Mary Seacole and the Virtual Nation

Mary Seacole, the so-called “Jamaican Nightingale” and proprietress of the “British Hotel,” was valorized for tending to injured British soldiers stationed in the Crimea. This period of her life, described in her travelogue, The Amazing Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, has been the focus of ample critical inquiry.1 She was at once a British colonial subject and yet a national icon, a “yellow woman” and yet adoptive “mother” to countless white soldier-sons. Before her career in the Crimea, however, Seacole spent years in another borderlands area, the circum-Caribbean region of Panama. Here, the expansionist threat came not from the Russians but from the Americans, who wished to achieve strategic position in shortening trade routes, especially to the East. It was here that the British Hotel was first founded and where Seacole first became unofficial cultural ambassador of British values. Her table d’hôte became a kind of virtual Britain, dispensing British comforts to a clientele that was overwhelmingly American. This article argues that it was among the Americans in Panama, rather than among the British in Crimea, that Seacole first developed a sense of British nationhood.