Captivity Narrative: Mary Rowlandson

One of the worse nightmares of anyone living on the frontier was to be captured by Natives.  Lurid imaginings of what might happen were often worse than the reality when it did occur.  Such was the experience of the first American woman to record her experiences in captivity, Mary Rowlandson.

Mary White Rowlandson (1637-1711) was born in Somersetshire, England and came to Massachusetts in 1650, while she was a teenager.  They settled first in Salem, then moved to Lancaster, Massachusetts in 1656.  Mary met and married Joseph Rowlandson, the local Puritan minister.  The couple had four children, but one died soon after birth, leaving them only Sarah, Little Mary and Joseph, Jr.  In the early morning hours of February 10, 1675 during King Phillip's War, the entire family was captured by Wampanoag, Narragansett and Nashaway Natives.  Joseph, Sr., managed to escape but Mary and the three kids were hurried away by their captors, Mary struggling to carry six-year-old Sarah, who had been wounded in the attack.  Sarah eventually died and Mary was separated from Little Mary and Joseph, Jr.  Although she feared the Natives and felt disgusted by their primitive way of life, they were kind to her and Mary reciprocated by helping to gather food and sewing clothing for them.  The ladies of Boston took up a collection for ransom and Mary along with the two surviving children were turned over to Colonial authorities eleven weeks later at Redemption Rock near Princeton, Massachusetts.

Mary went back to her life as a minister's wife, raising her remaining children.  In 1677, Joseph Rowlandson moved his family to Wethersfield, Connecticut and took up ministerial duties there.  He died in 1678 and the church voted his widow a pension.  During this time, if Mary spoke or wrote about her experiences with the Natives, she did so privately.  Soon after her first husband's death, Mary Rowlandson moved to Boston and there, nearly six years later, she wrote and published a heavily edited version of her captivity, entitled The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Redemption of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.  Because no original manuscript survives, it's difficult to tell how much of the writing was her own work and how much was the result of editing, mostly by Increase Mather, a leading Puritan minister and propagandist for Puritanism in general and Massachusetts in particular.

Mary divides her journey into twenty smaller journeys, which she or her editor term removes, likely because the captives were quickly removed from place to place as the Natives continued raiding and tried to stay one step ahead of the Settler forces.  Losing Sarah in death and uncertain where her other two children or husband were, Mary constantly turned to her faith and her knowledge of Scripture to sustain her.  Not only was she worried about being so far from the nearest White settlements that she might never be found, she was also worried about the possibility of rape, which seems to have been a subtle but overriding concern.  In her Narrative, she was at pains to say that the Natives were kind, never once doing or saying anything that she would consider unchaste.  This kindness and restraint on their part, however, she attributes to Divine Providence, repeatedly referring to Natives as barbarous creatures, murderous wretches and any other invective she or her editor could think up.  Mary, or her editor speaking in her voice, thoroughly believed the Puritan mindset that Natives were some sort of demonic creatures of the wilderness, not human beings in their own right and incapable of kindness or humanity other than if restrained by God or circumstance.

The Narrative was published in Boston in 1682 and later that same year in London.  Captivity narratives in and of themselves were nothing new, having existed since the time of the Crusades when Christians were captured by Saracens and vice versa.  However, this was the first captivity Narrative by a Settler in North America taken by Natives.  And, it was the first significant piece of Colonial literature by a woman writing under her own name and coming forward of her own initiative.  Although later generations assumed Mary died soon after writing the book, she later married Samuel Talcott, and outlived him to survive until 1711.  The Narrative went through several different editions and reprints and ultimately inspired other captivity stories.  It became an archetype of the captivity Narrative and later romance novels based on the genre.