Andrew Newman
“Whilst they continued Gods plantation, they were a noble Vine, a right seede,” declared Reverend John Cotton in 1630, “but if Israel will destroy themselves; the fault is in themselves.” Cotton’s sermon, “Gods Promise to his Plantation,” identified the Israel of the Old Testament with his congregation of English Puritans on the point of embarking for Massachusetts Bay. According to Cotton, just as God had cleared “room” in the promised land of Canaan for the people who had followed Moses out of Egypt, planting them like a “vine” that would flourish so long as they adhered to Mosaic law, so he would plant and protect Christians in New England (in a region where the native peoples had suffered catastrophic depopulation through epidemic disease), so long as they upheld their end of the new Covenant under the Law of the Gospel. “But if you rebell against God,” he warned the assembled colonists, invoking Jeremiah, who prophesied the destruction of the Temple and the carrying‐away of the Jews as captives to Babylon, “the same God that planted you will also roote you out againe, for all the evill which you shall doe against your selves: Jer. 11.17.” God would thus chasten his backsliding people, yet “even in their captivity” he would sustain those among them who were predestined to reform: “The Basket of good figges God sent into the land of Caldea for their good: Jer. 24.5” (Cotton 1686: 16–17).
Thus the Protestant colonists arrived with a predetermined interpretation for captivities, a recurrent feature of the wars that were the inevitable consequence of the system of “settler colonialism” which sought to “replace the natives on their land” (Wolfe 2001: 868). Among the various forms of colonial contact, captivity was especially significant to the New England colonists, because it was so legible to their theological worldview as evidence of God’s disposition toward them and their enemies. Captivity was the ideal object for an extension of typology – the system of correspondences wherein the persons and events of the Old Testament prefigured those of the New, especially the coming of Christ – to current events, sometimes uncannily. Styling themselves as Israelites who had escaped from the Egyptian tyranny of the Church of England to settle in their promised land, they seemed to find themselves reliving ancient history: their sanctuary sacked by heathens, their women and children carried away as captives.
The story of the first New English captives aptly exemplifies this figural significance. In April 1637, Pequot raiders attacked the town of Wethersfield, on the Connecticut River. According to Newes from America (1638), Captain John Underhill’s history of the Pequot War (1636–1637), Pequots “slew nine men, women and children,” and took “two maids captives” (1638: 15–16). They then canoed within sight of Fort Saybrook on the Long Island Sound, taunting the English soldiers who “gave fire” (16). For Underhill, “it was a speciall providence of God” that the English ordinance did not hit the canoe carrying “the poore maids,” else “then should we have beene deprived of the sweet observation of Gods providence in their deliverance” (16). That is, God ordained that the young women would not be struck by friendly fire (an event for which the Puritans may have been challenged to locate a clear biblical precedent) so that through their captivity and redemption He could provide an object lesson in His sovereignty over human affairs.
Although the two captives were only bit players, their story warranted a lengthy digression in Underhill’s history, because it revealed the workings of the principal player in everything – God. In this regard, the embedded captivity narrative within Newes from America expresses a rationale for the initial development of the captivity narrative as a stand‐alone genre, with some works appearing under titles that instructively subordinate the human protagonist‐author of the narrative to the divine Author of events: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed, Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) and God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty, Exemplified in the Captivity and Redemption of Elizabeth Hanson (1728). As Roy Harvey Pearce wrote in a seminal essay on the genre, in early captivity narratives “the details of the captivity itself are found to figure forth a larger, essentially religious experience” (1947: 2).
The pages Underhill devotes to the two Pequot War captives also preview some of the interpretive problems attending subsequent narratives. They feature his representation of the testimony of the elder of the two young women, who was “about sixteene years of age,” at their debriefing or “examination,” which took place after Dutch traders had redeemed them from the Pequots and delivered them to Fort Seabrook (25). The account is presented partly in third person, partly in first person, and is framed by Underhill’s narration and interpretive commentary; therefore it is impossible to objectively determine what happened to the two captives, how they felt about their experience, or to sort out their account from the agendas and mediation of more powerful men.
For example, apparently one of the examiners’ priorities was to confirm that the young women did indeed return from captivity as “maids”: “[D]emanding of her how they had used her, she told us that they did solicite her to uncleannesse, but her heart being much broken and afflicted under that bondage she was cast in, had brought to her consideration these thoughts, how shall I commit this great evill and sinne against my God?” (25). Did Underhill reliably represent the captive’s testimony? If so, by vilifying her captors and attesting to her religious resistance to sexual temptation, was she just telling the men what they wanted to hear? If she was straightforwardly reporting her experience, how much could she have understood, in light of cultural and linguistic barriers, about the Pequots’ intentions? As evidence of a colonial encounter, the value of this account is vitiated, but it is more directly revealing of colonial anxieties about contact between European women and Indigenous men. The consensus in subsequent narratives, until the genre took a turn toward sensationalist fiction after the colonial period, was that Indians had no interest in making, in Mary Rowlandson’s phrase, “the least abuse of unchastity” (Sayre 2000: 172) toward the women they held in their power (at least, so long as they held the status of captives; those captives who were adopted and incorporated into Indian families, as discussed below, would be expected to participate in family relations).
Underhill was not particularly interested in the Pequots’ motivations, however. Although some later captivity narratives would seek to feed their readers’ curiosity about Native Americans, the early ones, as “simple, direct religious documents,” stuck to their rhetorical purpose (Pearce 1947: 2). Thus, whereas the Pequots, according to Underhill, “shewed” the captives “their Forts, and curious Wigwams, and houses, and incouraged them to be merry,” they were too preoccupied by their spiritual plight to be entertained: “the poore soules, as Israel, could not frame themselves to any delight or mirth under so strange a King”; instead, “hanging their Harpes upon the Willow trees,” the young captives “gave their mindes to sorrow, hope was their chiefest food, and teares their constant drinke” (25–26). Here Underhill, speaking for the former captives, toggles their story with that of the Jewish captives in Babylon. His reference is to the famous 137th Psalm, arguably the most prominent biblical signpost for American captivity narratives. In this lament, the Jews, by the “rivers of Babylon,” are disconsolate about being estranged from their homeland and refuse their captors’ taunting request for a song, choosing instead to hang their “harps upon the willows” (Psalms 137:2).1
For Puritans, the primary meaning of the Babylonian captivity, with respect to the Pequot War captives and others during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was that their affliction was the consequence of God’s righteous anger, toward them and perhaps toward their community. Thus the young women from Wethersfield necessarily concluded that “Gods hand was justly upon them for their remisnesse in all their wayes” (Underhill 1638: 25). Yet such chastisement could also be a sign of God’s love toward his chosen people, whom he restored to righteousness through scourging, as was symbolized by the captives’ physical redemption and restoration to their community.
Hence, the Pequots’ captives’ “sorrow” was not over their situation as captives, but rather over their spiritual plight as sinners, over having been “so ungratefull toward God” as to be turned over to savage enemies – a punishment for which they were intensely grateful (Underhill 1638: 25). Although the elder captive admitted, according to Underhill, that she sometimes feared that she would die at her captors’ hands, especially if the English prosecuted their war, Underhill represents her as concluding: “I will not feare what man can doe unto me, knowing God to be above man, and man can doe nothing without Gods permission” (26). These words, which “fell from her mouth when she was examined in Seabrook fort” (26), suited Underhill’s larger purposes in Newes from America, which aimed to vindicate English atrocities during the Pequot War, especially the torching of the Pequot fort at Mystic, a holocaust that consumed approximately eight hundred men, women, and children. They also represent the upshot of the Protestant captivity narrative, which repeatedly illustrated and urged a complete subjection of oneself to God’s will.
In his commentary, Underhill referred to stories from the Book of Daniel about devout Jewish captives in Babylon whom God protected from harm. The “Three Children,” Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who emerged unscathed from Nebuchadnezzar’s “fierie furnace,” and Daniel himself, who survived a night in King Darius’s “Lyons dennelion’s den,” were popular types for captivities (Underhill 1638: 27); they appear, for example, in the narratives of Rowlandson and John Marrant (Sayre 2000: 172, 213). Underhill’s references in Newes from America neatly exemplify the operation of biblical typology, because first he reads Christ into the Old Testament, then he applies it to the present day: “better in a fierie furnace with the presence of Christ, then in a Kingly palace without him: better in a Lyons denne, in the midst of all the roaring lyons and with Christ, then in a doune bed with wife and children without Christ” (27).
His point is that the Wethersfield captives were better off in the hands of the Pequots than readers were in the comforts of home – the risk of physical harm was as nothing compared with the risk of spiritual death from a lapse into complacency and ingratitude. Accordingly, he cautioned, some readers might be so foolish as to wish for such affliction themselves: “if this be the fruit of afflictions, I would I had some of those.” But to do so would be presumptuous: “wee are rather to follow Christs example, Father not my will, but thy will bee done” (28).
Underhill’s commentary lends some context to the concluding paragraph of Mary Rowlandson’s Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682): “Before I knew what affliction meant,” it begins, “I was ready sometimes to wish for it.” In her previous life, Rowlandson had been “sometimes jealous least I should have my portion in this life”; that is, she was concerned that in enjoying the temporal comforts of life on earth, she was forsaking the everlasting joys of life in Heaven. Hebrews 12:6 told her that “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every Son whom he receiveth” (Sayre 2000: 176). So why not her? God seemed to have let her off easy, which might be a sign that she was not predestined to go to Heaven.
Rowlandson’s turn had come in February 1676, during the devastating conflict known as Metacom’s or King Philip’s War, when Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and Wampanoags attacked the Massachusetts frontier town of Lancaster. According to the anonymous author of the preface to her narrative, “most of the buildings were turned into ashes; many people (men, women and children) slain, and others captivated” (Sayre 2000: 133). Rowlandson saw her nephew and sister slaughtered and carried her own mortally wounded daughter Sarah with her into captivity, accompanied by her other two children. Then Rowlandson drank “the dregs of the cup” (Isaiah 51:17), “the Wine of astonishment” (Psalms 60:3). Now, in her moment of composition, her recollection of her living nightmare affords her a spiritually salutary perspective: “I have learned to look beyond present smaller troubles,” she concludes, “and to be quieted under them, as Moses said, Exodus 14.13. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord (Sayre 2000: 176).
As this closing note illustrates, Rowlandson’s narrative, published in 1682 in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the Sovereignty and Goodness of God, and in London as A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, is at once orthodox and intimate. It exemplifies the potential beauty and poignancy in religious rhetoric and the representation of a devotional experience. Notably, its words are not entirely hers; they are also those of the Bible. In addition to a profusion of scripture, its prose contains many chords that harmonize with the two orthodox texts that “contained – one might even say disciplined” her narrative (Knight 2008: 182). These are the “Preface to the Reader,” which is signed in Latin “Per Amicam” (By a Friend) and is widely attributed to the prominent minister Increase Mather; and her late husband Joseph Rowlandson’s final sermon, “The Possibility of God’s Forsaking a People,” which was appended to early editions of the narrative.2
These peritexts frame the narrative exclusively in religious terms, but the narrative also contains many discordant notes. These include Rowlandson’s accounts of her economic transactions with her captors, who traded food and goods in exchange for her sewing: “I was not a little glad that I had anything that they would accept of” (Sayre 2000: 151). Rowlandson’s indecorous, urgent quest for food, furthermore, strains against the typology. In one oft‐cited instance, she snatches a boiled horse hoof from a starving, “slobbering” captive child “and ate it myself, and savory it was to my taste” (Sayre 2000: 162). Accordingly, some readers have discerned an expressive struggle and suggested that Mather, especially, may have influenced her composition, or even intervened directly, lacing the text with scripture and shaping it to serve his political purposes.
Others have pointed out that Rowlandson, a minister’s wife, might be expected to possess the sort of fluency with scripture displayed by the narrative and that there is nothing unorthodox about the conflict between Rowlandson’s personal voice, which is at times “very impatient […] almost outrageous,” and “quieting scripture” (Sayre 2000: 154). On the contrary, this contest, in which Rowlandson is necessarily overruled, is characteristically Puritan. What distinguishes it is that it took place within a context saturated with typological significance, making it especially noteworthy, and affording Rowlandson, at the center of it all, a waiver from the general proscription against women putting their personal experience or opinions on “public view” (Sayre 2000: 135).
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God is structured in “Removes,” with the chapter sections corresponding to Rowlandson and her captors’ movements “up and down the wilderness” (Sayre 2000: 138). References to scripture are not simply layered on as commentary; rather, in many instances they are part of the narrative’s action sequences. Indeed one of her declared motives in composing the narrative was to recount God’s “goodness in bringing to my hand so many comfortable and suitable scriptures in my distress” (Sayre 2000: 149). Necessarily, these communications began with the provision of a Bible. “I cannot but take notice,” she wrote in the “Third Remove,” “of the wonderful mercy of God to me in those afflictions, in sending me a Bible” (Sayre 2000: 144). Rowlandson’s benefactor was possibly one of the Nipmuc converts to Christianity, a “Praying Indian,” who were among the captors’ party, but in Rowlandson’s representation his motives were irrelevant: the credit goes to God (Sayre 2000: 143).
In Rowlandson’s exercise of “the fundamental devotional act of her community” (Knight 2008: 169), the Bible was not simply a repository of God’s Word, but rather a transmitter. Immediately upon receiving the Bible she opened it, and the communication began: “in that melancholy time, it came into my mind to read first the 28th Chapter of Deuteronomy.” Deuteronomy 28 enumerates a series of curses to be visited upon the unfaithful Jews; it was bad news that spoke to her “dark heart” with uncanny specificity: for example, 28:41 prophesied: “Though shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity.” God’s inescapable message, through Deuteronomy 28, was that, like the Old Testament Jews, Rowlandson had transgressed and was therefore being punished. But as a Christian reader, “the Lord helped” her “to go on reading” until she came to much better news, an anticipation of the Gospel of Christ in Deuteronomy 30:1–7. “I found, there was mercy promised again, if we would return to him by repentance.” Furthermore, the tables would be turned: “though we were scattered from one end of the Earth to the other, yet the Lord would gather us together, and turn all those curses upon our enemies” (Sayre 2000: 144).
To modern, perhaps secular ears, Rowlandson’s representation of her divinely directed reading may seem implausible. Surely, as a minister’s wife, she knew what she would find in Deuteronomy 28, and that if she only kept reading, she would find reassurance. But Rowlandson was a representative Puritan reader, albeit in an unusual situation. In her understanding, the God‐to‐soul connection only worked if it was activated by the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, the Bible consisted merely of inert words on the page. Thus in the “Thirteenth Remove” she recounts an episode where she “found no comfort” in the Bible: “So easy a thing it is with God to dry up the streams of scripture comfort from us” (Sayre 2000: 155).
This understanding of Rowlandson’s literacy practices is difficult to reconcile with the view that the typological interpretation of Rowlandson’s captivity was imposed on the narrative. Instead, it also emerges from within, in the form of God’s own running commentary, through scripture. Within this typological understanding, the Indians were simply instruments of Providence, whom she refers to formulaically as a “company of hell‐hounds”; “black creatures” and “merciless enemies” (Sayre 2000: 139–140). Nevertheless, as the narrative develops, some individuals emerge from among the undifferentiated mass of “this barbarous enemy” (Sayre 2000: 140).
These include three native leaders. Rowlandson came to see her “master,” the Narragansett sachem Quinnapin, as “the best friend that I had of an Indian, both in cold and hunger” (Sayre 2000: 154). She represents her “mistress,” Weetamoo, “Squaw Sachem” of the Pocasset Wampanoags, as “a severe and proud dame” (Sayre 2000: 163). In one striking sequence, she recounts how Quinnapin had her “wash” for the first time since her capture, and then gave her a mirror “to see how [she] looked”; Rowlandson subsequently describes, revealing her fundamental lack of recognition of her captors’ worldview and their ritual practices, how each day Weetamoo took as much time to dress as “any of the gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with necklaces, with jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her hands” (Sayre 2000: 163). Rowlandson also took special notice of Metacom, the Wampanoag Sachem known to her as Philip. She describes him as a “crafty fox” (Sayre 2000: 168), but she does not vilify him as one might expect of a firsthand account of King Philip’s War.
She does, however, vilify the “praying Indian[s]” as foul hypocrites and impostors (Sayre 2000: 160). Yet her narrative has paradoxically contributed to the recovery of some of their stories, as scholars have correlated her narrative with other historical documents and investigated the Indians she mentions by name. Tom Dublet and Peter Conway, the messengers who carried the correspondence negotiating Rowlandson’s ransom and release, had been among the hundreds of Christian Indians whom the English had interned, under horrendous conditions, on Deer Island in Massachusetts Bay, during Metacom’s War. “Though they were Indians,” Rowlandson wrote, of their delivery of a letter from the Massachusetts Governor’s council, “I got them by the hand, and burst out into tears” (Sayre 2000: 163). The person who wrote out the response to that letter, on behalf of the “Indian sachems,” was James Printer (Wowaus), whose English surname referred to his role before the war as an apprentice to the printer Samuel Green (Sayre 2000: 164n43). Printer returned to his vocation in Cambridge, Massachusetts after the war; scholars speculate that in 1682, “in one of the most sublime ironies of King Philip’s War,” he set the type for Rowlandson’s narrative (Lepore 1998: 126).
The representation of Native Americans and the question of patriarchal, editorial interference with a female author’s self‐expression are principal discussion points in the scholarship surrounding Rowlandson’s narrative. Another is Rowlandson’s apparent struggle to reconcile her orthodox faith with the extremities of her psychological and physical experiences, especially those of grief and hunger. Hers is the first full‐length Protestant narrative of captivity among Indians in North America, the initial installment in the 111‐volume Garland Library of Narratives of North American Indian Captivities (1976–1980), making Rowlandson the lead author, as it were, of a genre that is commonly but misleadingly identified as uniquely American. Actually, as Linda Colley and others demonstrate, the British colonists who came to North America in the seventeenth century brought “stories of capture” – especially arising from conflicts in Islamic peoples – with them, but these were “adapted to a new American environment and to very different dangers” (2002: 140).
All the attention devoted to The Sovereignty and Goodness of God has made it perhaps the most widely analyzed work of colonial American literature – analyzed by professional scholars and students alike. This “hypercanonization” has a somewhat distortive effect on the study of captivity narratives as a genre, and even more so on the understanding of captivity as a historical phenomenon (Arac 1997: 133). That is, Rowlandson headlines an important set of Puritan captivity narratives, including Cotton Mather’s accounts of Hannah Swarton and Hannah Dustan, first published in 1697 (Vaughan and Clark 1981: 145–164), and John Williams’s 1707 narrative, “The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion” (2006). But while her narrative contributed to the extraordinary resonance of the figure of the white female captive wrested from home, this figure is foreign to many of “more than a thousand separate captivity titles” that were published from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, and it only represents a small portion of the “wide continuum of experiences” of captivity in colonial North America (Kolodny 1979: 232; Snyder 2012: 5).
In their anthology Puritans among the Indians, Alden Vaughan and Edward Clark propose four categories of captivity narratives. These groupings, especially the first three, are not as “distinct” from one another as Vaughan and Clark suggest, but they are nevertheless useful, especially insofar as they correspond to some of the motives Native Americans had in taking captives, namely for ransom, for enslavement, and for adoption (Vaughan and Clark 1981: 14; Snyder 2012: 5).
Rowlandson and Williams exemplify the first group: they were detained among Indians for a relatively brief period, and they were “not substantially changed” by their experience, in the sense that the cultural boundaries separating captor from captive remained intact or were easily reestablished (Vaughan and Clark 1981: 14). Their captors regarded them as commodities or bargaining chips held for ransom, and accordingly they were relatively safe. In the “Eighth Remove,” one of Rowlandson’s captors assured her that “none will hurt you” (Sayre 2000: 150). Williams, who was the most valuable asset among the 112 captives taken in the famous 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts during Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), probably realized as much when he defied his Mohawk “master,” a Catholic convert, who threatened “to dash out [his] brains with his hatchet” if he refused to kiss a crucifix (2006: 113). Williams would have known that his master would have been reluctant to forego his ransom, which he received soon after their arrival in New France.
This transition is a turning point in Williams’s narrative, marked by a shift from Old Testament to New Testament points of reference. The first section exhibits Williams’s “patient bearing the indignation of the Lord” while in the hands of the “cruel and barbarous” Indians and, more especially, while undergoing the “hardships and fatigues” of the journey to Canada (96). Collectively, the Deerfield captives meditated on verses that construed them as objects of God’s righteous judgment, being punished for their transgressions. At a Sabbath‐day prayer meeting the Indians allowed them to have, Williams gave a sermon on Lamentations 1:18: “The Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled against his commandment. Hear, I pray you, all people, and behold my sorrow. My virgins and young men are gone into captivity” (102). Such references to verses of scripture become less frequent in Williams’s narration of his time in Canada, where he represents the Jesuits implementing a divide‐and‐conquer strategy, separating the Protestant captives from one another and resorting to trickery and intense pressure to convert them to Catholicism. At one point, he alludes to the story of Christ’s Temptation on the Mount, casting the Jesuit Superior, who offered to reunite him with his children and provide an “honorable pension” if he would remain in Canada, as Satan: “Sir, if I thought your religion to be true, I would embrace it freely without any such offer, but so long as I believe it to be what it is, the offer of the whole world is of no more value to me than a blackberry” (125–126).
Rowlandson’s and Williams’s narratives were religious documents, but they were also wartime propaganda, and they continued to serve the purpose of vilifying enemies in later reprintings, throughout the colonial era and beyond. Most later narratives were less concerned with inspiring spiritual reform in their readers and more devoted to fueling their hatred of Indians and their European allies. Collectively, they suggested that scalping, torture, mutilations, cannibalism, and the murder of women and children were essential features of the Indians’ culture. These representations of atrocities marked the Indians as inhuman, but for that reason the real culpability was often imputed to those who supposedly subscribed to international law, the so‐called civilized peoples who incited their Native allies to violence: the French, during the series of wars that lasted from 1688 to 1763, and the British, during the War of Independence and the War of 1812. During the early national period, captivity narratives continued to attest to the Indians’ essential barbarity and therefore contributed to the case for removing them to the west of the Mississippi.
Such a portrait of the Native Americans was shaped more by political needs than by the actual experiences of the captives. According to Vaughan and Clark, however, a smaller number of captivity narratives belong to a second category, featuring “empathetic insight into Indian culture” (115). They give the example of John Gyles, who was captured during a French and Abenaki raid on his family’s settlement in Maine in 1689 during King William’s War (1689–1697). Gyles was 11 when he was made captive, and according to his 1736 Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc, he spent “about six years” in “doleful captivity” among the Maliseet Abenakis before they sold him to the French (Vaughan and Clark 1981: 124). Gyles definitely had a different status among his captors than did Rowlandson or Williams. He regarded himself as a “slave,” and along with fellow captives he was principally consigned to woman’s work (Vaughan and Clark 1981: 124). In other words, he filled a preexisting role, although a subordinate one, within the Maliseet economy. He may have forgone the opportunity to enhance his status by rejecting any acculturation, or adoption of Abenaki cultural practices, including their “form of Catholicism” (Foster 2003: 114). As might be expected, his representation of the culture of his captors is richer and more detailed than in narratives in the first category, but it is doubtful that these descriptions express empathy, as Vaughan and Clark suggest. Instead, as Yael Ben‐Zvi (2008) argues, “ethnographic” descriptions in captivity narratives tend to emphasize the Indians’ “foreignness” (x).
Vaughan and Clark’s third category of narratives “was written by those who had difficulty adjusting to their natal culture after long exposure to Indian life,” because they had undergone some degree of acculturation (15). One narrative that represents such a transformation is A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black (1785), which recounts the journey of the 13‐year‐old Anglo‐African Marrant, a recent convert to Methodism, across the “fence” that “divided the inhabited and cultivated parts” of South Carolina from “the wilderness” (Sayre 2000: 209). When he returned after captivity among Cherokee Indians, he was professedly fluent in their language and his “dress was purely in the Indian stile”; his family, except for his “youngest sister,” did not recognize him, and “contrived to get [him] out of the house” (Sayre 2000: 216–217). Yet to an even greater extent than Rowlandson’s Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Marrant’s narrative, which was written by the Methodist minister William Aldridge on the basis of Marrant’s oral account (Marrant himself edited and annotated later editions), seems to bend toward biblical stories. The family reunion scene, for example, seems inspired by the story of Joseph. Therefore, it is challenging to sort out Marrant’s immersion in Cherokee culture from his ascription of religious significance to the events he depicts. As the title of his narrative indicates, God is its foremost protagonist.
In contrast, Vaughan and Clark give the example of an Account of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Colonel James Smith (1799). Smith is clearly the protagonist of his own narrative. His account, which has still “received surprisingly little attention from scholars of the captivity genre” (Sayre 2000: 260), provides an instructive counterpoint to the Rowlandson model of captivity. First, unlike the paradigmatic literary captive, and like “over 80 percent” of the “approximately 2,600 Anglo‐American captives” brought to Canada during the French and Indian wars, Smith was male (Foster 2003: 2). Second, the authorship of his narrative is undisputed; Smith’s brief preface explains that he rejected the suggestion “to employ some person of liberal education to transcribe and embellish” his narrative, opining that “nature always outshines art” (Sayre 2000: 263). Finally, his narrative is a story of adventure rather than of Providence. Whereas Rowlandson was captured in a raid, Smith was among those colonists who voluntarily left home, and were detained en route to or through Indian country. These included missionaries, traders, soldiers, and, most iconically, “frontiersmen” such as Daniel Boone, whose capture and adoption by Shawnees in 1778, leading to his “initiation into knowledge of the Indian way,” was an important part of his resumé as a folk hero (Slotkin 1973: 288). In Smith’s case, he represents himself as choosing “Mars” over “Venus” at age 18; he left his “dear fair one” on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1755 and voluntarily exposed himself to the hazards of Indian captivity, joining the war effort by helping to “cut a waggon road” westward from the Pennsylvania frontier, leading to an even deeper and more entangling immersion into a Native American society (Sayre 2000: 263).
Smith was captured and adopted by a band of Kahnawake (“Caughnewago”) Mohawks who had migrated to the Ohio Country from the Canadian mission town of Kahnawake, near Montreal. He represents his adoption ritual at considerable length, including a ritual cleansing performed by three “young ladies,” concluding with a rendition of a speech by “one of the chiefs.” In Smith’s translation, the chief makes an unlikely allusion to Genesis 2:23 (“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh”):
My son, you are now flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone. By the ceremony which was performed this day, every drop of white blood was washed out of your veins; you are taken into the Caughnewago nation, and initiated into a warlike tribe; you are adopted into a great family, and now received with great seriousness and solemnity in the room and place of a great man; after what has passed this day, you are now one of us by an old strong law and custom –
(Sayre 2000: 268–269)
Smith’s representation of the ceremony and the speech illustrates “requickening,” the ritual whereby Haudenosaunees and neighboring peoples replaced lost family members through “ceremonies in which the deceased’s name, and with it the social role and duties it represented, was transferred to a successor” (Richter 1992: 32). Requickening was part of a “cultural pattern” called the “mourning‐war,” because as the casualty rate increased, as it did dramatically during the colonial era, Indians increasingly sought to repair their losses by taking captives, perpetuating a vicious circle of retaliation (Richter 1992: 32). In the view of Smith’s adopted people, their ceremony erased his former identity, reanimated the persona of a deceased “great man,” and transferred it to him. Hence he was no longer a “detained outsider” (the definition that Cristina Snyder proposes for “captive”), but rather, prospectively, a core member of the group (Snyder 2012: 5). He had yet to grow into the role: “‘we hope you will always go on to do great actions,’ his elder adoptive brother told him on a future occasion, ‘as it is only great actions that can make a great man.’” Smith responded “that I always wished to do great actions, and hoped I would never do any thing to dishonor any of those with whom I was connected” (Sayre 2000: 295–296).
That spectacularly vague rendering of whatever Smith might have said to his adoptive kin in the Mohawk dialect in which he became fluent, epitomizes what is so interesting in narratives of acculturation like Smith’s. Whereas Rowlandson’s narrative expresses her unwavering attachment to her people and her faith, Smith’s narrative wavers constantly. It expresses the rhetorical predicament of an author who is torn, albeit not in equal parts, between two antagonistic peoples. It is not a predicament that Smith manages adeptly, but his equivocal writing makes for interesting reading. For example, in recalling his response to the ceremonial speech at his adoption he writes:
At this time I did not believe this fine speech, especially that of the white blood being washed out of me; but since that time I have found that there was much sincerity in said speech, for, from that day, I never knew them to make any distinction between me and themselves in any respect whatever until I left them. If they had plenty of cloathing, I had plenty; if we were scarce, we all shared one fate.
(Sayre 2000: 269)
The sentence is grammatically ambiguous, but the implication is not that Smith came to believe that he had been purged of “white blood,” but rather that he realized that the Indians unconditionally treated him as one of their own. Although Smith repeatedly attempts to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over the Indians’ “light of nature” (Sayre 2000: 310), he ends up repeatedly attesting to the superiority of their communal society over his natal culture. So why did he leave?
Others chose not to. “By what power does it come to pass,” wondered John Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), “that children who have been adopted when young among these people can never be prevailed on to readopt European manners?” Observing that such adopted captives consistently refused to be reunited with their birth parents, he speculated that “there must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples even of one of those aborigines having from choice become Europeans!” (1981: 213, 214). Such captives, “who never returned to their natal culture,” are the subjects of a fourth category in Vaughan and Clark’s classification of captivity narratives. Since these captives lost whatever English‐language literacy they had through acculturation, this category is “hypothetical.” As Vaughan and Clark note, “the most famous example” (1981: 16) of an “unredeemed” captive is Eunice Williams, the daughter of John Williams, who was seven when she was captured along with most of her family and many of their neighbors in the 1704 Abenaki, Mohawk, and French raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts. Eunice, the biological daughter of a Puritan minister converted to Catholicism, married a Mohawk man, had children, and died as Catholic Mohawk elder Marguerite Kanenstenhawi in 1785.
The composition and publication of a narrative was effectively part of the story of the redeemed captive, the ultimate sign of his or her return to so‐called civilization. Accordingly, for a fully acculturated captive like Eunice Williams, retaining the ability to write her own story would have been incompatible with that story. According to John Williams, in the only meeting he was permitted to have with her in Kahnawake, while he was still in Canada as a prisoner, he found “she could read very well and had not forgotten her catechism.” He enjoined her “to be careful she did not forget her catechism and the Scriptures she had learned by heart,” but without a Bible and further instruction her literacy and eventually her English lapsed (118–119). Thus whereas her father, through his self‐authored captivity narrative, furnished generations of Protestant readers with an exemplar of steadfast faith in the face of duress and temptation, his daughter’s English name “became a byword for the susceptibility of even a minister’s daughter to cultural and religious conversion” (Newman 2011: 232). She became a model for “cautionary” characters in early nineteenth‐century fiction (Namias 1993: 97): Faith, in Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in Massachusetts (1827), and Ruth, in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Wept of Wish‐Ton‐Wish (1829).
During the same period, however, two non‐fiction, as‐told‐to works filled the void of Vaughan and Clark’s fourth category: A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison (1824) and A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830). Both Jemison and Tanner were initially captured by Shawnees. Jemison, at age 12, was adopted by Senecas in 1758; she became a Seneca woman herself, twice marrying and having “a large family of Indian children” (Seaver 1992: 119).3 Jemison gave her life story as an oral history to the minister James Seaver, who is credited with authorship of her narrative. Her children, she explained, made it impossible for her to take the opportunity to return to her natal society at the end of the Revolutionary War; she feared her white relatives “would despise them, if not myself; and treat us as enemies; or, at least with a degree of cold indifference, which I thought I could not endure” (Seaver 1992: 119–120). Tanner, similarly, was adopted by an Ojibwa family in 1790 as a nine‐year‐old. As the Ojibwa writer Louise Erdrich writes in the introduction to the Penguin edition, he was “raised entirely as an Ojibwa,” and as an adult “was never able to accommodate himself to a non‐Indian life” (2003: xi). His narrative was written by Edward James on the basis of Tanner’s oral account, although Tanner is listed as the author. According to Erdrich, it is “probably one of the very few in the captivity genre that appeals strongly to Native Americans” (2003: xi). This appeal is understandable, because, like the narrative of Mary Jemison, it does not present Native American society as something from which one needs to be redeemed.
The scope of this chapter has been limited to non‐fictional representations of colonists from British America and the early United States who were captured by Native Americans. It leaves out fictional captivity narratives, like Ann Eliza Bleecker’s History of Maria Kittle (1797). It also leaves out so‐called Barbary captivities, the accounts of Christians enslaved in North Africa, as well as representations of Indian captivity from other colonial contexts, such as New France or South America. A more capacious definition of the captivity genre might also include Anglo‐African slave narratives, representing the experience of Africans captured and brought as slaves to the Americas. Narratives like Rowlandson’s have long been a mainstay of early American literature courses, foregrounding cultural encounters and the experiences of women and therefore helping to diversify syllabi that were dominated by white men. The trend in contemporary literary scholarship, however, is expansive, looking beyond New England to other regions, religions, and languages, and seeking to reach past the limited point of view of the captive narrators and into “Native Space” (Brooks 2013). In this regard, there is more work to be done in building a conversation between early American literary studies, which has emphasized the significances of captivity narratives in their historical and cultural contexts, and the field of ethnohistory, which has used captivity narratives as primary sources of information about Native American cultures, including practices of captivity, enslavement, adoption, and warfare.
Of course, the vast majority of captivities are not represented in literature. Native Americans were capturing other Native Americans long before the arrival of the colonists, and continued to do so throughout the colonial period; some Indians later emulated their white neighbors by enslaving persons of African descent (Snyder 2012). Finally, most significantly for this essay, European and American colonists captured many more Indians than vice versa, including thousands who were made into slaves (Newell 2015). The relationship of narratives such as The Sovereignty and Goodness of God to the nonexistent autobiographical accounts of Indian captives, like the Christian Indians interned on Deer Island during Metacom’s War, or Metacom’s son, who was sold into foreign slavery after, is not simply one of representation versus silence in the historical record. Rather, in addition to inspiring faith, indulging curiosity, and occasionally offering glimpses of empathy, the “selective tradition” of captivity narratives served to justify the colonists’ treatment of Native Americans (Strong 1999: 3).
See also: chapter 2 (cross‐cultural encounters in early american literatures); chapter 3 (settlement literatures before and beyond the stories of nations); chapter 4 (the puritan culture of letters); chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820); chapter 13 (the varieties of religious expression in early american literature); chapter 16 (captivity recast).