Cannons roar and the sharp blasts of gunshots ring.
It all seems so far, so very far away.
A pale young man lies alone in his stretcher, a blood soaked blanket thrown across his gut.
Beyond him, doctors hunch in silent concentration over a man they can still save.
But there's no hope for him.
"Mother..." he calls weakly, picturing his mom safe back in England.
A warm and weathered hand grips his,
but when he looks up, the face that greets him isn't what he'd pictured.
It's full of care and kindness though, and he can almost pretend.
And his eyes drift closed.
But that's still years to come.
Today in 1821, the songs of sailors soar over the creaking of ships
and the groan of ropes as crate after crate of cargo is hauled onto the London Docks.
Captains huddled with customs officers, arguing in low hushed tones...
Amidst it all, a young woman who would one day be celebrated in London,
took her very first eager step onto its soil.
This was Mary Seacole.
History may have forgotten her for over a hundred years,
but she would never be forgotten by the soldiers she nursed during the Crimean War.
In the prim and proper world of Victorian England,
she was a sensation and a study in contradictions.
She was both a clever businesswoman who sold expensive luxuries in a war zone
and a generous caretaker who gave her supplies freely to those in need.
She was a proud woman who sometimes looked down her nose at others,
yet she never hesitated to pull up her sleeves and treat an illness or an injury.
And she walked a long road to become one of the unsung heroes of the Crimean War.
The daughter of a Jamaican hotel owner and the Scottish soldier,
Mary inherited her mother's business sense and her father's wanderlust.
She grew up watching her mother, a doctress in the Jamaican tradition,
treating patients who came to her hotel.
when she looked at her mother; smart, caring and - most of all - in charge,
Mary wanted to be her.
She played doctor on her long-suffering doll,
copying everything she had seen her mother do.
But the ships and the waves also called to her.
Time and again, she would trace one special route on an old map in her bedroom.
Her finger wore down the ink from her home in Kingston, to her dream of London.
So when a relative there invited her to stay with them for a season,
Mary jumped at the chance.
Thus, we find her in 1821 arriving in London at the age of 16.
She fell in love with the place immediately.
In London, she developed a taste for trade that never truly left her.
Although she first arrived as a tourist,
she soon returned with a cargo of pickled and preserved food
that she sold to a British society hungry for a taste of the outside world.
With friends back home sending her fresh supplies,
Mary turned a small, but steady profit.
Enough to launch herrself into new ventures across New Providence, Cuba and Haiti.
After four years, she returned home a successful businesswoman
and took a place running the Blundell Hall Hotel beside her aging mother.
Now, those were some tense years for Jamaica.
Although Mary did her best to stay out of it.
In 1831, what had started as a peaceful protest among Jamaica's slave population,
escalated to an all-out revolt and was brutally suppressed.
Word of this Christmas uprising spread to abolitionists in Britain.
And they used it as a catalyst to propel their efforts to end slavery,
passing partial emancipation in 1834 and then full emancipation in 1838.
As a black woman, Mary was glad to see the end of slavery,
but as the daughter of a white man, she never considered herself part of the struggle.
Mary was a British citizen first and foremost and a very proud one at that.
She caused a stir when she married a white man, Edwin Seacole,
in a society that was accustomed to seeing black women taken only as mistresses, not wives.
But she and Edwin were partners. Together they opened a small general store
and together they fought a losing battle to make it thrive.
After six years, defeated they returned to the Blundell Hall
and then disaster truly struck.
In 1843, a fire raged through Kingston.
It destroyed everything in a thirty block radius, including the hotel.
And then, before Mary could do so much as get back to her feet,
her husband died. Shortly followed by her mother.
In one single year, Mary lost everything she held dear. She was devastated.
But she wasn't the type to accept defeat easily.
She pulled out of her grief and threw herself into building New Blundell Hall,
determined to make it better than before.
When the cholera epidemic came to Jamaica in 1850,
Mary bore down on the disease like a personal enemy.
Although she fared no better at curing it then John Snow or any other doctor of the time,
her experience with it would prove invaluable.
Because this would not be her last time fighting it.
Now that she had succeeded in getting her hotel back in running order,
her wayward heart yearned for adventure once again
and her brother gave her the perfect excuse.
He'd gone off to start his own hotel in Panama.
So, Mary left New Blundell Hall in the care of a trusted cousin and followed after him.
She arrived in Panama not a moment too soon.
A guest and a friend of her brother's dropped dead mere hours after dining with him
and the town immediately suspected foul play.
"It was murder!" they claimed. "He poisoned the food!"
Mary thought the death seemed suspicious too, but for a very different reason.
She insisted on examining the corpse, the exam proved her suspicion true.
This man had not died of poison, but of cholera.
Her enemy was back.
Cholera swept through the town.
Mary fought it tooth and nail, but she knew it was a losing battle.
This town was a wet, rundown filthy place
and her Jamaican medical knowledge advocated warm sun and clean spaces.
In the end, her remedies had no effect on the victims.
Instead, it was her mothering that did the most good.
She sat by bedsides, she swept foreheads,
and once her patients showed signs of recovery,
she demanded that they stop living in their own filth.
In Panama, Mary established the protocol she would live by for the rest of her days.
She would treat everyone who came to her.
Relying on those who could pay well, to make up for those who couldn't pay at all.
And it worked.
She made enough money treating cholera patients
to open her own business across the street from her brother.
She called it: "The British Hotel",
but it was really more of a dining hall.
There were no rooms for guests to spend the night,
but she laid out sumptuous banquets for travelers who had, at this point,
resigned themselves to eating iguana and monkey stews.
Then, in a stroke of brilliance, she hired a barber.
Western men desperate for the rare luxury of a good shave,
crowded to her hotel and thus to her dinner table.
Mary's business thrived in Panama, but she realized it would be short lived.
The railroad being built across the country,
mostly to help ferry Americans to and from the California goldrush,
would soon be completed. And when it was,
way stations like hers would have no more reason to exist.
And so, when word reached her that the new British war
being raged in Crimea had a desperate need for nurses,
she knew where she was needed.
She would cross the Atlantic again
to serve England as a nurse in the Crimean War.
The Crimean War was a messy tangled affair
fought over the feeble remains of the Ottoman Empire.
It began with a dispute over who would control holy sites, once the Ottomans crumbled
and spiraled into a bitter struggle for diplomatic supremacy in Europe.
France, England and Sardinia sided with the Ottomans
to prevent Russia from extending her reach down to the Middle East,
but in the trenches outside Sevastopol, and even inside the besieged city,
it was disease, not gunfire that proved the greatest threat to soldiers on all sides.
By the end of the war, disease would claim 3.5 times as many lives as bullets.
None of this deterred Mary Seacole.
She didn't fear battle and she had faced down disease time after time.
Volunteering in Crimea felt like the fate she had been made for.
If only she could get there...
She wrapped up her affairs in Panama and ventured forth,
like always without a backwards glance.
She headed straight for London, went directly to the military headquarters
and insisted she speak with the Secretary at War.
His aides were somewhat flustered by Mary's presumption.
She marched from one department to another,
until she finally got the ear of a surprised, but patient officer
who suggested that she apply to Florence Nightingale's organized expedition of nurses.
Again, Mary skipped the formalities of mailing an application
and traveled straight to the source.
Florence Nightingale had already left, 3 days before Mary's arrival.
So instead, she spoke to the organizers in London.
Her interview there was stiff and unwelcoming.
This old eccentric woman was not at all the type of nurse they had in mind.
They let Mary know that they had already recruited enough nurses for the Crimea
and left Mary with the impression that even if there had been any openings,
she wouldn't have been chosen to fill them.
Was it the color of her skin?
She wondered this as she walked through the moonlit streets of London, lost in thought.
She was no stranger to racial slights,
Back in Panama, she'd once been forced off a ship by white women
who'd refused to share a berth with her
and not long before that, a group of hotel patrons had tried to compliment her
by saying she'd be perfect if only she bleached her skin.
Truth be told, Mary had always considered herself special,
because of her white parentage and light skin tone.
And finding that others didn't see her as the true English woman she considered herself,
shook her. But still, when push came to shove,
Mary was never one to back down.
She had told those hotel patrons exactly what they could do with their bleach
and she wasn't going to be defeated this time either.
If the army wouldn't send her and the nurses wouldn't accept her,
she would just have to send herself.
Join us next time, as Mary ships herself to the Crimea
and faces down the worst ravages of disease and war
that the world of the 1850s had to offer.
Subtitled by: Louis Lenders (louislenders@hotmail.com)