Mary Seacole - Early Life, 1805–1825

Early Life, 1805–1825

Mary Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica, the daughter of a Scottish officer in the British Army and a free Jamaican Creole woman. Seacole's mother was a "doctress", a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal remedies. She ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7 East Street in Kingston and one of the best hotels in the whole of Kingston. Many of the residents were disabled European soldiers and sailors, often suffering from the endemic yellow fever. Here Mary Seacole acquired her nursing skills. Her autobiography said her early experiments in medicine were based on what she learned from her mother while ministering to a doll, then progressing to pets before helping her mother to treat humans.

Seacole was proud of her Scottish ancestry and called herself a Creole, a term which was commonly used in a racially neutral sense or to refer to the children of white settlers. In her autobiography The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, she records her bloodline thus: "I am a Creol, and have good Scots blood coursing through my veins. My father was a soldier of an old Scottish family.". Legally, she was classified as a mulatto, a multiracial person with limited political rights. Robinson speculates that she may technically have been a quadroon. Seacole emphasises her personal vigour in her autobiography, distancing herself from the contemporary stereotype of the "lazy Creole", yet she was "proud of relationship" with black American slaves demonstrated by the "few shades deeper brown upon skin".

The West Indies was an outpost of the British Empire in the late 18th century and in 1789, one fifth of Britain's foreign trade was with the British West Indies; this increased to a third in the 1790s. Britain's economic interests were protected by a massive military presence, with 69 line infantry regiments serving there from 1793 to 1801, and another 24 from 1803 to 1815.

Seacole spent some years in the household of an elderly woman, whom she called her "kind patroness", before returning to her mother. She was treated as a member of her patroness's family and received a good education. As the educated daughter of a Scottish officer and a free black woman with a respectable business, Seacole would have held a high position in Jamaican society.

In about 1821 Seacole visited London, staying for a year, and visited relatives, the merchant Henriques family. Although London had a significant population of black people, she records that a companion, a West Indian with skin darker than her own "dusky" shades, was taunted by children. Seacole herself was "only a little brown", nearly white according to Ramdin. She returned to London approximately a year later, bringing a "large stock of West Indian pickles and preserves for sale". Her later travels would be as an "unprotected" woman, without a chaperone or sponsor, an unusual practice. Seacole returned to Jamaica in 1825.