Mary Seacole had made up her mind. She would go to the Crimea,
and open a hotel just like the one she'd built in Panama.
There was only one problem: she couldn't afford it...
But she knew somebody who could.
Shortly before she left South America, Mary had closed up her hotel
and joined a gold mining operation in New Granada.
Her late husband's cousin, Thomas Day, had helped to oversee the mine
and had recruited Mary to take care of the staff.
They got along well,
even though they both turned out to be failures as gold mine investors
But Day still had money to burn
and - better yet - he'd already planned a small shipping expedition to the Crimea.
She tracked him down in London and convinced him to join her new Crimean enterprise.
Even though it was his money, Mary convinced him to give her top billing.
And so the business partnership of Seacole and Day was formed.
While Day went ahead to scout the Crimea, Mary set off across the Mediterranean,
picking up food, staff and medical supplies for the hotel she intended to open.
"It would be," she declared, "comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers."
She finally arrived in the Crimea with great upon crate of cargo to establish her store
and immediately broke out her supply of tea and bandages to comfort the wounded soldiers
who are waiting in port for their hospital transfers.
The same boldness that had made her such an oddity in London,
made her very welcome here. She asked no one's permission,
but the exhausted surgeons and the officers who saw her holding men's hands
and listening to their stories, were grateful for her help.
All of the anxieties and the worry that had loomed
over Mary during her voyage to this place, disappeared.
Leaving behind her business and Panama, her family in Jamaica
and traveling to a war zone with nothing more than the hope
that she could find a place to do some good.
All of those wild risks paid off. This was Mary's calling.
She and Thomas Day set to work,
building their hotel just outside the military base at Kadikoi.
Since building materials were pretty hard to come by,
they collected scrap iron and drift wood thrown off by the ships.
They built a loooong dining hall with a cozy kitchen,
a large storeroom and stock pens for a few animals.
As a finishing touch, Mary raised the Union Jack above the entrance.
Her British Hotel was back!
And just like Panama, Mary relied on the business from the hotel
to subsidize her care for the poor.
Her stock rooms held every small necessity and every giant luxury an officer could wish for.
Her dining hall hosted feast with rich stews, fragrant curries and sweet puddings
for the soldiers who were far from everything they knew,
surrounded by death and the disease in a siege that seems to have no end.
For a war that seems to have no purpose.
Mary's hotel offered the welcome glow of home.
They called her mother Seacole and she treated them like her sons.
Sickness weighed heavy on the entire camp,
but these were the diseases that Mary had so often seen before;
typhoid, dysentery and her old enemy cholera.
Soldiers who could make the trip, came to Mary for tinctures and salves to ease their pain.
But the worst off were confined to their beds in the nearby army hospital.
For them, Mary packed a bag full of creature comforts like sponge cakes and books
and went visiting from bed to bed.
She'd have snuck them sweets too if the doctors hadn't forbidden it.
And when her sons went out to battle, mother Seacole was not far behind.
The British hotel was, after all, right near their army camp,
which meant that Mary was right next to the action.
In June of 1855, the British and allied forces
attempted to take the city of Sevastopol from the Russians.
Mary arrived with a bag full of medical supplies
and as many refreshments she could carry.
She knew better than to run into the battle but,
she made her way stubbornly to the British reserve line
and then to the temporary hospital.
Even there bullets sang and artillery shells pounded nearby.
Suddenly a shout: "Mother lie down!"
Mary flung herself to the ground.
She wrapped her arms over her head and shut her eyes tight.
A quick thud shook the ground beneath her.
Something touched her shoulder and she flinched, but it was just a gentle tap.
She looked up to find one of her sons grinning down at her,
offering her a hand off the floor. "You're alright now, mother. It didn't hit."
Mary grumbled and let him help her up.
Then she dusted off her dress and went straight back to work.
After all, the doctors were spread too thin.
She needed to look after her sons until care arrived.
The assault on Sevastopol failed
and so the Russians struck back two months later at the Chernaya river.
It was the French who bore the worst of this assault.
With the Ottomans and the Sardinians beside them.
Mary's British sons never took the field,
but just the same; as soon as the Russians were forced to retreat,
she picked up her trusty bag and hurried to help.
Dead soldiers lay everywhere.
Some faces frozen with rage, others lost in a drifting sleep.
The wounded sobbed and groaned for help.
In that moment, all the soldiers on the field were like her sons.
French or Russian friend or foe,
Mary gave water to all of them, bandaged what she could
and helped to flag down the ambulance carts to take them off the field
The tempo of war changed. Buoyed by their success at Chernaya,
the allied forces resumed their assault on Sevastopol with more vigor.
Cannons fired day and night
and the officers who used to lounge around Mary's hotel disappeared to man their posts.
Rumors flew.
Mary went to bed with nightmares of Russian soldiers overrunning her tiny hotel.
She woke to the sound of more distant gunshots, more cannon fire.
Mary's sons were busy, but not too busy to let her know the final push was at hand.
When day broke, on September 8th, it found Mary already packed up and on her way.
Not away from the field - like a sensible person -but straight towards.
It was a strict military zone now, but the officers knew Mary.
This was the woman who made them claret cups,
when their rations limited them to a cup of sour rum.
She had helped them stage races and cricket matches
to take their minds off the war for just a little while.
And when they came to her with jaundice, with diarrhea,
with any number of ailments that they blush to mention,
she mixed them up a treatment and picked up their spirit with her laugh.
Ad so of course they let her through to join the army doctors
frantically patching soldiers brought back from the front.
While the French forces overran the battlements
and finally rushed inside Sevastopol,
mother Seacole was putting on bandages
and giving water to men fighting for their lives.
When the British forces were pushed back from a messy charge on their side of the city wall,
She cheered the wounded with news of the French success.
She closed the eyes of many soldiers
that she'd come to know and love during her time in the Crimea.
Some she had even known from all the way back in Jamaica.
Her heart ached to lose so many, but still the city fell.
The capture of Sevastopol drove the final nail into the coffin of the Crimean War.
The Russians fled the city overnight and the allies moved in.
There were no more pitched battles, no more drawn-out sieges
and no more battle wounds to dress in Mary's part of the world.
She settled back completely into her role as merchants and morale booster,
for business boomed.
She went to race days and hunting competitions staged by the troops
and set up stalls to sell refreshments.
Christmas and New Years found her up to her neck
in orders for her famous plum puddings and mince pies.
But Mary saw the writing on the wall. With the new year came news from the west.
The powers that be had agreed to a cease-fire, while they negotiated the term for peace.
At last, on March 30th 1856, the allies and the Russians signed a treaty
and the troops in Crimea began to return home.
The storehouse was full, but the crowds emptied out of Mary's little hotel.
Some came to say goodbye and to pay the IOU's that Mary had so often let them take out,
but others simply left. She didn't have the heart to become a debt collector
and she couldn't sell what she had for more than a 10th of what he paid for it.
Soon after they return to London,
Mary and her business partner Thomas Day declared bankruptcy.
November 24th 1856.
Mary sat alone in a tiny apartment near the Covent Garden Market, reading her daily paper.
She came across a letter signed simply: 'Da Meritus'. 'Give to the deserving'.
News of her bankruptcy and subsequent poverty had gotten out.
The letter said: "That good old soul,
whose generous hospitality has warmed many a gallon spirit,
has been caught in the gale of adversity.
Are the humble actions of Mrs. Seacole to be entirely forgotten?
And will none now testify to the worth of her services?"
A fund was started in her name.
Donations poured in immediately.
The newspapers were filled with stories from Crimean soldiers,
recalling how much she had done for them. One magazine even wrote her a song.
At this rate, Mary would be able to pay off her debts in only two months.
But sitting there on that final day, reading and rereading that note in the paper,
Mary could only smile.
She had put everything on the line to go to the Crimea and take care of her sons
and now, in the late summer of her life, they would take care of her.
I wish I could say that history looked after Mary Seacole as well as her sons did,
but the truth is, that after her death she was forgotten.
She was a black woman in an age that looked down on both of those qualities.
Where even the 40,000 supporters who attended her fundraiser
made no effort to preserve her legacy.
She treated patients with the unique combi- nation of European and Caribbean medicine,
but no one studied her methods.
She came through the same crucible that forged Florence Nightingale
and Ekaterina Bukanina, but she didn't help found the profession of nursing.
Her efforts to volunteer in future war efforts, were quietly declined by the government
and she was too old to fight back this time.
Mary would have been a role model.
A self-made woman who devoted her life to practicing medicine
and wouldn't let anyone tell her she wasn't qualified.
But as she faded from memory after the Crimean War,
the trail she cleared was soon erased
and those who came after had to fight as hard as she did clear it again.
But history sometimes allows us to reach back.
To find parts of our past that we had forgotten
and to bring them into the light again.
We can rescue her story as an example for our times.
Of a woman who came impossibly far and proved beyond a doubt that she deserved to be there.
Mary Seacole treated soldiers on the front lines of the Crimean War.
She did so at her own expense,
believing simply that if she could be of any help, it would be worth any risk.
Her contribution to history is not only what she did during her life,
but what she means to us today.
with her kindness and her courage, she has become an icon for a modern age
that recognizes in her the steadfast determination
required to make a better world.
Subtitled by: Louis Lenders (louislenders@hotmail.com)