BETWEEN 1689 AND 1730 nearly three hundred women, men, and children were taken captive from northern New England. For frontier wives, the possibility of capture must have meant a contraction of boundaries in these years, an augmented fear of going to the well after dark or of sending children to a nearby wooded fringe to gather berries. But paradoxically, perhaps, the fact of capture might have meant an expansion. For those actually taken, new worlds both of terror and of possibility were opened. The captive described in the ministerial literature was invariably an innocent Christian seized by rude savages and subjected to capricious taunts and torments mitigated only by Providential intervention. Captivity thus became a ritualistic journey of salvation, a passage through suffering and despair toward saving faith. In reality, captivity was sometimes a journey toward a new home, a new occupation, new friends and family, or at the very least toward earthly experiences little imagined in the farms and villages left behind.
Only by looking at all the known captives—those who escaped, those who returned, those who died, and those who stayed with the Indians or the French—can we understand the significance of the dramatically visible heroines of the wartime literature. Because captivity was an extraordinary experience shared by ordinary men and women, it is worth exploring for another reason as well. Although cold, hunger, fear, and forced contact with an enemy culture were experiences shared by captives of all ages and both sexes, captivity often took adults and children, females and males in different directions, illuminating role boundaries which might not be otherwise apparent.
EARLY IN THIS CENTURY Alice Baker and Emma Coleman set out to collect all known information about New England captives taken to Canada, adding to the colonial documents and local traditions many baptismal and marriage records gleaned from Canadian archives. Building upon this information, we can trace 270 captives taken from the region between 1689 and 1730.1
Like Hannah Duston, most prisoners were taken from their own houses in attacks involving several dwellings in their neighborhood if not an entire village. The towns of origin of the 270 captives place Mather’s “Valley of Achor” unmistakably in the region of New England north of Cape Ann. Sixteen of the recorded captives came from Hannah Duston’s town of Haverhill and a few others from the Essex County towns of Newbury, Salisbury, and Amesbury. Almost all of the others came from the New Hampshire and Maine settlements north of the Merrimack. It is not surprising, given the massive assaults on York in 1692 and on Oyster River in 1694, that a fifth of the captives came from these two towns. With York, the towns along the Piscataqua River—Dover, Exeter, Oyster River, Kittery, and Salmon Falls—accounted for more than half. Twenty came from the more compact village of Wells, Maine, while the scattered plantations above Wells—Scarborough, Casco, Saco, Cape Elizabeth, Yarmouth, Pemaquid—accounted for the remaining eighty.
Table 5. New England Captives
James Axtell has suggested that in later wars Indian captivity was primarily an experience of women and children.2 In northern New England in these years this was not so. Although unmarried girls and boys under the age of twenty-one accounted for two-thirds of the captives, this proportion was not much different than in the general population. Among adults, fifty-two women appear on Coleman’s lists and sixty men. The overall proportion of males to females was almost equal: 142 to 128.
Axtell has also described the phenomenon of the “white Indian,” the captive who chose to stay, or was enticed into staying, with his or her captors. Again there is little evidence of this in northern New England, perhaps because the Abenaki Indians, who accounted for many of the raids, were less interested in adoption than in ransom. Coleman found information on only four “white Indians” from northern New England. Joanna Ordway of Newbury, who was sixteen when taken, remained in Canada and married an Abenaki. Tradition says that Martha Clark of Casco and Samuel Gill of Salisbury also stayed with the tribe which captured them. Sarah Hanson of Cocheco was adopted by Canadian Indians, but eventually married a Frenchman. There may have been more, since eighteen percent of male captives and sixteen percent of female were simply lost to the record. Among documented cases, however, “Anglo-French” are far more numerous than “white Indians.”
Age was a key factor in determining the outcome of captivity. Captives over twenty were half again as likely to return as those under. Even more important than age, however, was gender. Although equal proportions of males and females were eventually ransomed, males were more likely to escape or to die, females to stay with their captors. Males resisted; females adapted. Still, escape was an uncommon feat for either sex. Only eight percent of males as compared with two percent of females managed to get away, and among all the escaped prisoners, male or female, only Hannah Duston and her companions returned with enemy scalps.
Hannah Duston’s escape was unusual, but her physical condition at the time of capture was not. Fully one fifth of adult female captives from northern New England were either pregnant or newly delivered of a child. Their ability to cope with captivity is striking. Hannah Bradley of Haverhill and Tamsen Drew of Oyster River lost infants born in Indian camps, but three Maine women, Anne Batson, Sarah Cole, and Hopewell Hutchins, all in the second trimester of pregnancy when taken, delivered healthy children, baptized soon after birth by solicitous Canadian priests. Five other women, including Hannah Duston, marched northward while still experiencing post-partum symptoms.
According to Cotton Mather, Catherine Adams of Wells was dragged from her house only eight days after delivery. When told to walk, she was unable to stir, even with the help of a stick, but with prayer a new strength came into her. She trudged twenty miles the first day, was up to her neck in water six times, and at night “fell over head and ears” into a swamp. To the minister, it was miraculous that “She got not the least Cough nor Cold by all this: She is come home alive unto us.”3 Within the larger record of captivity her health seems less miraculous than commonplace. Whatever their condition, women taken from northern New England survived. Death claimed only three of fifty-two adult captives.
This is in sharp contrast to the record from another part of New England. Nine of twenty-three women taken from Deerfield in western Massachusetts in 1705 died or were killed. To John Williams, the Deerfield pastor who was himself among the captives, the death of fainting women came to be expected. Williams’ own wife, who had lain in a few weeks before, nearly drowned while crossing a stream and was killed by an Indian soon after. Another captive “Who being nigh the time of travail, was wearied with her journey” was slain, as were four others also said to have been “tired.”4 Ministers were not required to explain why God gave one woman the strength to move on and another only the courage to die, but historians cannot so easily assign events to Providence. The frequent mention of physical fatigue and physical disability in Williams’ account suggests that most Deerfield women were killed because they could not or would not keep up the pace required by the flight into Canada. Perhaps women from the northern frontier with its sawmills and isolated garrison houses may have been more accustomed to wilderness travel than women taken from Deerfield’s village center.
In sorting out such differences, however, we must look at the captors as well as the captives. The Abenaki Indians pushed their English captives far beyond their own presumed ability: Hannah Swarton wrote of traveling “over steep and hideous Mountains one while and another while over Swamps and Thickets of Fallen Trees, lying one, two, three foot from the ground, which I have stepped on, from one to another, nigh a thousand in a day; carrying a great Burden on my Back.”5 But almost as frequently the narratives testify to Indian assistance in coping with the unaccustomed rigors of life on the trail. Elizabeth Hanson left a particularly detailed account. Her Indian master carried her newborn baby and sometimes even her blanket “tho’ he had, as is said, a very heavy Burden of his own.” Though Elizabeth climbed mountains so steep that she “was forc’d to creep up on my Hands and Knees,” her master helped her. “When we came at very bad Places, he would lend me his Hand, or coming behind, would push me up before him: In all which he shewed some Humanity and Civility more than I could have expected.”6
“Humanity” certainly had something to do with the treatment the captives received, but there were additional motives. Since prisoners were taken for ransom, for enslavement, or for adoption, their captors had a real stake in their survival. Here the differences between the Deerfield and northern New England captives become most apparent. The Deerfield women were all taken by Mohawk Indians in a single winter attack on their village. The northern New Englanders were taken by Abenaki Indians in much smaller groups in a series of attacks over a period of thirty years. An unusually large group of captives both increased the liability and decreased the value of any one individual. Even if they might bring a good ransom, pregnant or post-parturient women were a high-risk group. For a tribe primarily interested in adoption, as these Mohawks seem to have been, they were worth less effort than a sturdy child.7
For whatever reason, most wives taken captive from northern New England survived. Returning to towns like Haverhill or Oyster River or York or Berwick, they gave their communities an image of “wilderness courage” more vivid and more immediate than any promoted by the Boston press. Their heroism was less spectacular than that of Hannah Duston, but it was noted and appreciated by their countrymen. Sylvanus Davis wrote a long letter to “be Communicated To the Inhabitants of the Province of Maine” based on intelligence collected by Esther Lee during her short period with the eastern tribes.8 Grace Higiman, Tamsen Drew, and Ann Jenkins traveled to Boston in 1695 to testify before the governor and council regarding the activities of an Indian named Bombazeen. Higiman demonstrated a particularly sharp memory for names, numbers, dates, and geographical detail, and after three years among the Canadian Indians she felt free to offer the councilors advice on military strategy as well as specific information. “I apprehend That if the yearly supply from France to St. John’s could be intercepted they would be greatly distressed and forced to draw off,” she told them.9
In King Philip’s War frontier women had been employed in diplomatic negotiations. After a year among the Abenakis, Elizabeth Hammon wrote and delivered a letter from her captors describing possible terms of settlement with the English. As the wife of a trader, she was already adept at communicating with the Indians.10 Cotton Mather recorded two instances of similar service by women in King William’s War. When ten English captives were redeemed at Sagadahock in 1691, the Indians were “very loth” to part with Mistress Hull “because being able to Write Well, they made her serve them in the Quality of a Secretary.” Goody Stockford, an otherwise unidentified captive, was a more direct intermediary between the two sides. She returned to the English as a messenger, then went back to the Indians with a shallop full of “Charity” with which to redeem other prisoners.11
It would be interesting to know whether captivity affected the lives of these women after their return. After two or three years in foreign parts did they come back to their struggling villages with new ideas or skills? Did the ability to survive wilderness trials and to adapt to an alien culture change their self-perceptions? Did captivity increase their respect for either enemy or only fan wartime hatred and resentment? We cannot know. Few captives left written records; almost all returned to the obscurity from whence they were taken.
IF THE MAJORITY of New England captives returned to their homes, an appreciable minority did not. The behavior of these New Englanders raises the complicated problem of assimilation. Why did some choose to remain with their captors? Here again gender was a crucial factor.
Figures from Deerfield show that many more girls than boys remained among the Indians. Unfortunately, there is not enough evidence from northern New England to draw any conclusions about the importance of Indian assimilation. The record for the French, on the other hand, is clear. Statistics confirm the perceptions of the Boston ministry that if New Englanders in captivity were threatened by “savages,” they were even more strenuously enticed by “papists.” Twenty-nine females and fourteen males from northern New England made new lives for themselves in Canada. That twice as many females as males remained with the enemy can be attributed to three factors: the primacy of marriage, the influence of religion, and the supportive power of female networks.
Marriage was the single most important factor in determining which female captives returned and which stayed in New France. Only one married woman stayed, and, as we shall see, her situation was exceptional. The two other adults who remained in Canada had both been widowed by the war, while all the other expatriate females were single women and girls. In fact, fifty-eight percent of female captives between the ages of twelve and twenty-one found new lives in the land of their enemy. This is, of course, precisely the age group which in New England would have been putting lamb bones under pillows or counting daisies or otherwise thinking about what the future might bring. If these captives did not prove as resolute as New England ministers might have hoped, it was because they had always known that their future life would depend more than anything else on the choice of a mate. Every girl knew that she would eventually leave her father and mother and perhaps even her community to marry. To leave the country, the language, and the culture of one’s childhood was not expected, of course, but in courtship proximity is more important than any other factor. Maine and New Hampshire were far away and French (and sometimes Indian) suitors insistent. Furthermore, there was no parent’s guiding hand to restrain a youthful infatuation.
In New France the captives had found a country in which marriage may have been even easier than in New England. The first English captives arrived in Canada after the colonization policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of internal affairs, had already proved successful. Observers in the late 1660s reported a line of settlement along the St. Lawrence; farms were replacing forests, crafts and trades were appearing. It is clear from contemporary documents that industrious settlers of both sexes were welcome in the French settlements, though, as in all pioneer societies, women may have been especially welcome.12 Furthermore, it would have been easier for females to assimilate simply because a wife usually assumes the status of her husband. The wife of an Indian or a Frenchman could become Indian or French by virtue of marriage.
The importance of the marriage choice becomes even more apparent if we look at the three adult captives who remained. Abigail Turbet’s story is somewhat obscure; she died not long after making the decision to stay, so it is difficult to know if she would have returned eventually, yet she probably had little reason to do so. Her husband had died during her captivity and she had no children.13 There is no question about Abigail Willey’s motivation, however. For her, a forced journey to Canada brought freedom from bondage of a different sort. She had no desire to return to her husband, whom she had previously accused in court of insane jealousy and repeated cruelty. He was perhaps just as ready to forget her, for when he went to sea in 1696, he made out a deed of gift which ignored the existence of a wife in Canada. French and Indians effected a separation which New Hampshire courts had denied. For more than a decade Abigail lived as a single woman in New France, part of the time in the service of Messire Hector de Callières, governor of the Island of Montreal. In 1710, now listed as a widow, she married Edouard de Flecheur.14
Grizel Otis was also a widow. Her husband had been killed in the attack upon Dover. Within six months in New France she had married Philippe Robitaille, a Montreal cooper. But for Grizel there was an additional factor—religion. Although her husband had been a Quaker, her mother had been Irish and probably Catholic as well. Soon after her arrival she was baptized by a Canadian priest, as were her three-month-old baby, Christine, her two-year-old daughter, and four stepchildren and grandchildren. All of these children and grandchildren grew up in Canada, married there, and, with the notable exception of Christine, remained for the rest of their lives.15 Captivity brought Grizel a new opportunity for marriage, but, perhaps even more important, it returned her to the faith of her mother.
The story of Grizel Otis Robitaille also illustrates the significance of the network of female captives which developed in Montreal. Grizel’s easy assimilation into French faith and society may have been a bridge for Abigail Willey, who was related to her by marriage.16 Although she seems to have had no prior connection with Abigail Turbet, in 1705 she witnessed Turbet’s deathbed abjuration of the Protestant faith and her acceptance of Catholicism.17 For some New England women, Canada offered an opportunity for a new life, but in New France opportunity was often linked to religious institutions fully as zealous as any in New England and to a system of support provided by godly women.
Unlike the Protestant communities of New England, New France offered women not one but two life choices, each exemplified in the biographies of two Maine girls: Esther Sayward, who in 1712 became Madame Pierre de Lestage, and her sister Mary, who a few years earlier had taken vows and become Soeur Marie-des-Anges.18 Both girls had been captured as children and educated by the Sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Montreal.
Women stand side by side with men in the legendary accounts of the founding of Montreal, the one city in North America unequivocally established through religion.19 As a sister of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Mary Sayward belonged to one of two important Montreal institutions founded and continued by women. As nuns of L’Hôtel-Dieu (hospital), Mary Silver, Mary Ann Davis, and Ruth Littlefield were associated with the other.20
Mary Silver of Haverhill was sixteen when she was captured in 1708. Two years later her mother petitioned the General Court, begging help in securing her release. She was worried about her daughter’s soul, as well she might have been, for two months earlier Mary had been baptized in Montreal with the High and Mighty Seigneur Messire Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, Chevalier of the military Order of Saint-Louis, and Governor General of New France, standing as godfather. A year later Vaudreuil wrote Governor Dudley of Massachusetts that Mary was as free as any of the English captives to return, but that he wouldn’t force someone to go back who wanted to stay. Mary had already entered the order of St. Joseph as a Soeur L’Hôtel-Dieu, as had another Haverhill girl, Mary Ann Davis, who had been captured fourteen years before. Seven-year-old Ruth Littlefield of Wells, who would eventually join them as a hospitalière, was probably among the children being educated at the nearby convent school.21
The religious influence of the New England converts spread outward from Montreal. When a mission and school were established at Sault-au-Récollet in 1701, Mary Sayward went there as superior. There she taught Indian girls and young English captives brought from her homeland. She may have been the “papist Englishwoman” who tried to comfort Joseph Bartlett of Newbury when he was brought to the mission in 1708. In 1712 she heard Hannah Hurst, a Deerfield captive, declare her wish to live among the Indians and marry there, and although there is only circumstantial evidence of this, she may also have met her cousin Esther Wheelwright of Wells, who was taken from the Abenakis in 1709 and who afterward became the fifth and most famous of the New England nuns.22 Esther, who took final vows in 1714, was twice superior of the Ursuline convent of Quebec. Though she eventually re-established contact with her family in Maine, she never renounced her new religion. “God himself assures us,” she wrote her mother in 1747, that “he who leaves for his sake, Father, Mother, Brothers and Sisters, shall have an hundred fold in this life, and Life eternal in the next.”23
Since the New England captives who stayed in Canada included daughters of prominent families, it is little wonder that officials at home worried over the threat of French Catholicism. John Williams, the minister of Deerfield, devoted most of his captivity narrative to the spiritual threat of “papacy.” In a wartime tract directed to the inhabitants of the frontier, Cotton Mather urged New England captives to fortify themselves through knowledge of the scriptures, strict observance of the Sabbath, and mutual supports through meetings and prayer.24 A tract printed in Boston was an ineffective shield against the French assault. English girls who arrived in Montreal, Quebec, or the outlying missions encountered a world which was highly religious, oriented toward conversion, and at the same time almost exclusively feminine.
French proselytizing touched adult women as well as their daughters. Although Elizabeth Hanson, Hannah Swarton, and Margaret Stilson resisted Catholic influence and eventually returned to tell of their triumph, almost a third of adult female captives made at least some capitulation to the French. Only Grizel Otis, Abigail Willey, and Abigail Turbet fully converted, but Anne Batson of Scarborough, Tamsen Drew of Oyster River, Mary Plaisted of York, Sarah Cole of Saco, and Mehitable Goodwin, Elizabeth Tozier, and Martha Grant of Salmon Falls all accepted Catholic baptism, though they eventually returned to live in New England. Among adult males, only one—Tamsen Drew’s husband, Thomas—accepted baptism. There is no indication of coercion here. Though the priests might take an infant from its mother’s arms to sprinkle it against the fires of Hell, they did not forcibly baptize adults. The “susceptibility” of these women to Catholicism is best explained in social terms. In New France the religious institutions which were most intimately involved with captives were dominated by women.
The most frequent name on baptismal records of New England captives of all ages, both those who returned and those who stayed, is that of M. Henri-Etoine de Mériel, who was not only priest of the parish of Notre-Dame but also chaplain of the Hôtel-Dieu and confessor of the pupils and sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame.25 Though Father Mériel was himself interested in the captives, the fact that twice as many females as males succumbed to French influence points beyond the zealous father to the sisters who nursed and taught them after their purchase from the Indians. Nearly all of the girls who married and stayed in New France were first nurtured by nuns and baptized under their care. Local tradition says that after a year with the sisters, eight-year-old Sarah Gerrish of Dover went home in tears, hiding a little crucifix under her armpit.26 The ministry to the captives became even more effective with the addition of the English sisters, including Mary Silver, who eventually succeeded Father Mériel as catechist. The network of female captives in New France—from Grizel Otis Robitaille, who established her family in Montreal in 1689, to the last of the captives in the wars of the eighteenth century—deserves further study, but its existence seems certain.27
By putting one foot in front of the other, New England women and their daughters survived the trek to Canada. Once there, they responded in different ways. Some interpreted their captivity, much as the ministers did, as a spiritual quest for courage and faith. Others accepted it as both an opportunity and a trial. Little girls responded to the nurture they were given, sometimes embracing a faith foreign to New England. Older girls, especially those in their teens or early twenties, frequently chose to marry rather than to wait months and years for ransom. Most adult women kept their eyes on home and eventually returned, though not without accepting French friendship and eventually French religion. If female New Englanders resisted captivity less strenuously than males, their adaptation was never merely passive. They proved themselves “movables,” like the pots, pans, and cows which formed the chief female inheritance in either country.
ONE OF THE MOST VISIBLE—and movable—of New England captives was Christine Otis of Dover, New Hampshire. The details of her life portray the often dramatic contrast between literary heroism and life. Christine was taken to Canada as an infant with her mother, Grizel Otis Robitaille. She grew up in New France, was educated by the sisters of the Congrégation, and in 1707 at the age of eighteen married Louis Le Beau. In 1713 he died, leaving her with two daughters. A year later she married Captain Thomas Baker, a Deerfield captive who had escaped in 1705 and who now returned to Montreal as an interpreter with a party of English negotiators. Christine followed her new husband back to Massachusetts, though French officials denied her permission to take her children by Le Beau. In 1722, with support from the Massachusetts government she briefly returned to Montreal to assist in retrieving some English captives, and again she petitioned—unsuccessfully—for custody of her daughters.28
In 1729 she received an earnest letter from her mother’s confessor, François Seguenot, who addressed her as “my dear Christina, poor stray sheep,” urging her to return to New France. Christine’s own response to this letter is unknown, but her husband was concerned enough about it to give it “to a Gentleman well vers’d in that Language to transcribe, in order to employ some person to answer it.” Both the translated letter and the answer appeared that year as A Letter from a Romish Priest in Canada. A personal appeal which had perhaps originated with Christine’s mother thus became a ministerial polemic, as the anonymous Protestant tangled with the Jesuit point by point in a debate over scriptural interpretation and ecclesiastical history. Christine’s own soul was obviously of less interest to either side than the argument it made possible.
In a telling passage the Protestant apologized for the level of the discourse. “I perceive Madam,” he wrote, “that I am quoting Authors that are unknown to you; but you may lay the blame of it upon Mr. Seguenot, who amuses you with Stories, into the truth of which you can never examine.” The condescension of Seguenot was almost as pronounced. He urged Christine to read his letter again and again, since her eternal happiness or misery was at stake, but he also asked her to show it to her ministers and requested that they reply to him in Latin or Greek if they did not know French!29 The two clergymen were conducting a professional argument using a specialized vocabulary reserved for insiders. Fine distinctions between “the Spouse of Christ” and the “invisible Church” or between “priestly sacrifice” and “the Lord’s supper” probably meant little to Christine Otis Le Beau Baker, who had experienced the conflict between English Protestantism and French Catholicism on a far more personal level.
When Thomas Baker died in 1735, she decided to begin life again for a third time. Having lived the first twenty years of her life in Canada and the second twenty in Massachusetts, she took the proceeds of a land grant from the General Court and set herself up for the remaining forty as a tavernkeeper in Dover, New Hampshire, the town where her story began. Uprooted by war and transplanted by marriage, she returned to the home of her birth. There she died in 1773, a curious relic of the age of female heroism in New England.