Mary Seacole’s plant matter(s): vegetal entanglements of the Black Atlantic in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

ABSTRACT

This article offers a new reading of Mary Seacole’s autobiography from the perspective of material ecocriticism. The Black Atlantic origins of Seacole’s pharmacopoeia reveal a troubled, complex engagement with histories of medicine and cure, with local indigenous knowledges, and with the often-violent circulation of plants and people across the planet. Paying close attention to instances in the text when plants meld and move with humans, within and beyond the Atlantic medical complex, the article links together vegetal materiality and medical, botanical histories of slavery, the plantation, and resistant black ecologies. To foreground the vibrant plant-human encounters at work in the text, the article selects three plants from Seacole’s medicine chest and follows their routes across the Black Atlantic, articulating how Seacole used her pharmacopoeia to save white Anglo patients while inadvertently addressing the long histories of slavery and colonialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Mary Seacole
• critical plant studies
• material ecocriticism
• Black Atlantic
• the Atlantic medical complex
• black ecology

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks to the editors and anonymous peer review; your feedback was invaluable. I would also like to express my gratitude to the communities who so graciously engaged with earlier versions of this article, in particular the 2021 Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery conference on Pandemic Legacies: Health, Healing, and Medicine in the Age of Slavery and Beyond at the NYPL Schomburg Center and the 2021 GAPS conference on Science, Culture, and Postcolonial Narratives at the University of Oldenburg – coming together virtually, from a variety of global locations, has offered much-needed companionship and perspective in this pandemic year.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Unless implied otherwise, all further references to the text are based on the 2005 Penguin Classics critical edition, edited and with an introduction and notes by Sara Salih. I will abbreviate the title as Wonderful Adventures throughout.

2. Seacole demonstrates her knowledge of contagion theory here – until later in the nineteenth century, cholera was believed to be transmitted by fumes and toxic epidemic air (miasma theory). In 1855, however, the apothecary, surgeon, and physician John Snow proved that cholera was not air- but waterborne (Gilbert 2008, 94).

3. It is interesting to note that she directs her derision for slavers only at Americans. Slave trade was abolished in Jamaica in 1807, slavery itself in 1833 (when Seacole was 28), but Seacole never once mentions British slave holders, save for the oblique reference above.

4. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic established the Atlantic Ocean, which links Africa to Europe and the Americas, as a transoceanic contact zone: “the movements of black people – not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship – provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity and historical memory” (1993, 16).

5. Schiebinger borrows “from Philip Curtin’s notion of the ‘plantation complex.’ For Curtin, the plantation complex – stretching from Bahia, Brazil, to Charleston, South Carolina – was an ‘economic and political order centering on slave plantations in the New World tropics’” (2017, 3; Curtin 1990).

6. As Katherine McKittrick underlines, these contact points between Europe and the Americas, Africa and the Americas, and between Amerindians and the planation space were all inherently “linked to a broader global economy that thrives on the ‘persistent underdevelopment’ and ‘persistent poverty’ of black life” (2013, 3; Beckford 1999). On slaves’ ecological-agronomic practices as subversion and resistance, see Carney (2021).

7. I use the concept of the pharmacopoeia not in its primary sense of an “authoritative or official treatise containing listings of approved drugs with their formulations, standards of purity and strength, and uses” but meaning an actual, material “collection or stock of drugs” (“Pharmacopoeia” 2021).

8. For sustained engagement with these questions, see also Kimmerer (2013), Laist (2013), Marder (2013), Nealon (2015), Irigaray and Marder (2016), Gibson (2018), Chang (2019), and Coccia (2019).

9. For a blue humanities reading of plant matter in relation to oceanic archiving, see Ann Garascia’s article in this special issue.

10. Presented, for example, in scientific texts published by European doctors in the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, such as James Grainger’s 1764 Essay on the Common West-India Diseases. This text, which became the standard reference work on West Indian diseases and treatment immediately after its publication and subsequent reissue in 1802, concerns the “management” and medical treatment of slaves in the Caribbean (Medina 2016) and served to make the plantation machinery more efficient. On plantation manuals, scientific racism, and pro-slavery movements in the era of abolition, see also Dumas (2016).

11. Within material ecocriticism, the concept of storied matter “underlines the idea that matter is not only lively, agentic and generative, but also densely storied” (Oppermann 2018, 411). It suggests “a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 1–2).

12. She says: “Opium I rather dreaded, as its effect is to incapacitate the system from making any exertion, and it lulls the patient into a sleep which is often the sleep of death” (Seacole 2005, chap. 4, 34).

13. The Columbian Exchange is not the only starting point for the Atlantic travels of plants: “significant botanical transfers also occurred in the pre-Columbian period. Notable are the Asian crops that diffused with the expansion of Islam in the seventh century, particularly sugarcane. Plants were also transported through ancient Indian and Pacific ocean networks, whose seafarers possibly connected Asia and Oceania with the Pacific coast of the Americas” (Carney and Rosomoff 2009, 28).

14. See table 5.2, “Medicines for the treatment of slaves in the coast of Guyana, 1683–86” (Gómez 2017, 126).

15. For the contested histories of rhubarb (once a luxury import, much like chocolate, tea, coffee, or Peruvian bark, and used as a laxative in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and its trade routes along the Silk route from China, see, for example, Foust (1992) and Schiebinger (2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Leetsch

Jennifer Leetsch is a researcher at Bonn University’s Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. She is currently working on a postdoctoral project which intertwines forms and media of black life writing with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecologies. Her first monograph on Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing was published with Palgrave in 2021. She has published and forthcoming work in, among others, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, the Journal of the African Literature Association, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and is currently co-editing a volume on migration imaginaries across visual and textual spheres (De Gruyter).