Mary Rowlandson (1636-1678)

From June 1675 to August 1676, the Wampanoag chief Metacomet, called King Philip by the colonists, carried out a series of bloody raids on Colonial settlements in what is now called King Philip's war. The Puritans thought of the war as a sign of God's punishment for the sins of the younger generation but such a conflict was probably inevitable. It was the natural result of growing encroachments by the settlers on tribal land and of the conflict between the two cultures. Despite careful attempts by Colonial leaders to regulate the buying of territory, the New England tribes had been forced into ever more restricted areas. And although the natives had sold the land, they rejected the condition that they could no longer hunt on it. To them, "selling" meant selling the right to share the land with the buyers, not selling its exclusive ownership.

Matters came to a head when Metacomet's former assistant, who had given information to the whites, was killed by his own people. His killers were tried and hanged by the Puritans. This was too much for Metacomet to bear, and two weeks later the most severe war in the history of New England began. Its tragic result was the virtual extinction of tribal life in the region.

Among the war's victims was Mary Rowlandson. Mrs. Rowlandson was the wife of the Congregational minister of Lancaster, a frontier town of about fifty families that was located thirty miles west of Boston. On a February morning, she and her three children were carried away by a raiding party that wanted to trade hostages for money. After eleven weeks and five days of captivity, her ransom was paid. She was to survive for only two more years.

Her captors, it is important to remember, were only slightly better off than their prisoners. Virtually without food, they were chased from camp to camp by Colonial soldiers. Their captives, they thought, were the only currency with which to buy supplies and food. In a graphic passage, Rowlandson describes the lengths to which the Indians were driven by their hunger: "They would pick up old bones," she wrote, "and cut them to pieces at the joints, and if they were full of worms and maggots, they would scald them over the fire to make the vermin come out, and then boil them, and drink up the liquor . . . They would eat horses' guts, and ears, and all sorts of wild birds which they could catch: also bear, venison, beaver, tortoise, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes; yea, the very bark of trees ... I can but stand in admiration," she concluded, "to see the wonderful power of God, in providing for such a vast number of our enemies in the wilderness, where there was nothing to be seen, but from hand to mouth."

Rowlandson's moving tale of survival shows us the ordinary Puritan mind at work in extraordinary circumstances. Through apt quotations from the Bible, she places her experiences in the context of ancient Biblical captivities, such as the enslavement of Moses and the Israelites by the Egyptians. The Puritans regarded such Biblical captivity narratives as allegories representing the Christian's liberation from sin through the intervention of God's grace. Rowlandson viewed her own experiences as a repetition of the same pattern.

Her narrative, then, not only presents a terrifying and moving tale of frontier life but also provides insight into how the Puritans viewed their lives with a characteristic double vision. For Rowlandson, events had both a physical and a spiritual significance. She did not want merely to record her horrifying experience; she wished to demonstrate how it revealed God's purpose. The full title of her narrative illustrates this intention: 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.

Mary Rowlandson's Narrative was one of the most widely read prose works of the seventeenth century. It was especially popular in England, where people were eager for lurid, tales of the native inhabitants of the New World. The popularity of Rowlandson's story even gave rise to a mass of imitations that were often purely fictional. These "captivity" stories might have been entertaining, but they had a tragic side effect: They contributed to the further deterioration of relations between Native Americans and colonists.