1676 First published in 1682, Mary Rowlandson’s account of her Captivity and Restoration ran through fourteen further editions by the end of the 17th century. Clearly the theme of an innocent captured by alien forces had a powerful effect on American readers. In time, dozens more captivity stories would follow, in which the kidnappers could be Jesuit priests, or Romans enslaving Jews (in the case of Ben Hur, 1880), or even a British officer, as in Susanna Rowson’s sentimental romance Charlotte Temple (1791), the most popular work of fiction in America until Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
But in Rowlandson’s narrative there is a further layer of spiritual autobiography. She scrutinises each twist and turn of her captivity for signs of what it portends for her own salvation. So when ‘many hundreds’ of what she calls the ‘heathen’ manage to cross the river ‘bag and baggage’ – ‘some sick, some lame’, including ‘squaws’ with ‘papooses at their backs’ – she naturally expects the pursuing English army to follow on pretty smartish. But they don’t. ‘On that very day’, she writes, ‘came the English army after them to this river, and saw the smoke of their wigwams, and yet this river put a stop to them.’
Rowlandson was disappointed not just because the English failed to save her, but also because of what the episode portended. After all, she knew her Old Testament. It was God’s chosen people who crossed the Red Sea dry-shod, and the heathen Egyptian army that got swallowed up in the converging waters. Something was wrong here. The best she can offer by way of interpretation is: ‘We were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance.’ And by ‘we’ she means not just the captives but also their would-be rescuers.