—every thing that has been done has been a failure & nobody knows the reason why—the Gods have punished with blindness some past sin & visited the innocent with the consequences …” (1987b, 103).

24. Along with many verse quotations (cf. pp. 7, 13, 114, 126, 134), Seacole also alludes to Sterne's Tristram Shandy (15); the legend of Hero and Leander (85); the Arabian Nights (110-11); the Hebrew Bible (165-66); and Burns's Tam O'Shanter (123). Further, Seacole recounts her role as English teacher to the Turkish ruler Omar Pacha, which formed a basis for a “lasting friendship” (cf. pp. 110-11). Seacole also displays a sophisticated understanding of contemporary political issues in her narrative. Her literacy was not an anomaly. The world of free black urban boarding-house owners formed a respectable middle-class caste in early- and mid-nineteenth-century Jamaica and other Caribbean islands such as Trinidad (Alexander and Dewjee, 9-10). See, also, William Makepeace Thackeray's brief, racist portrait of the heiress Miss Swartz (“the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitts”) sent to Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies in England (she is charged “double” for her education) in the opening chapter of Vanity Fair.

25. The Homeric and Herodotean patterns of war narrative exist in counter-distinction to Thucydides's methodology that, as George Steiner points out, recounts the Pelaponnesian conflict with a threefold narrative purpose: (1) to narrate the events leading up to the conflict, (2) to analyze both overt and covert causes of the war, and (3) to offer “moral insight into the violence, blinding illusions, cumulative inevitability of great wars” (86). Steiner argues that Thucydides's “uniquely intricate” approach to war narrative “has marked all serious philosophies and sociologies of warfare since” (88).

26. My reading of Odysseus owes a debt to both Paul Zweig's The Adventurer and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's discussion of Odysseus in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (43-80).

27. For a twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean rewriting of the Iliad see Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros (New York: Noonday Press, 1990). Furthermore, Walcott has recently adapted the Odyssey for the stage, giving his verse play an Afro-Caribbean emphasis. Walcott's birthplace, the island St. Lucia, is known as the “Helen of the West,” because it has been fought over by so many European countries.

28. Gates bases his concept of the talking book on Bahktin's notion of “double-voiced” discourse.

29. See, also, Seacole's statements that: “it is not my intention to dwell at any length upon the recollections of my childhood” (2); “it is all very well to smile at these [disasters] now, but at the time they were heartrending enough” (118); and “although I can laugh at my fears now—I was often most horribly frightened at Spring Hill …” (121).

30. White Jamaican racism would again cause a sensational uproar in England during the Governor Eyre scandal of 1864, yet another ignominious event that emphasized the continuation of Jamaica's repressive and racist institutions. See Semmel 1963.

31. Ward offers another example of the connection of the siege of Sebastapol with ancient sieges when he comments that “no doubt there was a good deal going on in Carthage, while Hannibal was besieging Rome, which one could not but be reminded of last winter; but that was not (so the Crimean campaign shows) peculiar to blacks” (Ward's emphasis, 274). For an extended nineteenth-century re-creation of the siege of Carthage, see Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô.

32. See Horkheimer and Adorno 45-46.

33. E. J. Hobsbawn writes that with the California gold rush, the need for a shorter route from Europe, the Caribbean, and the east coast of the United States to California was “overwhelming,” and that this need was answered by the redevelopment of trade routes through the Isthmus of Panama: “the Isthmus of Panama once again became what it had been in Spanish colonial times, the major point of trans-shipment, at least until the building of an isthmian canal which was … begun—against American opposition—by the maverick French Saint-Simonian de Lesseps, fresh from his triumph at Suez, in the 1870s” (65-66). Hobsbawn recounts that prior to the construction of the Panama Canal, “the United States government fostered a mail service across the Isthmus of Panama, thus making possible the establishment of a regular monthly steamer service from New York to the Caribbean side and from Panama to San Francisco and Oregon. The scheme, essentially started in 1848 for political and imperial purposes, became commercially more than viable with the gold-rush. Panama became what it has remained, a Yankee-owned boom town, where future robber barons like Commodore Vanderbilt and W. Ralston … cut their teeth. The saving of time was so enormous that the isthmus soon became the crossroads of international shipping …” (66).

34. Similarly, on her journey to the Crimean battlefield, Seacole stops at the marketplace in Gibraltar where she stands “curiously watching its strange and motley population” (83).

35. Alexander and Dewjee write that Seacole “is not an obvious heroine for modern times. While her snobbery and coyness are counterbalanced by many fine qualities, less endearing are her prejudices against Native Americans, Greeks and Turks, and her glorification of war. In addition, although it is clear from the text that she was proud of her origins, sometimes she conveys contradictory feelings about her status as a black woman” (9). See also Paquet's reading of Seacole.

36. For many sarcastic letters written by Nightingale concerning Hall, see Nightingale 1987.

37. For Seacole's praise of Nightingale, see Seacole 87-91. Although Seacole recites the stock praises of Nightingale's “immortal” deeds (“that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom” 91), she offers oblique criticism in terms of Nightingale's snobbery, fragility, and possible racism (cf. 78-79, 89-91, and 148).

38. Wilma R. Bailey writes that among the English Army bases on Jamaica, “Port Royal and Fort Augusta, both on dry, sandy peninsulas, had low morbidity and mortality rates. So did the camp at Stony Hill, at an elevation of over 1,250 feet. On the other hand, the troops quartered on the coastal lowlands at Parade, Up Park Camp, Rockfort and Castile Fort suffered greatly. … Up Park Camp [was] disease-ridden … [and] the mortality among the men of the 82nd Regiment stationed there was very high” (29 and 31).

39. On May 8, 1857, Seacole writes that she “believes there will yet be work for her to do somewhere. Perhaps China, perhaps on some other distant shore to which Englishmen go to serve their country, there may be woman's work to do” (quoted in Punch, May 30, 1857). The London Times reported on July 28, 1857, that “in an interview with the Secretary of War which took place yesterday … Mrs. Seacole expressed her desire to set out immediately for India. ‘Give me,’ said the excellent old lady, ‘my needle and thread, my medicine chest, my bandages, my probe and scissors, and I'm off.’” For Nightingale's devotion to the British Army, especially the British Army in India, see Nightingale 1990.

Works Cited

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Andrews, William L. 1988. “Introduction.” Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. By Mary Seacole. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bell, Bernard W. 1992. “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past.” African American Review 26:1 (Spring): 7-15.

Césaire, Aimé. 1969. Return to my Native Land. John Berger and Anna Bostock, trans. Baltimore: Penguin.

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