In autumn 1854, a Jamaican woman arrived in London: Mary Seacole. She hoped to travel to Crimea as an army nurse supporting British troops, but her applications at the War Office were rejected, so she paid her own way. Once in Crimea, she set up a hotel near Sevastopol that became popular with British soldiers, many of whom called her ‘Mother Seacole’.
The mixed-race nurse who tended to wounded troops during the Crimean War is now familiar to many. What’s less well known is that this wasn’t her first visit to the imperial metropole, nor even her second. An avid traveller, Seacole had spent her teenage years imagining what it might be like to visit London. As she wrote in her famous autobiography The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands: “I was never weary of tracing upon an old map the route to England; and never followed within my gaze the stately ships homeward bound without longing to be in them.”
In her memoir, she’s cagey about what took her to London the first time – indeed, she does not share when she went, though it seems to have been in the early 1820s – but she travelled with relatives and stayed for about a year. Shortly after returning to Jamaica, she ventured to London once more, this time spying a business opportunity. She took with her “a large stock of West Indian preserves and pickles for sale”.
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