SOURCE: Vaughan, Alden T. and Edward W. Clark. “Cups of Common Calamity: Puritan Captivity Narratives as Literature and History.” In Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption: 1676-1724, edited by Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, pp. 1-28. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981.

[In the following essay, Vaughan and Clark expound on the uniquely religious characteristics and influences of the Puritan captivity narrative.]

“It is no new thing for Gods precious ones to drink as deep as others, of the Cup of common Calamity.”

—Preface to Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 1682

“Remarkable Mercies should be Faithfully Published, for the Praise of God the Giver.”

—Sermon by John Williams, 1706

“It would be unaccountable stupidity in me,” wrote a former captive of the Indians in 1707, “not to maintain the most Lively and Awful Sense of Divine Rebukes which the most Holy God has seen meet … to dispense to me, my Family and People in delivering us into the hands of those that Hated us, who Led us into a strange Land.” But the redeemed captive, Reverend John Williams of Deerfield, Massachusetts, did not dwell on the Lord's rebukes. Like so many of his contemporaries in New England, Williams emphasized instead “The wonders of Divine Mercy, which we have seen in the Land of our Captivity, and Deliverance there-from [which] cannot be forgotten without incurring the guilt of the blackest Ingratitude.”¹ A staunch Puritan, Williams believed—as earlier and later generations did not—that capture by the Indians was no military happenstance or secular accident. Captivity was God's punishment; redemption was His mercy; and New England must heed the lesson or suffer anew. Many survivors of the captivity ordeal proclaimed that message in stirring narratives which tell much about Puritan prisoners among the Indians and their French allies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and reveal even more about the Puritan mind.

Puritans, of course, did not invent the captivity narrative. It is one of America's oldest literary genres and its most unique. Soon after Europe awakened to the existence of an inhabited western continent, stories of captivity by an alien culture began to excite the public imagination. Ironically, the earliest New World captivity tales must have been told by American natives: Spaniards, not Indians, first seized hapless victims to serve as guides, interpreters, hostages, or curiosities. But the Indians soon retaliated, and because Europeans long had a monopoly on the written word, most printed accounts related capture by Indians. Hence “captivity narrative” came to mean an account, usually autobiographical, of forced participation in Indian life. The literature of early American colonization is dotted with poignant and often gruesome tales of seizure, torture or adoption (sometimes both), and eventual escape or release. Such stories found a ready audience on both sides of the Atlantic, where they flourished, in one form or another, for three centuries.

Not until the late seventeenth century did captivity narratives emerge as a separate and distinct literary genre. Before then most captivity tales appeared as dramatic episodes in works of larger scope. That was true not only in Latin American literature—the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca and Juan Ortiz, for example—but also of North American settlement.² Captain John Smith's various versions of his capture by Powhatan Indians and his last-second rescue by Pocahontas is a case in point; they were embedded in Smith's chronicles of early Virginia.³ Similarly, accounts of Father Isaac Jogues's incarceration, torture, release, recapture, and eventual death at the hands of the Iroquois were scattered through the annual Jesuit relations.⁴ More than a century later, the earlier pattern of captivity narratives as a single stage in an unfolding adventure still survived: witness the stories of Daniel Boone's capture and adoption by the Shawnee.⁵ But in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, writers in Puritan New England began to issue narratives of Indian captivity in separate book-length works, though usually brief and sometimes bound with other items.

The Puritans approached the new genre cautiously at first—their initial narrative appeared more than five years after the event and was privately printed. When that volume achieved instant popularity, similar works soon followed. Thereafter captivity narratives, usually as separate works, enjoyed nearly two centuries of commercial success in colonial America and the United States, although not without important changes. From unpolished but intense religious statements in the Puritan period, captivity narratives had evolved by the late eighteenth century into ornate and often fictionalized accounts that catered to more secular and less serious tastes. By the late nineteenth century the genre had lost most of its historical and autobiographical integrity. It ultimately blended with the “penny-dreadfuls” of America's Victorian-age fiction.

Puritan captivity narratives began in 1682 with Mary Rowlandson's story of capture during the later stages of King Philip's War. Her brisk Soveraignty & Goodness of God … Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson sold quickly; three more issues appeared within the first year, and others followed periodically throughout the Puritan era.⁶ Many subsequent New England narratives had almost as impressive literary careers and were the best-sellers of their day, and they remain among the most insightful clues to the tensions and expectations of Puritan society.

These stories were immensely popular because—like any successful literature—they served readers a hearty fare of literary and psychological satisfaction, peculiar to their time and place. In a society without fiction and plays, and almost barren of poetry, real-life dramas filled a crucial cultural void. Histories and accounts of warfare only partly met the need for dramatic literature. After 1676 tales of Indian captivity offered a more personal story: they told of raids and forced marches, of the wilderness and its native inhabitants, of the chilling efforts of Indians and Frenchmen to assimilate their captives into an alien culture. But the heart of the New England narrative—the theme that made it truly Puritan and infused it with unusual dramatic force—was its introspective concentration on God's role in the life of the individual and the collective community. As Rowlandson's title proclaimed, she wrote only incidentally about deliverance from misery and potential death. More important, she portrayed “The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises,” while an appended posthumous sermon by her husband raised “the possibility of God's forsaking a people, that have been visibly near & dear to him.” In sum, the Rowlandson's publisher promised an intensely personal account of God's testing and eventual salvation of a tormented soul, and a broad hint that her experience might foretell in microcosm the fate of all Puritans. Those were compelling attractions to the deeply pietistic people of seventeenth-century New England, who sought desperately to comprehend their preordained roles in God's awesome universe.

Puritan authors wove the captivity narrative from several existing literary strands. One strand was spiritual autobiography; numerous seventeenth and early eighteenth-century New Englanders described their search for salvation to edify their children and other kin and occasionally to inspire the community at large. John Winthrop's “Christian Experience,” Thomas Shepard's “My Birth & Life,” Anne Bradstreet's “To My Dear Children,” and Edward Taylor's “Spiritual Relation” are notable examples of an abundant theo-literary form.⁷ The literary use of a representative life reaches much further back, to be sure, at least to the Reformation when Martin Luther developed the exemplum fidei, which stressed the spirit of Christ's life rather than his deeds.⁸ That notion found congenial soil in Tudor-Stuart England, where the Puritans gave it added prominence and eventually carried it to their American Zion. The New England branch of the Puritan movement, and still later the Quakers in Pennsylvania, encouraged spiritual autobiography as a vital expression of the search for personal salvation. The principal authority on this early American literary form observes that “the spiritual autobiographer is primarily concerned with the question of grace: whether or not the individual has been accepted into divine life, an acceptance signified by psychological and moral changes which the autobiographer comes to discern in his past experience.”⁹ But the search for salvation was fraught with torments, doubts, and relapses, in almost perfect parallel to the experiences reported in the captivity narratives. In spiritual autobiographies, God and Satan wrestled for the sinner's soul; in captivity autobiographies, the captive, with God's help, battled Satan's agents. In both cases, of course, God eventually prevailed: the weary pilgrim survived the ordeal because his faith wavered but did not break, and because God's mercy was stronger than His wrath.

During and after his captivity by Indians, the victim pondered how his own experience coincided with God's plan. A redeemed captive usually saw his ordeal, and even the ordeal of his loved ones, as punishment for his past sins or present impiety. The survivor often concluded that he had gained measurably from the chastisement, and he almost invariably offered his experience as a lesson to neighbors of the ephemeral security of this world and the awesomeness of God's sovereignty. Mary Rowlandson, for one, came to appreciate God's omnipotence: “I then remembred how careless I had been of Gods holy time: how many Sabbaths I had lost and mispent, and how evily I had walked in Gods sight; which lay so closs unto my spirit, that it was easie for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut off the threed of my life, and cast me out of his presence forever. Yet the Lord still showed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.”¹⁰ “Redemption,” a frequent term in captivity titles and texts, thus had a double meaning—spiritual as well as physical. Similarly, captivity stories combined individual catharsis and public admonition. Implicitly, at least, they exhorted the reader to find his or her own spiritual redemption. Rowlandson's title page explains that her story is directed “Especially to her dear Children and Relations.” God would not have subjected her to such an ordeal had He not intended her spiritual pilgrimage to enlighten her family and neighbors. Everything had a purpose. As Reverend John Williams insisted after his own harrowing ordeal, the Lord “has enjoyned us, to shew forth His praises in rehearsing to others the Salvations, and Favours we have been the Subjects of.”¹¹

Astute ministers such as Cotton Mather made sure the lesson was not missed. Serving as Hannah Swarton's amanuensis, Mather wrote an epitome of the abasement-salvation theme which offered hope and courage to those in doubt of their own fate. Swarton laments, “I was neither fit to live nor fit to die; and brought once to the very Pit of Despair about what would become of my Soul.” But she found in her Bible the account of Jonah's troubles and resolved to pray as her biblical prototype had: “In the Meditation upon this Scripture the Lord was pleased by his Spirit to come into my Soul, and so fill me with ravishing Comfort, that I cannot express it.”¹² And in Humiliations Followed With Deliverances Mather related the now-legendary story of Hannah Dustan's escape from the Indians after tomahawking her sleeping captors. In his initial recitation of the episode, Mather addressed a congregation in which she sat; he observed that “there happens to be at this very Time, in this Assembly, an Example, full of Encouragement unto these humiliations, which have been thus called for.”¹³ Presumably Hannah Dustan served many New Englanders as a living example of Christian piety and courage. In the same vein, Reverend John Williams wrote an extensive account of his own captivity and redemption; it went through several editions and ranks as one of the most forceful Puritan statements.¹⁴

A second source of inspiration for early New England captivity narratives was the sermon, that quintessential Puritan expression to which several generations of congregational preachers and settlers were addicted. In addition to the usual two Sunday sermons, there were Lecture Day sermons (usually on Thursday evening), election day sermons, fast and humiliation sermons, thanksgiving sermons, artillery company sermons, funeral sermons, even execution sermons. Most were delivered by clergymen, but occasionally laymen indulged as well.¹⁵ John Winthrop's shipboard “Model of Christian Charity” is the most famous lay sermon, but there were many others, and they formed an important, if smaller, part of the same rhetorical type. And while most sermons—lay or clerical—were never published, an impressive number were put into print and widely read. Moreover, many parishioners took notes on sermons for later meditation, and schoolchildren were required to discuss Sunday's sermon in Monday morning's class. Not surprisingly, Puritan captivity narratives borrowed liberally from sermon themes and language. Especially evident are their emphasis on moral lessons and their extensive use of biblical citations to bolster almost every argument. At root, captivity narratives were lay sermons (or, when recited secondhand by an Increase or Cotton Mather, clerical sermons) in the guise of adventure stories.

Third, and perhaps most significant, the Puritan captivity narrative owed much of its tone and content to “jeremiads”—those peculiar laments by Puritan clergymen (and, again, sometimes by laymen) that accused New England of backsliding from the high ideals and noble achievements of the founders, of God's evident or impending wrath, and of the need for immediate and thorough reformation.¹⁶ That theme emerged as early as the 1650s, sometimes in the pronouncements of the founding generation itself, but not until the 1660s and 1670s did the jeremiad become a literary cliché. Usually it appeared in sermons, but it also took other forms, such as Michael Wigglesworth's poetic God's Controversy with New England and the report of the Reforming Synod of 1679, which epitomized the jeremiad genre. (Even Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, a massive ecclesiastical history of New England, is part jeremiad.) In 1662, Wigglesworth, the lugubrious Massachusetts minister-poet, interpreted a prolonged drought as a clear sign of God's growing wrath:

For thinke not, O Backsliders, in your heart,
          That I shall still your evill manners beare:
Your sinns me press as sheaves do load a cart,
          And therefore I will plague you for this geare
Except you seriously, and soon, repent,
          Ile not delay your pain and heavy punishment.(17)

The impetus for such harangues came partly from an exaggerated sense of New England's “Golden Age” and chiefly from the Puritans' extreme biblicism. From close scrutiny of the Bible, Puritan divines drew parallels or types between the Old and New Testaments on which they based much of their religious and social doctrine. They used this typological system, for example, to justify their rejecting the corruptions of Old England for the wilderness of New England, thus reenacting the Israelites' flight from Egypt to the milk-and-honey land of Canaan. The ramifications of Puritan typology are too complex for adequate discussion here, but among them was the belief that God, in return for the colonists' suffering in the wilderness and establishing a new Zion, would protect and prosper His newly chosen people—if they remained true to His laws and steadfast in their faith.¹⁸ Puritan enthusiasts such as Increase and Cotton Mather searched relentlessly for evidence of God's favor to New Englanders, which they duly published under titles such as Illustrious Providences, Wonderful Works of God, and Remarkable Judgements of God.¹⁹ Predictably, the Mathers and their fellow seventeenth-century colonists found what they were looking for: miraculous deliverances from danger for the godly, divine retribution for the godless.

This search for the Lord's guiding hand had implications far beyond individual rewards and punishments. Sins—especially a persistent flouting of the true faith—brought punishment to the entire community because of the Puritans' compact with the Lord; as John Williams explained, “the great God … hath taken us into Covenant Relation to Himself.”²⁰ Accordingly, the righteous must suffer along with transgressors when He punished his flock for its accumulated wrongs. Mary Rowlandson was only the first of the Puritan captivity narrators to identify Indian depredations with God's retribution against the entire community: “It is said, Psal. 81. 13. 14. Oh that my People had hearkned to me and Israel had walked in my ways, I should soon have subdued their Enemies, and turned my hand against their Adversaries. But now our perverse and evil carriages in the sight of the Lord, have so offended him, that instead of turning his hand against them, the Lord feeds and nourishes them up to be a scourge to the whole Land.”²¹ Two decades later, John Williams opened his narrative with essentially the same message: “The History I am going to Write, proves, That Days of Fasting & Prayer, without Reformation, will not avail, to Turn away the Anger of God from a Professing People.”²²

Williams's contemporaries had frequently witnessed God's anger at incomplete reformation. In the 1670s and after, New England suffered a frightful series of major and minor calamities. The worst came in 1675-1676 when the region's most devastating Indian war claimed the lives of nearly a tenth of its adult colonial males—the highest mortality rate in American military history, before or since—and took a correspondingly heavy toll in property: twelve thousand homes burned, eight thousand head of cattle destroyed, innumerable farmlands laid waste. And the destruction did not end in 1676 with the death of Metacomet (King Philip); rather, it shifted to the relatively vulnerable northern frontier in Maine, New Hampshire, and western Massachusetts where Indians, often accompanied by their French allies, continued to raid isolated farms and villages. No wonder the Reforming Synod of Puritan ministers and lawyers concluded in 1679 that “God hath a Controversy with his New-England People”; the Indians, they believed, were His principal rod of chastisement.²³ No wonder too that Puritan captives looked inward for signs of their own shortcomings. Most captives found convincing evidence; others acknowledged their failings but also recognized that even the innocent and the saintly must suffer when God punished an errant flock. “It is no new thing,” wrote the anonymous author of the preface to Mary Rowlandson's narrative, “for Gods precious ones to drink as deep as others, of the Cup of common Calamity.”²⁴

Puritan readers responded enthusiastically to the captivity genre not only because it fused the prominent features of spiritual autobiography, lay sermon, and jeremiad with those of the secular adventure story. In its descriptions of the forced rending of Puritan families, the narratives unintentionally added an element of pathos that appealed profoundly to a society which placed unusual emphasis on family ties and responsibilities. This fundamental social unit was often revered in Puritan tracts and sermons and was frequently the subject of governmental legislation and proclamations. The importance Puritans gave to the family undoubtedly touched a universal chord among readers of the narratives and made more poignant their grief over the death of loved ones that so often accompanied captivities. Accounts of the murder of a husband, wife, or child are numerous, and the understated descriptions of their deaths helped the narrators weave their fascinating and sometimes horrifying tapestry of despair and salvation. A modern reader—like readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—cannot resist deep sympathy for Mary Rowlandson when her six-year-old daughter dies in her arms or for John Williams when he learns of his wife's death by an Indian tomahawk after she fell through a frozen river.

Despite the importance a Puritan attached to family love and security, he knew that these affections were ultimately temporal and must not supersede the love of God. Had not Jesus said that a true Christian should follow Him (Luke 14:26) and if necessary forsake his family? And Puritans were familiar with the lesson of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: every Christian must turn his back on spouse and family, shoulder his burden of sins, and start out for the Celestial City. This ultimate reliance on the self and its relation to God often conflicted with the family communal bond. A Puritan whose family had been dispersed after capture suffered an enormous sense of loss and guilt, tempered only slightly by the dictates of religion. The narratives of Mary Rowlandson, John Williams, and Elizabeth Hanson bear witness to the depth of such heart-wrenching experiences. Puritan captivity narratives have interest for modern readers beyond their poignant expression of religious fervor and individual anguish. As anthropological records they recount unique individual and group experiences; as observations of native tribes, many of which no longer exist, they provide rare descriptions of northeastern Indian life; and as ethnological histories they shed light on conflicts between disparate cultures—New England's against Algonquian-Iroquoian and, in some cases, New England's against French Canadian.

Modern readers of an Indian captivity narrative are likely to see what anthropologists term a rite of passage, or, more specifically, an initiation process by which a person moves from one set of perceptions to another. Several scholars have isolated the initiation process as a vital element in the captivity experience.²⁵ There is, however, a danger in focusing too intently on the initiation ordeal and overlooking the significance of the much longer and equally profound captivity experience itself. The day-to-day struggle with an alien culture is the mainspring of the experience and the driving force of the captive's attempt to understand the change he has undergone.

Anthropologist Victor Turner provides an explanation of the initiation process that permits a broader focus on the three stages of rites de passage, or transitions from one social position to another—separation, margin, and reaggregation.²⁶ Turner's analysis can be applied to captivity narratives. First, captives began to gain new knowledge about their own culture and American Indian culture when they were separated from their natal environment—in Puritan narratives, a New England town or frontier settlement. They then entered a “margin” (or “liminal”) phase where they lost the security they had enjoyed as English subjects and usually suffered servitude in a culture they considered grossly inferior to their own. With their world in psychological as well as physical disarray, the captives initially saw their new social relationships and consequent obligations as punishment and humiliation; unfamiliarity with Indian language kept them from understanding even nonthreatening remarks. Later they became more flexible and began to comprehend, perhaps even to appreciate, their captors' beliefs and manner of living.²⁷ Finally, in the third stage, they were redeemed and reintegrated (“reaggregated”) into their own culture.

During the liminal phase the captive witnessed the bulk of what he recorded in his narrative, for in that stage—the actual captivity—he was relatively free from the social strictures and cultural values of his previous life. His natal culture's values were called into question; he must adapt to foreign ways or starve or be killed. Cut loose from his normal guideposts of language and social relationships, he entertained ideas and values that colonial New England did not allow. Old patterns were abandoned and new ones acquired. Just to keep alive, for example, all captives had to eat food they previously considered inedible. Mary Rowlandson drank broth boiled from a horse's leg and ate bark from trees, and found them palatable; Hannah Swarton ate “Groundnuts, Acorns, Purslain, Hogweed, Weeds, Roots, and sometimes Dogs Flesh”; Elizabeth Hanson scavenged “Guts and Garbage” of the beavers her masters had eaten.²⁸ And virtually every captive, even in time of war, eventually admired the Indians' ability to accommodate harsh conditions. A captive's admiration usually extended only to Indian clothing and housing or to personal stamina and ingenuity; he rarely appreciated the complexities of Algonquian spiritual life or the Indians' approach to social and political organization. But at least the captives' earlier prejudices lost some of their rigidity when confronted by the realities of Indian life.

Rarely was a captive taken singly. Usually he was part of a group, often survivors of the same attack. Seeing the death of a parent or sibling sometimes left him in a psychological trauma, too shocked to rebel. When captives shared such a crisis, a small community of sufferers emerged. Turner calls the resulting esprit de corps “communitas”—the group identity created by those in the same liminal experience.²⁹ Communitas can be seen in the New England narratives when captives gathered for group prayer. By praying together, Puritan hostages gained comfort from familiar religious rites and values while simultaneously restating their cultural separateness from their Indian or French captors. Both Indians and Frenchmen recognized the cohesive strength of group prayer and its detriment to acculturation, and both usually proscribed it.

Although collective activities strengthened common identity, Indian retribution against all captives when one of them escaped probably did more to cement communal bonds. When an English prisoner ran away, the captors usually threatened to kill one or more of those remaining. Few captives risked the responsibility, and the ensuing guilt, for such retaliation against their compatriots. John Williams reported one situation: “In the Night an English Man made his escape: in the Morning I was call'd for, and ordered by the General to tell the English, That if any more made their escape, they would burn the rest of the Prisoners.”³⁰ Sometimes the Indians vented their wrath on those who escaped and were recaptured. John Gyles described his brother's fate: “My unfortunate Brother who was taken with me, after about three Years Captivity, deserted with an Englishman who was taken from Casco-Bay, and was retaken by the Indians at New-Harbour and carried back to Penobscot Fort, where they were both tortured at a Stake by Fire for some time; then their Noses and Ears were cut off, and they made to eat them; after which they were burned to Death at the Stake.”³¹ Such intimidating events worked paradoxically on a surviving captive: on one hand they forced him to endure, even to cooperate with his captors; on the other hand they heightened his resentment of the captors' culture and raised psychological barriers to acculturation.

Each captivity narrative was written during the postliminal period, usually soon after redemption, and reflects the profound impact of the liminal experience on the writer. And whatever the depth and variety of the impact, redeemed captives seemed compelled, like Coleridge's ancient mariner, to recite their tales. Among the scores of narratives that spanned the centuries and the continent, several distinct categories emerge.

First, some writers give the impression that they had not substantially changed, although former captives were obviously not quite the same psychologically as they had been before their ordeals. After redemption, once again in familiar surroundings, captives still vividly remembered their months in the wilderness. Mary Rowlandson, for one, could not forget: “I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other wayes with me. When all are fast about me, and no eye open, but his who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past.”³²

For women especially, the return to New England society posed problems of readjustment and reacceptance. Although no ethnological evidence indicates that northeastern Indians ever raped women prisoners, as Plains Indians sometimes did, female captives sometimes felt a need to defend their sexual conduct. Rowlandson, for example, assured her readers that “not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me, in word or action. Though some are ready to say I speak it for my own credit, But I speak it in the presence of God, and to his Glory.”³³ Similarly, Elizabeth Hanson insisted that the Indians were “very civil toward their captive Women, not offering any Incivility by any indecent Carriage (unless they be much overgone in Liquor[)],” and implied that no intoxicated Indians had molested her.³⁴

Under captivity, when many undreamed-of things could occur, both fear and its opposite—temptation—were omnipresent. There was always the suspicion that redeemed captives had, consciously or unconsciously, found Indian ways irresistible, and that they had to some degree “gone savage.” Such suspicions came easily in a culture that interpreted the form of God's displeasure as a reflection of its cause. “Christians in this Land, have become too like unto the Indians,” the Reforming Synod declared, “and then we need not wonder if the Lord hath afflicted us by them.”³⁵ Thus community group pressure urged captives to reaffirm their natal culture's values more fervently than ever and to deny the attractions of “savage” life. On the other hand, it was acceptable to admit, as Hannah Swarton repeatedly does, that she strayed from God's path so long as it was a torment of the soul, not the passions. Mather, Swarton's mouthpiece, defends her honor while steadily guiding her toward conversion.³⁶ Most New England narrators did not need such help. John Williams's Redeemed Captive and Mary Rowlandson's Soveraignty & Goodness of God emphatically reaffirm the Puritans' errand into the wilderness. It may not be coincidental that Williams was a clergyman and Rowlandson a clergyman's wife. The clerical class had the deepest commitment to Puritan values.

Narrators who gained empathetic insight into Indian culture constitute a second group. Although they reaffirm their natal ways, they acknowledge some Indian virtues. John Gyles is a good example. He admired the Indians' skill in hunting moose as well as the powwow's ability to forecast the hunt's success through dream visions; yet he considered Indian myths of no more value than fairy tales. Similarly, Gyles praised the Indians' adaptation to their environment but believed them too influenced by the unpredictable elements of nature and too addicted to feasting to plan for future needs. On the whole, adult Puritan captives successfully resisted efforts at assimilation by the French and Indians. Puritan indoctrination had been thorough, and a pervasive sense that an omniscient God kept close eye on His chosen flock was real enough to shield most adult New Englanders from cultural innovation.³⁷

A third group of narratives was written by those who had difficulty adjusting to their natal culture after long exposure to Indian life. The number of such accounts is small and includes none of the New England captivities. However, as a matter of illustration, James Smith's Account of the Remarkable Occurences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith reflects a substantial assimilation of Indian habits.³⁸ Captured in 1755 on the Pennsylvania frontier by a Caughnawaga and two Delawares, Smith lived for four years with Indians in the Ohio territory. He did not publish his narrative until 1799 because he felt that “at that time [1760] the Americans were so little acquainted with Indian affairs, I apprehended a great part of it would be viewed as fable and romance.” Although Smith returned to white America, he sympathetically described his life among the Indians and so thoroughly absorbed their military tactics that he taught them to settlers on the Ohio frontier.³⁹ A more difficult adjustment is illustrated in John Tanner's narrative, published in 1830. Tanner spent over thirty years among the Ojibway tribe and, not surprisingly, his account offers a more accurate picture of Indian life than narratives by those who lived only briefly with their captors. When Tanner attempted to return to “civilized” society, he was rejected, and he probably rejoined the culture he had so thoroughly absorbed.⁴⁰

Another category of narratives, this one hypothetical, could have been written by those who never returned to their natal culture. If captives who entirely forsook their original environment—who completely transculturated—had written of their experiences, we would have a still more sympathetic and knowledgeable portrayal of Indian life. This category would be filled mainly by those who had been captured as children; in most cases they forgot their mother tongue and hence could not easily have written their narratives. The Indians and the French were well aware, of course, that children did not have the physical or psychic strength to resist acculturation and had not yet acquired the political and cultural loyalties of adulthood. Although a captive child was not exactly a Lockean tabula rasa for his Indian captors, he readily learned a new language and new values. (By the same token, English missionaries made special efforts to indoctrinate Indian children into Christianity and European customs.) The most famous example of an unredeemed Puritan youngster's assimilation into Indian and French ways was Eunice Williams, daughter of John Williams. Aged seven when captured, Eunice remained in custody long after the rest of her family returned to New England, and she eventually succumbed to the alien culture. She was converted to Catholicism by Canadian nuns, married an Indian, and refused all subsequent efforts to reunite her with her Puritan family.⁴¹ The fact that many children captives chose not to return to their families must have shaken New England's confidence. Perhaps these youthful expatriots are a bittersweet symbol of the failure of the concept of “progress,” a notion to which the Puritans firmly subscribed and which became almost universal among nineteenth-century Americans.

Despite the relative brevity of the captivity period for most captives (usually a few months to a few years), the narratives collectively provide a fascinating glimpse of Indian culture. It is only a glimpse; Puritan society had abundant legal and social structures against imitating or admiring the Indians' “prophane course of life.”⁴² Indian ways were to be shunned, not emulated; “savagery” was feared and despised, not appreciated or respected. Hence captives had little incentive, save their own curiosity or a desire for dramatic detail, to describe native customs, and the few exceptions are marred by pervasive ethnocentricity.

Even if the captives had been willing and unbiased, the task of description would have been formidable. Most raiding parties probably had warriors from several tribes, each with a slightly—sometimes markedly—different cultural heritage; the same was often true of the villages to which the captives were taken. And although most Indian captors were from the northeastern Algonquian linguistic group, a significant minority were from the linguistically and culturally distant Iroquois Confederacy. Especially important among the latter were Mohawks who had converted to Roman Catholicism, nominally at least, and had moved to the Caughnawaga missionary settlement near Montreal. (Many Puritan captives, including Eunice Williams, were thus simultaneously confronted by Indian and French cultural pressures.) Most New England prisoners were taken to southeastern Canada, where French, Algonquian, and Iroquoian cultural influences were gradually but unevenly blending. Bewildered captives could scarcely have comprehended the complex and ever-changing Franco-Indian world of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but we can wish they had tried harder to describe, even if they could not understand or appreciate, their new surroundings.

When ethnographic material does appear in the captivity narratives, it is valuable and fascinating. Mary Rowlandson, for example, included a lively if not entirely sympathetic description of the ceremonial preparations for an attack on Sudbury, Massachusetts.⁴³ Elizabeth Hanson explained (unsympathetically) Indian eating customs.⁴⁴ John Gyles told much about Indian hunting and farming practices, methods of preserving food, and burial and marriage rites. Gyles, in fact, came closest of the Puritan narrators to providing comprehensive ethnographic information. Although he appears to have been a member in good standing of the Puritan community, his account is conspicuously less pietistic than the others; his relatively secular turn of mind allowed him to describe Indian and French customs more fully and even to devote several pages to the curious habits of the beaver.⁴⁵

Several Puritan narrators dwelled on Indian maltreatment of captives—especially Quentin Stockwell and John Gyles, who were apparently handled more harshly than most New England captives. Gyles twice was saved from torture ceremonies, once by his master and once by a squaw and an Indian girl. In each instance, Gyles's savior pledged a gift to the tribe to reprieve him. Gyles later explained that “A Captive among the Indians is exposed to all manner of Abuse, and to the utmost Tortures, unless his Master, or some of his Master's Relations, lay down a Ransom, such as a Bag of Corn, or a Blanket, or such like: by which they may redeem them from their Cruelties.” When Gyles's kindly master later traveled to Canada and left him with less friendly guardians, Gyles fell into the hands of Cape Sable Indians who inflicted the torture that he had earlier avoided.⁴⁶

Perhaps because he wrote his narrative long after the era of intense Puritan piety, Gyles attributed Indian compassion or cruelty to human inclination, Earlier captives saw the Indians as God's pawns, at least when it came to kindness. John Williams epitomized this aspect of the Puritan perspective: among “Passages of Divine Providence,” he reported that “God hath made such … characters … as delighted in cruelty, to pity and compassionate such who were led into captivity by them. Made them bear on their Arms, and carry on their Shoulders our Little Ones, unable to Travel, Feed the Prisoners with the best of their Provisions: Yea, sometimes pinch themselves, as to their daily food, rather than their Captives.”⁴⁷ Similarly, Cotton Mather attributed the Indian men's reluctance to molest female captives to “a wonderful Restraint from God upon the Bruitish Salvages.”⁴⁸ But whether God or man got the credit, New England narratives clearly reveal that some Indians were kind, some were cruel, and that generally the treatment of women and children was as humane as wartime conditions allowed.

Puritan perceptions of how Indians treated captives may be partly explained by the narrators' norms for family structure and its responsibilities. The New England family centered on the conjugal relationship of husband, wife, and children. Servants who resided under the roof of a Puritan home were treated almost as family members. They called the patriarchal head of the family “master” and owed him loyal and industrious service. Masters, in turn, were obliged by law and custom to treat their servants humanely and to provide them with adequate food, shelter, clothing, education, and religious training. Master and servant, in short, had almost the same relationship as father and child.⁴⁹ (A sharp increase in African and Indian slaves in the eighteenth century helped to undermine the earlier master-servant relationship.) A Puritan captive of the Indians usually referred to his principal captor as master, which not only implied the captive's inferior status but also suggested that, in the captive's eyes, each had reciprocal obligations. In many of the Puritan narratives, captives—unconsciously thinking in terms of their culture alone—complain bitterly of the failure of Indian masters to provide them with enough food or comfort. Yet a captive often realized, as he grew more accustomed to Indian ways, that he usually ate as well or as poorly as his captors; the ill treatment of Elizabeth Hanson and her children in the 1720s was an exception, not the rule.

The Puritan family centered primarily on the relationship of husband, wife, and children in what anthropologists call a cognatic descent group: all descendants, both male and female, are emphasized equally. Northeastern Indians, on the contrary, employed a complex mixture of unilineal descent groups, both matrilineal and patrilineal. The lineage groups of a particular clan of a tribe could be traced through either husband or wife. Thus, an Indian child could inherit a distinct group of rights and responsibilities from his mother and quite a different set from his father.⁵⁰ Moreover, in many tribes a man might have two or three wives, which not only offended the English captive but added to his bewilderment over the intricate matrix of Indian social bonds. In Elizabeth Hanson's narrative, for example, when her master ordered his son to beat her child, “the Indian boy's [maternal] grandmother, would not suffer him to do it.” Hanson's protectoress later became so upset with her son-in-law's behavior that she moved out of his wigwam.⁵¹

Because all captives were prisoners of war, some animosity toward Indians or French captors was inevitable, whatever the treatment accorded the prisoners and whatever the reasons for it. Perhaps inevitable too was the combination of war-bred enmity with latent contempt for Indians that gradually shifted the New England captivity narrative from an essentially religious tract, with occasional insights into Indian culture, to what Roy Harvey Pearce has aptly called a “vehicle of Indian-hatred.”⁵² That motif had first appeared in the preface to Rowlandson's narrative—though significantly not in the narrative itself—in an assertion that “none can imagine what it is to be captivated, and enslaved to such atheisticall proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, bruitish (in one word) diabolicall creatures as these, the worst of the heathen.”⁵³ But not until Cotton Mather's accounts, especially those published in Decennium Luctuosum (1699) and repeated in Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), did the anti-Indian and anti-French themes become blatant. Late in the seventeenth century Mather lashed out at “those Ravenous howling Wolves,” and “these cursed Blood-Hounds”; by the turn of the century, Mather was ranting about “those Dragons of the Wilderness,” and “the Dark places of New-England, where the Indians had their Unapproachable Kennels … of Cruelty.”⁵⁴ That atrocities took place is undeniable; the point to be made here is that Mather began the transformation of captivity narratives into a new sub-genre. By 1740, as Pearce notes, “religious concerns came to be incidental at most; the intent of the typical writer of the narrative was to register as much hatred of the French and Indians as possible … The captivity narrative had become the American equivalent of the Grub Street criminal biography.”⁵⁵ By then it had also ceased to be Puritan.

Most New England narratives before mid-eighteenth century praised the French for tempering the Indians' cruelty, providing material comfort, and arranging prisoner exchanges. That did not prevent Puritan writers from venting their contempt for the “Popish” or “Romish” religion, as can best be seen in the narratives by Williams and Swarton. Both accounts record extensive debates between the authors and their Catholic hosts, which forcefully illustrate how the Puritan mind continued to battle what it considered the regressive doctrines of Roman Catholicism. The Puritans' antagonists were seldom the Canadian laity, whom the narrators often thanked explicitly and abundantly, but rather the Jesuits and other clerics who assumed a God-directed edict to convert English captives—just as the Puritans assumed the opposite. Puritan captivity narratives thus suggest a cultural hostility between Canada and New England that in some ways paralleled the cultural chasm between English and Indians.

In style as well as substance, Puritan captivity narratives reflect the dominant characteristics of early New England. The narratives are distinguished not only by their religious fervor but (not surprisingly) by the clergy's close involvement in their composition, which gives them a distinct tone. Of the best New England narratives before 1750, only a few can be considered purely lay products. Several were written by clerics or their immediate kin; others were transcribed and embellished by clergymen, especially Cotton Mather. Even John Gyles, the most secular of the Puritan narrators, may have leaned heavily on a local chaplain for stylistic guidance.

Authors with clerical affiliation or assistance were not reluctant to arouse the reader's emotions, though they were less inclined to sensationalism than were later writers. Cotton Mather especially employed attention-grabbing devices usually suited for oral delivery, such as alliteration, exaggerated emphasis, and exclamations. And because of his concern with communal rather than individual experience, Mather often resorted to generalized diction. This tendency is evident in his attempts to deal with the physical landscape. When Mather writes of Mary Plaisted's journey into captivity, his description is not tactile but mental, filtered through a mind more concerned with spiritual than with physical reality. “But she must now Travel many Days,” he wrote, “thro' Woods, and Swamps, and Rocks, and over Mountains, and Frost and Snow, until she could stir no farther.”⁵⁶ By contrast, John Williams had experienced captivity firsthand. Although his diction too is often general, he can recall physical details precisely; he writes, for instance, “Each night I wrung blood out of my stockings,” and “My shins also were very sore, being cut with crusty snow.”⁵⁷

Although Mary Rowlandson cited biblical sources more than Williams did, she balanced spiritual generalities with precise observations. For example, in her chilling description of the attack on Lancaster, she and other victims were “standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.”⁵⁸ Williams was more concerned with the Canadian Jesuits' attempts to convert his flock to Roman Catholicism than with an accurate rendering of the physical details of his wilderness experience. His narrative, in fact, is more precise in its Canadian than its New England portions. Rowlandson, on the other hand, displayed an acute understanding of the psychology of her Indian captors. She described with keen insight the second wife of her Indian master. Weetamoo, she tells us, was “a severe and proud Dame … bestowing every day in dressing her self neat as much time as any of the Gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with neck-laces, with Jewels in her ears, and Bracelets upon her hands: When she had dressed her self, her work was to make Girdles of Wampum and Beads.” Rowlandson thus reveals her mistress's preoccupation with cosmetic baubles; Weetamoo's vanity becomes obvious.⁵⁹

Gyles, too, presents his observations more carefully than his clerical counterparts. He can be meticulous in his description, even excruciating in detail. For example, Gyles contracted a severe case of frostbite, and wrote: “Soon after the Skin came off my Feet from my Ankles whole like a Shoe, and left my Toes naked without a Nail, and the ends of my great Toe-Bones bare, which in a little time turn'd black, so that I was obliged to cut the first Joint off with my Knife.”⁶⁰ Later writers of captivity narratives would strive for such sensational effects, but Gyles does not indulge in gory detail for its own sake. His narrative unfolds with honesty and simplicity—no pious ejaculations nor infants with bashed-in skulls. He does not see his Indian companions through Rousseau-colored glasses; rather he identifies with them, often using “we” and “our” when referring to his captors.

Gyles's structural form also sets his narrative apart from earlier New England captivity accounts. Although it follows the usual chronological sequence, some of its chapters interrupt the narrative flow. Chapter VI, for example, presents a “description of several creatures commonly taken by the Indians on St. John's River.” That Gyles would pause in his story to include such an account suggests a subtle shift in author-audience relations. It is difficult to imagine Mather, Williams, or Rowlandson succumbing to such a natural history urge. Thus, by the time Gyles published his story, captivity narratives were in the process of becoming a subliterary genre; its audience expected not only a truthful tale but information about Indians, the landscape, and animals of which most townsfolk had no firsthand knowledge. Perhaps such pressure encouraged editors to “improve” the narratives for better reception.

Although Elizabeth Hanson was Quaker, her story belongs within the New England captivity narrative framework. The writer of the three-paragraph preface to her narrative of God's Mercy Surmounting Man's Cruelty alludes to biblical themes as well as contemporary historians, including, apparently, Cotton Mather. Hanson was captured in Maine and she, like other New Englanders, was bought from her captors by the Canadian French.⁶¹ When compared to another famous Quaker captivity narrative, Jonathan Dickinson's God Protecting Providence, Hanson's account—with its focus on New England terrain, on family trials, and on the moral lesson of the “kindness and goodness of God”—is clearly within the New England mold. Dickinson's narrative, published in 1699, is set in East Florida and Carolina. Moreover, Dickinson is more properly considered an Englishman than an American, and he does not conclude his narrative in the usual New England manner by asking the reader to see in the captive experience evidence of God's over-arching plan. Dickinson merely hopes “that I with all those of us that have been spared hitherto, shall never be forgetful nor unmindful of the low estate we were brought into.”⁶²

Hanson's work, however, stands at the end of the New England school and at the beginning of a more personal and secular response to Indian captivity. Her narrative illustrates an increasingly conscious literary attempt to arouse the reader's sentiments. The drama of her family's ordeal and her husband's death while trying to redeem one of their children proved too tempting for later editors, who liberally embellished her story.⁶³

As the narratives progress chronologically over the years, biblical quotations—another evidence of Puritan piety and clerical influence—decrease. John Gyles's book (1736) has few. Instead Gyles quotes The Odyssey, Dryden's Virgil, and even Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. Elizabeth Hanson's narrative (1724) contains no biblical citations. Although religious tracts and sermons remained popular literary forms well into the eighteenth century, the focus of New England captivity narratives shifted from communal to personal, from religious to secular. Later, in narratives published during the Revolution and the early national period, the emphasis shifted again to a combination of personal experiences and national spirit. Puritan narratives, like Puritanism itself, had given way to new modes of expression.

Embellishment and diffusion marked the narratives' subsequent career. Beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century, publishers of captivity narratives increasingly exercised a heavy editorial hand. Often they sought to imitate the sentimental fiction in vogue in England; sometimes they merely heightened the drama and polished the prose. The earlier narratives, especially those in Puritan New England, had exhibited a simple, unadorned style. Authors were not overly concerned with careful sentence patterns or orchestration of tone. Most narrators told their stories in chronological order and in a sparse, vital style that effectively conveyed the immediacy of the author's life-and-death struggle. Even when an editor's ghostly hand seemed to hover over the narrative, its emphasis remained substantive rather than rhetorical.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the literary image of women captives also underwent significant alteration. Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Swarton, and Elizabeth Hanson achieved fame during their lifetimes as resilient and resourceful women. The gothic vogue of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries stereotyped female captives: the woman became a passive mother who witnessed the murder of her baby and the abduction of her older children by a cruel man-monster. Although the actual experience of captive women often justified a more assertive image, the usual picture in the public mind was of a frail woman submissively kneeling before her Indian captor, waiting for a death stroke from a raised tomahawk. Various components of this icon may be found in the woodcut depictions of later narratives and ultimately in Horatio Greenough's massive sculpture, “The Rescue Group.”⁶⁴

In the early nineteenth century, captivity narratives presented fewer unadorned firsthand experiences and more rhetorical flourishes, often verging on fantasy. Even then, however, some of the captivity accounts contained important ethnographic detail, as in the narrative of John Tanner (1830) on which Longfellow drew extensively for his epic poem Hiawatha. But Tanner was exceptional. More representative of the later genre were dime novels such as Nathan Todd; or The Fate of the Sioux' Captive (1860), which catered to an audience more interested in sensation than verisimilitude.⁶⁵ Even though authentic narratives about life among the western Plains Indians appeared as late as 1871, when Fanny Kelly's My Captivity among the Sioux Indians was published, popular fiction had largely absorbed the genre years before.⁶⁶

In the 1830s Andrew Jackson's removal policy transplanted most eastern Indians permanently beyond the Mississippi River. As aggressive white farmers and land speculators moved onto confiscated Indian lands, the Indian, no longer viewed as a serious threat by easterners, became the sympathetic subject of popular dramas and novels. In 1829, King Philip, having lain silent for a century and a half, was resurrected by John Augustus Stone in Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags. The lead role secured Edwin Forrest an enduring fame and a small fortune as well; he played the part for forty years. In 1855 the stage Indian was so noble and so ethereal that John Brougham aimed a satiric arrow at pompous portrayals of Indians by actors such as Forrest; his burlesque Po-ca-hon-tas also made fun of James Nelson Barker's early drama The Indian Princess (1808) and George Washington Custis's Pocahontas (1830).⁶⁷

The themes, imagery, and language of the captivity narrative occurred frequently in the more serious realms of American literature. As Richard Slotkin has pointed out, eighteenth-century works such as Jonathan Edwards's evangelical sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” employed the captivity rhetoric.⁶⁸ In the early nineteenth century, when writers in the young republic increasingly turned their attention to American topics, the captivity genre helped to create a new national mythology. Here was the stuff of New World experience, something that contemporary Europe could not offer. Charles Brockden Brown's novel Edgar Huntly (1799) employed the capture-escape-flight theme so congenial to an audience familiar with captivity narratives. Brown's application of the wilderness landscape to reflect the tangled battle between reason and emotion in his hero's psyche parallels the Puritan's use of the wilderness to symbolize the struggle between the spiritual and physical worlds. Other early American novelists used the captivity theme more explicitly: by 1823 at least fifteen American novels included a captivity episode.⁶⁹

Poets as well as prose writers responded to the quickening pace of American interest in Indian material in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The extremely popular Yamoyden, a Tale of the Wars of King Philip (1820), a long narrative poem written by James W. Eastburn and Robert C. Sands, focused on the plight of a fictional Nipnet chieftain and his white wife, Nora. With its shopworn imagery, sentimental description, and well-established romantic conventions, the poem nevertheless illustrates the sympathy which writers of imaginative literature then extended toward the Indian. The captivity theme and its underlying drama of the clash between Indian and European cultures reached its zenith, however, in the writer who first systematically exploited the myth of the American frontier, James Fenimore Cooper. The five volumes of the Leatherstocking tales delighted the American public: the initial novel of the series, The Pioneers (1823), sold 3,500 copies in its first day of publication.⁷⁰ Although Cooper killed off his hero, Natty Bumppo, in The Prairie (1827), the wilderness theme was so effective that he resurrected the hunter and wrote three more novels about Bumppo's youth. Cooper's portrayal of the inevitable demise of his Noble Savage, Chingachgook, was more than lively reading; it was grist for the mills of those who cried Manifest Destiny in the 1830s and after, and thus encouraged American expansion as well as American literary themes. Cooper was not the only prominent writer of the early nineteenth century whose work reflected America's perception of the taming of the wilderness. Southern novelists such as William Gilmore Simms, most notably in The Yemasee (1835), echoed Cooper's message.

Later writers also exploited the metaphors of the hunter and the hunted that were central to captivity narratives. Nathaniel Hawthorne reconstructed the famous Hannah Dustan story, making the husband the hero. Mather's account of the tomahawk-wielding frontierswoman also intrigued Henry David Thoreau. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreau underscores the ambiguities of Indian-European relations; the climactic moment of the “Thursday” section of the book retells the Dustan story differently: “The family of Hannah Dustin all assembled alive once more except the infant whose brains were dashed out against the apple tree, and there have been many who in later times have lived to say that they have eaten of the fruit of that apple tree.”⁷¹ Thoreau's most famous work, Walden (1854), chronicles a mid-nineteenth-century American's attempt to confront nature on a level parallel to the Indians of earlier centuries. Herman Melville's first novel, Typee (1846), is based on the captivity-escape plot in which Toby, the main character, flees not from Indians but from South Sea islanders he suspects of cannibalism. Melville's awareness of the cruelties of both frontiersmen and Indians is found in its most mature form in The Confidence-Man (1857) in a perceptive chapter called “Metaphysics of Indian-Hating.”⁷²

By mid-nineteenth century the captivity narrative had become fully integrated into American literature. If it had largely lost its standing as a reliable and introspective autobiographical account, and had wholly lost its religious fervor, it had nonetheless assumed an important role in the minds of America's most prominent authors. Through the voluminous and popular works of Cooper, Melville, Simms, Thoreau, and many others, the setting if not always the plot and substance of wilderness captivities had entered the mainstream of American literature.

Notes

1. John Williams, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion: A Faithful Narrative of Remarkable Occurrences in the Captivity and the Deliverance of Mr. John Williams (Boston, 1707), A2v.

2. For bibliographic details see R. W. G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia, 1949), 90-91.

3. Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith … 1580-1631, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1910), I, 14-22; II, 395-401, 911-912.

4. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols. (Cleveland, 1896-1961), XXXI, 17-137. This version is in Fr. Jerome Lalemont's “Relation of 1647” and includes Jogues's death. Father Jogues also wrote an account of his first captivity (1642) in a letter of 1643 to Father Jean Filleau, which has been reprinted several times. In 1646 Jogues was recaptured by the Iroquois and killed.

5. Boone was a captive for seven days in 1769 and for several months in 1778. See John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (Wilmington, Del., 1784; facs. repr. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966), 51-53, 63-66.

6. For bibliographic details see Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier, 167-169. A case could be made for John Underhill as the author of the first Puritan captivity narrative. Though not autobiographical, his account of the captivity and release of two girls from Wethersfield, Connecticut, in 1637 has many of the characteristics that later appear in Cotton Mather's secondhand accounts: drama, moral lessons, and pious rhetoric. See Underhill, Newes from America … (London, 1638; repr. in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3rd ser., 6[1837]), 12-13, 17-23.

7. Some Puritan autobiographies were published; most remained in manuscript. For discussions of the genre see Daniel Shea, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton, N.J., 1968), and Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York, 1972). Winthrop's account is in Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, 5 vols. (Boston, 1929-1947), I, 154-161; Shepard's is best consulted in Michael McGiffert, ed., God's Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety, Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard (Amherst, Mass., 1972), 33-77; Bradstreet's is in The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, ed. John Harvard Ellis (Charlestown, Mass., 1867; repr. Gloucester, Mass., 1962), 3-10; and Taylor's is reprinted in Donald Stanford, ed., “Edward Taylor's ‘Spiritual Relation,’” American Literature, 35 (1963-1964), 467-475.

8. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, 1976), 9-10.

9. Shea, Spiritual Autobiography, xi.

10. Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1682), 9.

11. Williams, “Reports of Divine Kindness,” appended to Redeemed Captive, 97.

12. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: or the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from … 1620. unto … 1698 (London, 1702), Bk. VI, 13.

13. Humiliations, 40.

14. Williams, Redeemed Captive. The best modern version is edited by Edward W. Clark (Amherst, Mass., 1976). For bibliographic details on the early editions see Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier, 201-202, 209, 265, 296, 300, 304, 387, 407-410.

15. Puritan sermons have been studied from diverse perspectives. Suggestive if not always convincing analyses include John Brown, Puritan Preaching in England (New York, 1900); Babette M. Levy, Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History (Hartford, Conn., 1945); Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Art of the American Folk Preacher (New York, 1970); Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, vols. I-II (Princeton, N.J., 1970-1975); and Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton, N.J., 1975). Convenient anthologies of Puritan sermons include Phyllis M. Jones and Nicholas R. Jones, eds., Salvations in New England: Selections from the Sermons of the First Preachers (Austin, Tex., 1977); and A. W. Plumstead, ed., The Wall and The Garden: Selected Massachusetts Election Sermons, 1670-1775 (Minneapolis, 1968). Many sermons are reprinted in the Arno Press, “Library of American Puritan Writings: The Seventeenth Century,” selected by Sacvan Bercovitch (New York, 1979).

16. The best discussion of the jeremiad is Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., 1978), chaps. 1-2. Important earlier analyses include Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953; repr. Boston, 1968), passim; and Bercovitch, “Horologicals to Chronometricals: The Rhetoric of the Jeremiad,” Literary Monographs, III (Madison, Wis., 1970).

17. Wigglesworth, “God's Controversy with New England,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 12 (1871-1873), 89.

18. Among several modern studies of Puritan typology, see especially Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Typology and Early American Literature (Amherst, Mass., 1972).

19. Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences … Especially in New England (Boston, 1684); Cotton Mather, The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated … (Boston, 1690); Cotton Mather, Terribilia Dei: Remarkable Judgements of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders … among the People of New England … (Boston, 1697). For additional works by the Mathers on the same subject see Thomas J. Holmes, Increase Mather, A Bibliography of His Works, 2 vols. (Cleveland, 1931); and Holmes, Cotton Mather, A Bibliography of His Works, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1940).

20. Williams, “Reports of Divine Kindness,” 97.

21. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 62.

22. Williams, Redeemed Captive, 1.

23. On King Philip's War see Douglas Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War (New York, 1958). The quote from the Reforming Synod is in [Increase Mather], The Necessity of Reformation … (Boston, 1679), 1.

24. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, A2v.

25. See, for example, Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973), 103-104. Because this work relies so heavily on Joseph Campbell's monomyth theory (Hero with a Thousand Faces [New York, 1949]), it should be used with discretion; it does, however, contain provocative ideas and a valuable bibliography. See also James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 32 (1975), 55-88; and Richard VanDerBeets, “The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual,” American Literature, 43 (January, 1972), 562.

26. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), 231-232. Turner expands and modifies Arnold Van Gennep's terms of separation, margin, and reaggregation.

27. Psychologists and other students of human behavior have long recognized the tendency of captives—whether they are taken by kidnappers, terrorists, or military forces—to develop sympathy for their captors. In some instances, the sympathy reflects a new awareness of the captors' viewpoint or culture—a true learning experience. But in other instances, captives admire, even emulate, captors who abuse and threaten them. The essential mechanism in this ostensibly illogical identification with the enemy is the captive's utter dependence on the captor for every necessity, even for life itself. For some widely diverse but highly suggestive writings on this matter, see Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38 (1943), 417-452; William Sargant, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing (New York, 1957); Dorothy Rabinowitz, “The Hostage Mentality,” Commentary, 63 (June 1977), 70-72; and Walter Reich, “Hostages and the [Stockholm] Syndrome,” New York Times, Jan. 15, 1980.

28. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 18-19, 21-22, 33; Swarton in Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Bk. VI, 10; Hanson, God's Mercy Surmounting Man's Cruelty (Philadelphia, 1728), 13.

29. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 231-232.

30. Williams, Redeemed Captive, 7. For a similar threat see “Quentin Stockwell's Relation” in Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (Boston, 1684), 45-46.

31. John Gyles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc., in the Captivity of John Gyles, Esq. … (Boston, 1736), 11-12.

32. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 71.

33. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 64.

34. Hanson, God's Mercy, 35-36.

35. Increase Mather, Necessity of Reformation, 5.

36. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Bk. VI, 10-14 passim.

37. For a discussion of Puritan captives' attraction to Indian life and the reasons why most resisted it, see Alden T. Vaughan and Daniel K. Richter, “Crossing the Cultural Divide: Indians and New Englanders, 1605-1763,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 90 (1980), 23-99, especially 81-83. At most, about twelve percent of the captives who spent the last part of their captivities with the Indians, rather than with the French, remained permanently among them.

38. For bibliographic details see Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier, 447.

39. James Smith, Scoouwa: James Smith's Indian Captivity Narrative, ed. John J. Barsotti (Columbus, Ohio, 1978), 16.

40. Tanner, A Narrative of the Captivity of John Tanner (New York, 1830).

41. For a discussion of captives from all parts of British America who were assimilated by Indians, see Axtell, “White Indians of Colonial America.” The demographic aspects of Puritan captives—numbers, age, sex, and length of captivity—are analyzed in Vaughan and Richter, “Crossing the Cultural Divide.” Eunice Williams's story is best followed in John Williams's narrative and Alexander Medlicott, Jr., “Return to the Land of Light: A Plea to an Unredeemed Captive,” New England Quarterly, 38 (1965), 202-216. A valuable examination of the legends that accumulate around famous unredeemed captives, especially Eunice Williams, is Dawn Lander Gherman, “From Parlour to Teepee: The White Squaw on the American Frontier” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1975), 70-91. The most famous narrative of a captive who remained with her captors is the semi-autobiographical account by Mary Jemison of Pennsylvania. In 1755, at age twelve, she was taken by the Seneca, with whom she lived until her death in 1833. Her career was described by James Everett Seaver, who interviewed her in 1823, in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (Canandaigua, N.Y., 1824). Many subsequent editions have been issued, some of them entitled Deh-he-wa-mis … the White Woman of the Genessee.

42. For example, J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut …, 15 vols. (Hartford, 1850-1890), I, 78.

43. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 50-52.

44. Hanson, God's Mercy, 12-13, 15-17, 22, 24.

45. Gyles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, passim, especially 24-27. Gyles was a captive from 1689 to 1695, but his narrative did not appear until 1736. By the later date the old Puritan enthusiasm had severely waned, and the new enthusiasm of the Great Awakening had yet to make its full impact. That may account for Gyles's secular tone; it may also reflect an editor's influence. For a summary of the ethnographic information to be found in captivity narratives throughout North America and over the span of three centuries, see Marius Barbeau, “Indian Captivities,” American Philosophical Society Proceedings, 94 (1950), 522-548, especially 531-543.

46. Gyles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, 5. For a comprehensive but somewhat muddled analysis of cruelty to captives, see Nathaniel Knowles, “The Torture of Captives by the Indians of Eastern North America,” American Philosophical Society Proceedings, 82 (1940), 151-225.

47. Williams, Redeemed Captive, 98.

48. Cotton Mather, Good Fetch'd Out of Evil (Boston, 1706), 33-34.

49. For a valuable general account of the Puritan family, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth Century New England, rev. ed. (New York, 1966). Of special relevance is the final chapter on Puritan tribalism. Among the most extensive Puritan statements are Cotton Mather, A Family Well-Ordered … (Boston, 1699), and Benjamin Wadsworth, The Well-Ordered Family … (Boston, 1712).

50. For a general introduction to the complexities of kinship, see two chapters in Robin Fox, Encounter with Anthropology (New York, 1968), “Comparative Family Patterns” (85-94) and “Kinship and Alliance” (95-112). Useful also for its information on tribes in northern New England and southern Canada is Handbook of North American Indians, XV, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C., 1978).

51. Hanson, God's Mercy, 26-28.

52. “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature, 19 (1947), 5.

53. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, A3v.

54. Cotton Mather, Souldiers Counselled and Comforted (Boston, 1689), 28; Fair Weather. Or, Considerations to Dispel the Clouds … of Discontent … (Boston, 1691), 90; Good Fetch'd Out of Evil (Boston, 1706), 4; Magnalia Christi Americana, Bk. VII, 69.

55. Pearce, “Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” 6-7.

56. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Bk. VII, 71.

57. Williams, Redeemed Captive, 16.

58. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 4.

59. Rowlandson, Soveraignty & Goodness of God, 47-48.

60. Memoirs of Odd Adventures, 16-17.

61. For full bibliographic information see Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier, 216-218, 248, 272, 274, 309, 313, 336, 362-363.

62. For full bibliographic information on Dickinson's narrative, see ibid., 192-194, 207-208, 223, 225-226, 244, 267, 292, 335, 350, 360, 370-372. The quote is from Jonathan Dickinson, Journal or, God's Protecting Providence, Being the Narrative of a Journey from Port Royal in Jamaica to Philadelphia between August 23, 1696 and April 1, 1697, ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven, Conn., 1961), 78.

63. Compare, for example, the early American and English editions. The latter is conveniently reprinted, with frequent comparative passages from the 1754 American edition, in Richard VanDerBeets, Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642-1836 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1973), chap. 4.

64. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 94. See also Gherman, “From Parlour to Teepee,” which successfully counters the prevailing image of the American white woman on the frontier as a genteel carrier of Western culture. For a vivid example of the nineteenth century's image of the woman captive as submissive mother, see John Mix Stanley's oil painting, “Osage Scalp Dance” (1845), reproduced in Smithsonian, 9, no. 4 (July 1978), 52-53.

65. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York, 1950), 99-135.

66. It is indicative of the “degenerate” state of the captivity narrative that Fanny Kelly's publishers felt compelled to verify her experience by appending several affidavits from United States military officers who rescued Mrs. Kelly. See Fanny Kelly, My Captivity among the Sioux Indians (1871; repr. Secaucus, N.J., 1962).

67. Metamora and Po-ca-hon-tas are included in Richard Moody, ed., Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762-1909 (Boston, 1966), 199-228, 397-422.

68. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 103-106.

69. Dorothy Forbis Behan, “The Captivity Story in American Literature, 1577-1826” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1952), passim.

70. For the popular reception of the Leatherstocking Tales see James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (New York, 1950), 80. One of Cooper's lesser known novels (The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish: A Tale, 2 vols. [New York, 1829]) focused directly on Puritan New England and the dilemmas of captivity and assimilation, and one of his better known (The Last of the Mohicans) was strongly influenced by the captivity theme.

71. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Boston, 1896), 426-427. For an interesting and provocative analysis of the Hannah Dustan story and how it fits into the American literary canon, see Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York, 1968), 98-108.

72. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Elizabeth S. Foster (New York, 1954), 163-171.