Captivity Narrative: Elizabeth Hansen

Captivity narratives often went from being fact to fiction by the time generations of editors got through with them.  Elizabeth Hansen's story of her few months with the Abenaki during Father Rale's/Dummer's War in 1725, was a case in point.

Elizabeth Meador was born in New Hampshire, and married John Hansen when she was 19 years old.  The couple had seven children.  Though Quakers in New England weren't actively persecuted, as they had been in decades past, they still weren't popular.  In 1724, when the conflict known in Canada as Father Rale's War, and in America as Dummer's War broke out, the family were living near Dover, New Hampshire.  Being Quakers, they were pacifists and refused refuge with the local garrison, believing that the Natives would respect their pacifist beliefs.  In August, 1724, an Abenaki war party captured Elizabeth, a maidservant, and four of her children, Sarah, Little Elizabeth, Daniel, Caleb, Eleazar, and Elizabeth's two-week old baby.  Two of the boys, Caleb and Eleazar, were killed along the trail, two young to keep up and stay quiet on the march.  Elizabeth, Sarah and the maidservant kept the baby alive as best they could. 

They arrived at an Abenaki village in Canada, where a Native woman showed Elizabeth how to make a nut milk that supplemented her nursing and kept her baby alive.  The maidservant, Sarah and Little Elizabeth were soon separated from Elizabeth, Daniel and the baby.  French forces soon raided the village and detained the captives.  A French family took in Elizabeth, her baby and Daniel.  Elizabeth was ill at this time.  The couple had the baby baptized Catholic and gave her the name Mary Ann.  Finally, in 1725, John Hansen was able to locate his family in Port Royal, Nova Scotia.  He managed to arrange the ransom for both the French couple and the Natives for all of his family, except his eldest daughter Sarah.  She, despairing of rescue, had chosen her own way out.  Old enough to marry, she married a French settler, thus freeing herself from the Abenaki and the French couple who had control of her mother and siblings.  Given the choice, she elected to stay with her new husband.  John took Elizabeth, Little Elizabeth, Mary Ann and Daniel back to Dover, but wasn't ready to give up on Sarah.  He returned to Canada to convince her to come home, but died at Crown Point, New York.

Elizabeth, now a widow, had to put the remains of her life back together as best she could.  Following in Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Dustin's footsteps, she published a narrative of her captivity, God's Mercy Surmounting Man's Cruelty.   The title gives everything away.  Like most narratives written about women in captivity to Natives, the work was heavily edited by a male editor, who took the opportunity to insert Quaker propaganda.  Only God's help and Elizabeth's own faith and strength of character had enabled her to survive.  Where the Natives were kind, such as the woman who helped her with the nut milk, or another woman who intervened when a warrior had wanted to kill Elizabeth, it was only God's providence, not the humanity of the Natives in question, that saved the day.  The book became a popular specimen of the captivity narrative genre, going through several printings, each with embellished details to harp on the cruelty of the Natives and the luck of Elizabeth's survival.