Capitve Selves, Captivating Others
Mary Rowlandson's Captivity NarrativeThe most prominent colonial captive of the war, Mary White Rowlandson was the wife of the pastor of Lancaster, Massachusetts, and the daughter of one of the town’s leading families. Several of Rowlandson’s captors were prominent allies of Metacom, and they recognized her as an exceptional prize. Ransomed by Nipmuc and English mediators after nearly twelve weeks of captivity, Mary Rowlandson reflected in writing upon the transformative experience she had undergone, adapting the Puritan conversion narrative to her experience of captivity among Nipmucs, Narragansetts, Pokanokets, and Pocassets. Advertised in the first American edition of Pilgrim’s Progress as “pathetically written, with her own hand,” Mary Rowlandson’s masterful narrative went through four editions in 1682 (printed in Boston, London, and twice in Cambridge), and some forty other editions and issues in succeeding centuries. The second of only four works by women to be published in seventeenth-century New England (and the first by a living author), Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative is among the most influential and enduring works of colonial literature. 23
Because Puritan hermeneutics led her to consider the most mundane occurrences as signs of the workings of Providence, Mary Rowlandson left a vivid and detailed record of her experiences as a captive. The immediacy of her account, together with Rowlandson’s placement among major Algonquian actors, allows an unusually thorough examination of the persons and events involved in her captivity. There is some irony in this, as it is largely through abstracting the captivity from its political context and portraying it within a spiritual framework that the narrative gains its ideological effect. Resisting this abstraction, my reading seeks to resituate the narrative within the struggle for political sovereignty that remains largely uninscribed. At the same time, I aim not to lose sight of Rowlandson’s own struggle for survival, meaning, and a voice in patriarchal society. 24
Mary Rowlandson and her three children were captured on February 20, 1676, along with twenty other inhabitants of Lancaster, which then numbered about fifty families. A dozen residents of Lancaster were killed in the attack, and several others died while in captivity, including Rowlandson’s six-year-old daughter, Sarah. Local Nipmucs as well as Pokanokets, Pocassets, and Narragansetts took part in the attack, the first of several raids on frontier towns following a devastating English attack on the “Great Swamp Fort,” the main Narragansett stronghold. Although the Nipmucs of nearby Nashaway had maintained generally peaceful re lations with the English for the first two decades of Lancaster’s existence, there had been increasing conflicts in recent years as the townspeople became less dependent on the fur trade and more intent upon expanding their farming and grazing lands. Relations had deteriorated also with the Nipmuc Christians of the neighboring praying town of Nashobah, who by the time of the attack had been incarcerated on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. 25
Soon after her capture the forty-year-old Mrs. Rowlandson was “sold,” she reports, to a Narragansett sachem named Quanopin (or Quinnipin), whom she called “master” for the twelve weeks of her captivity. A prominent member of the leading Narragansett patrilineage, Quanopin played a central role in negotiations with the colonies and ranked along with Canonchet (his patrilateral parallel cousin) and Pessicus (his father’s brother) as a leading war chief (see Figure 4.2 ). Quanopin, a close ally of Metacom, was married to the widow of Metacom’s brother Wamsutta. 26
Unfortunately, there are no further details regarding Quanopin’s acquisition of Mary Rowlandson, although she reports that her older daughter, Mary, was “sold” for a gun ( Rowlandson 1997:75). Perhaps Rowlandson’s original captor received some kind of valuable for turning her over to Quanopin, but Rowlandson’s perception of herself as a “servant” to be bought and sold misses an important aspect of the indigenous meaning of her captivity. Quanopin’s acquisition of Mary Rowlandson is reminiscent of the control that Opechancanough and Powhatan established over John Smith, and suggests that because of her status as a gentlewoman Rowlandson was turned over to Quanopin as a political hostage. Although her captors highly valued her skills in sewing and knitting--skills she employed industriously and fairly autonomously throughout her captivity--Rowlandson was especially prized for her exchange value. 27
Mary Rowlandson thought highly of Quanopin, calling him “the best friend that I had of an Indian, both in cold and in hunger,” but she despised and dreaded his third wife, Wetamo (spelled Wettimore in the narrative and Weetamoo elsewhere). 28 Rowlandson portrays Wetamo as a “severe and proud dame” who took delight in tormenting her ( 86, 96 ). Although she realized that Quanopin was a “saggamore” or sachem ( 75 ), Rowlandson betrays no knowledge that Wetamo was herself a hereditary sachem. Wetamo, sachem of the recently abandoned town of Pocasset, was one of several “squaw sachems” or female chiefs who came into prominence during Metacom’s War. Also known as “sunksquaws,” squaw sachems could attain a position of authority either as the widow of a sachem, or like Wetamo, through descent within a high-ranking lineage. 29 Like their male counterparts, female sachems governed their villages mainly through persuasion and the control of resources, regulating internal matters such as the production of food, the distribution of resources, and the resolution of disputes. Both male and female sachems established alliances with other villages through diplomacy, trade, tribute, and marriage (exemplified in Wetamo’s and Quanopin’s alliance). During times of hostility leadership might pass to another leader with demonstrated proficiency in warfare, but some sachems also served as war chiefs. This was apparently the case with Wetamo, who reportedly commanded three hundred warriors at the outbreak of the war and was greatly feared by the English. 30
Wetamo and Quanopin each had ample reason to join Metacom in his war of resistance against the English. Metacom had succeeded his brother, Wamsutta or Alexander, as sachem of the village of Pokanoket, in 1664. 31 At this time the sturdy alliance that their father Massasoit had maintained with Plymouth from 1621 until his death in 1662 was already endangered. The alliance had survived intact for nearly four decadesyears that witnessed the establishment of Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, New Haven, and dissident Providence; the near extermination of the Pequots in 1637; and English treachery leading to the execution in 1643 of the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi Quanopin’s father’s brother. But relations between Plymouth and Pokanoket became severely strained following the Restoration of 1660, when Plymouth had to defend its land claims before Charles 11 in the face of competing claims from the other English colonies. After Massasoit’s death in 1662, Plymouth applied in creasing pressure on Pokanoket to recognize the colony’s claim to exclusive control over its lands.
One expression of strained relations was the seizure at gunpoint of Massasoit’s successor, Wamsutta, who was forced to march to Plymouth to answer for his land dealings with Plymouth’s rival, Providence, whose royal charter of 1663 encompassed Pokanoket. Wamsutta, already sick, died immediately after this episode, leaving as his widow the squaw sachem of Pocasset, who assumed the new name Wetamo to mark her change in status. Metacom, succeeding his brother as sachem of Pokanoket, faced a Plymouth determined to encroach upon both his authority and his people’s land. In 1667 Plymouth established a new town, Swansea, on land claimed both by Metacom and the colony of Providence. Metacom protested, only to see Swansea expand. Four years later, after armed Pokanoket warriors marched on Swansea to demonstrate their displeasure with English territorial expansion, Metacom was forced to subject himself formally to colonial authority--signaling a significant loss of sovereignty for a people who heretofore had considered themselves subject only to the king of England. Rumors of a conspiracy against the colonists had surfaced periodically since Wamsutta’s brief tenure, and more than a decade of mounting tension climaxed in the murder, in March 1675, of Metacom’s interpreter, a Christian Indian named John Sassamon, who had accused Metacom of conspiracy. Three allies of Metacom were hanged for the murder in June 1675. Soon thereafter Pokanoket warriors attacked the town of Swansea, and Metacom’s War was under way. Among the early attacks was an August raid by Nashaway Nipmucs on Mary Rowlandson’s town of Lancaster, which left seven colonists dead. 32
Wetamo, who controlled lands that several of the colonies coveted, was one of Metacom’s earliest and most valuable supporters. 33 Not only was she suspicious about Wamsutta’s death, but the Pocasset people had a history of opposition to the English dating to the 1620s, when the sachem Corbitant (possibly Wetamo’s father) had taken Tisquantum captive. Wetamo parted with her second husband, the sachem Petananuet (or Benjamin), over his allegiance to the English, and supplied provisions and forces for the surprise attacks on frontier villages that became the hallmark of the war. 34 At the end of June, Wetamo allowed Metacom and his forces to hide along with her own people in the Pocasset cedar swamp. Like other swamps, this one was considered the home of powerful spirits and served as a traditional place of refuge. This time, however, the swamp provided only a brief respite, as all were driven out by colonial forces at the end of July. Metacom and Wetamo then parted company, the Pocasset sachem and her people taking refuge among the Narragansetts, most of whom were attempting to maintain neutrality. Within the next few months Wetamo married the Narragansett sachem Quanopin. 35
Offering refuge to the Pocassets turned out to be disastrous for the Narragansetts. Shortly before the main body of Pocassets arrived among the Narragansetts, on July 15,1675, the United Colonies had coerced four obscure Narragansetts to promise that refugees would be handed over for a bounty payment of two “coats” (or lengths of woolen trading cloth) per captive. In the same agreement the colonies offered a bounty of one coat for each enemy head; twenty coats for Metacom’s head; and forty if Metacom were delivered alive. About three weeks later, on August 5, a Rhode Island trader reported mixed results to the Governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop, Jr.:
The Narragansetts have been out, three hundred of them, brought me in seven heads of the enemy, also [are] now come home, and with them at least one hundred men, women, and children of Wettamore’s, the Pocasset Sachem squaw, and her with them. She is kind to Sucquauch [Pessicus, Quanopin’s father’s brother] and he desires all favor for her that can be. ( Updike 1937:110)
The Narragansett warriors received seven coats as a bounty payment for the enemy heads, but Wetamo and her people were not handed over to the English. Disappointed in the results of their offer, Connecticut and Massachusetts soon extended the bounty to colonial soldiers, offering for each enemy head or scalp a payment of thirty shillings, approximately three times the bounty offered to the Narragansetts. 36
The spurious agreement of July 15 was confirmed on October 18 by the Narragansett sachem Canonchet and three members of his council but later was repudiated by Canonchet, the only one of the four with the authority to negotiate with the colonies. Although eager to maintain neutrality, Canonchet was reluctant to surrender the Pocassets, knowing from bitter experience that refugees could expect harsh treatment from the colonists. Not only had the Pequot refugees been enslaved or indentured, but in 1643 the English demanded that the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi be executed while captive among the Mohegans, despite the payment of a ransom. Indeed, at the same time that the English were pressing the Narragansetts to surrender the Pocasset refugees, they were confirming the Narragansetts’ worst fears by selling several hundred Algonquian captives to slave traders headed for Spain and the West Indies, retaining an additional hundred as domestic slaves. 37 The majority of the enslaved prisoners were at peace when they were captured or had voluntarily surrendered.
The Narragansetts’ protection of the Pocassets became the rationale for a massive colonial attack on the Narragansett stronghold in December. In this attack, known to the English as the Great Swamp Fight, from three to six hundred Narragansetts were killed, including large numbers of women and children. This attack forced the majority of the Narragansetts into the hostilities: Together with the Pocassets, the surviving Narragansetts fled westward and took refuge among the Nipmucs, allying themselves with Shoshanim (or Sam Sachem) of Nashaway and other sachems hostile to the English. 38
When Mary Rowlandson was captured in the first of the raids following the Great Swamp Fight, her husband Joseph was in Boston seeking aid, alarmed by the warning of a Nipmuc Christian, James Quanapohit of Nashaway. Quanapohit had agreed to spy on Metacom’s forces for the English, together with another Nipmuc Christian, Job Kattananit, who was eager to learn the fate of his own three children, who had been captured by Metacom’s forces from the praying town of Hassanamesit. In return for their loyalty, both informers were returned to Deer Island in Boston harbor, where since October some five hundred Massachusett and Nipmuc Christians had been incarcerated under brutal conditions. Although their suffering on Deer Island and the distrust of the English had alienated some converts, others remained loyal to the English, including Tom Dublet (or Nepanet) of the praying town of Nashobah. Dublet, along with about sixty other inhabitants of Nashobah, had been living peacefully in Concord under the supervision of English attorney John Hoar when Capt. Samuel Moseley, a notorious Indian hater, forced them to march to Deer Island. Even so, Dublet agreed to undertake three missions on behalf of Mary Rowlandson, accompanied on the second trip by another displaced resident of Nashobah named Peter Conway (or Tatiquinea). On the third and final trip John Hoar himself accompanied the Nipmuc mediators, and together they obtained Mary Rowlandson’s release--negotiating not with Metacom or Quanopin but with Shoshanim and the other Nipmuc sachems with whom they had taken refuge. 39
Rowlandson’s narrative recounts the arrival of the Christian Indian emissaries, whom she called “Tom and Peter,” at Mt. Wachusett, where the Nipmucs, Narragansetts, Pokanokets, and Pocassets were then camped (see Figure 4.3 ): “Though they were Indians, I got them by the hand and burst out into tears” ( Rowlandson 1997:97). The captive was redeemed in May 1676, for a price she herself suggested--twenty pounds, delivered partly in the form of trading cloth. Rowlandson’s son and her surviving daughter were returned the following month, Joseph for a ransom payment and Mary “free of cost” ( 110 ). As their home and village had been destroyed, the reunited Rowlandson family was dependent upon others for lodging until the following spring, when Joseph Rowlandson was called to a new pulpit in Wethersfield, Con necticut. He died the following year, and in 1679 Mary married a wealthy Wethersfield landowner, Samuel Talcott. When The Soveraignty and Goodness of God appeared in print three years later, the author, now known as Mary Talcott, had achieved some distance from the dreadful events of 1676. 40
The months following Mary Rowlandson’s release were disastrous for Metacom, Quanopin, and Wetamo. Quanopin assumed leadership over the Narragansetts in June after his father’s brother, Pessicus, was killed by Mohawks (Canonchet having already been captured, shot, and beheaded by Indian allies of the English, including a band of Narragansetts). Quanopin held this position only briefly, however, as he was captured in mid-July. The following month Quanopin, the Nipmuc sachem Shoshanim, and one of the latter’s brothers were court-martialed and publicly hanged for treason against the king of England--a sentence that presumed the very subordination that Metacom’s forces were resisting. Wetamo’s forces had dwindled throughout the spring as English attacks increased; they were dispersed altogether during the summer.
In August Wetamo and her three dozen remaining followers were ambushed while trying to return to their home at Pocasset. As Boston minister Increase Mather told the tale in the entry for August 6 of his Brief History of the War with the Indians in New-England:
Only the Squaw-Sachem of Pocasset, who was next unto Philip in respect of the mischief that hath been done, and the blood that hath been shed in this War, escaped alone; but not long after some of Taunton finding an Indian Squaw in Metapoiset newly dead, cut off her head, and it happened to be Weetamoo, i.e. Squaw-Sachem her head. When it was set upon a pole in Taunton, the Indians who were prisoners there, knew it presently, and made a most horrible and diabolical Lamentation, crying out that it was their Queens head. Now here it is to be observed, that God himself by his own hand, brought this enemy to destruction. For in that place, where the last year, she furnished Philip with Canoes for his men, she herself could not meet with a Canoe, but venturing over the River upon a Raft, that broke under her, so that she was drowned, just before the English found her. Surely Philip’s turn will be next. ( Mather 1978 [ 1676]: 137 - 138 )
Mather quickly saw his prophecy fulfilled. Within six days Metacom’s wife and young son were captured, and the demoralized sachem himself was killed by a Pocasset deserter named Alderman. Col. Benjamin Church, the English commander, ordered that because Metacom “had caused many an Englishman’s body to lie unburied and rot above ground, that not one of his bones should be buried” ( 1975:156). Church’s Indian executioner decapitated and quartered Metacom’s body, the punishment accorded to domestic traitors. Metacom’s head and hands were given to Alderman so he could collect a bounty; his jaw would later be disengaged from his skull by Increase Mather’s son Cotton, a youth at the time. Just as Wetamo’s head was displayed on a pole at the scene of her death, Metacom’s was displayed in Plymouth, remaining for twenty years a grisly emblem of King Philip’s “treason” against the colony.
As in the case of Wetamo, the elder Mather interpreted the significance of Metacom’s death and punishment through a poetics that traced (and left traces) of spatial and temporal correspondences between past and present, body and spirit, sign and meaning. 41 His Brief History observes:
Thus when Philip had made an end to deal treacherously, his own Subjects dealt treacherously with him. This Wo was brought upon him that spoyled when he was not spoyled. And in that very place where he first contrived and began his mischief, was he taken and destroyed, and there was he (Like as Agag was hewed in pieces before the Lord) cut into four quarters, and is now hanged up as a monument of revenging Justice. ( Mather 1978 [ 1699]:139)
For Mather it was especially significant that Metacom’s head arrived in Plymouth on a day that had previously been set aside for thanksgiving. “Thus did God break the head of that Leviathan,” he wrote, “and give it to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness” ( Mather 1978 [ 1699]:139). Identifying Metacom with Satan in his guise as a monstrous sea serpent and Metacom’s death with the deliverance of Israel as foretold by Isaiah, Mather further envisioned the sachem as a sacrifice that would nourish God’s people in the wilderness. The dismembered body of the Pokanoket sachem signified not only his decapitated and dispersed body politic but also his domain, which would soon be divided among the English and provide them with “meat.”
Many of Metacom’s captains and warriors were executed in August and September, and armed resistance soon abated, although Algonquian attacks upon the western and northern frontiers continued into 1678. The colonies sold at least one thousand Algonquian prisoners and refugees in West Indian and Iberian slave markets, including Metacom’s wife Wootonekanuske and their nine-year-old son. The son’s enslavement caused considerable debate among the Puritan clerics, some of whom cited scriptural precedents in recommending that the boy receive the presumably harsher punishment of execution for his father’s “treason.” 42
Hundreds of other New England Algonquians were sold to colonists as slaves or indentured servants, including fifteen to Capt. Samuel Moseley and thirteen to slave trader James Whitcomb, in whose house the Rowlandson family resided after Mary’s return from captivity. Numerous Algonquian children--whose parents had been killed in the war or executed, or whose “relations seemed willing"--were placed in English homes, under the condition that they be “religiously educated & taught to read the English tongue” ( Salisbury 1997: 142 - 144 ). Adult survivors who were able to establish their loyalty were settled in four closely supervised praying towns, one of which was overseen by Wetamo’s former husband, Petananuet (now called Ben Sachem). Others managed to retreat to relatively isolated enclaves, especially on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. A few were restored to positions of relatively high visibility in colonial society, notably James Printer, who before the war had served for sixteen years as an apprentice to Cambridge printer Samuel Green, Sr. Forced into the hostilities when the praying town of Hassanamesit was attacked by Metacom’s forces, Printer served as a scribe for the Nipmuc sachems during the negotiations over Mary Rowlandson’s release. Successful in his bid for a pardon, Printer returned to work for Green, and was responsible for composing the type for the second and third editions of Rowlandson’s narrative-in which, ironically, he appears as a leading example of praying Indians’ “treachery.” 43
But James Printer was exceptional. Of the Algonquians who were not killed in the war, executed, enslaved, indentured, or confined to praying towns, the majority took refuge with other Native peoples in what Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney ( 1995) have called an “Algonquian diaspora.”
Various groups in northern New England that became known as “Abenakis” took them in, as did French missions such as St. Francis (primarily Abenaki) and Kahnawake (primarily Mohawk). Pokanoket, Pocasset, Narragansett, and Nipmuc lands, now cleared of their native inhabitants, were distributed to soldiers and sold to colonists. Benjamin Church, Metacom’s nemesis, developed lands in both Pokanoket and Pocasset in the decade following the war. 44
Wilderness Trials: A Gentlewoman’s Conversion Narrative
Increase Mather’s interpretation of the deaths of Wetamo and Metacom is one example of how New England Puritans discerned the hand of Providence in both the Algonquian challenge to New England’s sovereignty and in their defeat. Providential interpretations of the war were developed in fast-day sermons, histories, and most compellingly, in Mary Rowlandson Soveraignty and Goodness of God, which interprets her hardships while in captivity as a personal spiritual trial and opportunity for redemption. Although it is largely consistent with Increase Mather’s interpretation of the war, Rowlandson’s spiritual autobiography speaks in a distinctly personal voice and with the authority of experience--indeed, of an experience so “astonishing” that it sometimes threatened to exceed the totalizing capacity of Puritan hermeneutics ( Rowlandson 1997:82, 112). 45
From the first sentence Rowlandson’s narrative records a seemingly unprovoked assault upon her town, home, family, and friends. 46 The immediacy of Rowlandson’s prose draws the reader into her experience of “the dolefullest day” and “the dolefullest night that ever mine eyes saw.” She tells of the burning of her house (which served as one of Lancaster’s garrison houses), the wounding of her young daughter, Sarah, as well as herself, and the death of her sister, nephew, and brother-in-law, capturing the chaos in a vivid summation: “Thus were we butchered by those merciless Heathen, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels” (see Figure 4.4 ). Although she had always thought she would rather die than be taken by those “ravenous beasts,” Rowlandson writes that “when it came to the trial my mind changed” ( 68 - 70 ).
Rowlandson figures her captivity as a series of twenty “removes . . . up and down the wilderness"--a landscape that she, echoing other Puritan writers, describes as “vast and howling” or “vast and desolate” ( 70 - 71, 80 ). As Hambrick-Stowe ( 1982) noted, Rowlandson’s “removes” are reminiscent of John Bunyan’s account in Pilgrim’s Progress ( 1678) of Christian’s pilgrimage “through the wilderness of this world.” But as Neal Salisbury has pointed out, they are also reminiscent of the historical experience of many a New England Puritan, including Rowlandson herself, whose “entire life was punctuated by removes from one place to another"--from Somerset county, England, to Wenham, Massachusetts, to the inland settlement of Lancaster, and finally, after her captivity, to Wethersfield ( Salisbury 1997:7). Rowlandson’s figure of the “remove” combines these physical and spiritual meanings, coupling a description of her removal from the comforts, supports, and maternal responsibilities of her familiar life with observations on her parallel spiritual journey and transformation. The attack caught her at a time of “carelessness” and complacency, Rowlandson confesses, when she was almost wishing for God to submit her to a trial that would test and strengthen her faith ( Rowlandson 1997:74). “Affliction I wanted and af fliction I had, full measure,” she reflects, seeing her captivity as a trial analogous to the Biblical captivities of God’s chosen people ( 112 ). When she succumbed to tears shortly after crossing the Connecticut River in a canoe, Rowlandson recalled the first verse of Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion” ( 82 ). 47
In captivity Rowlandson found herself stripped of the comforts of domestic and community life; isolated from her family and the supports of Christian existence; reduced to what she considered a near-bestial state, exemplified by her “wolfish” appetite; and “enslaved” by a “master” and, worse, a “mistress” who themselves served the Devil. Most poignantly, she endured the suffering and death of six-year-old Sarah from a bullet wound as well as separation from her surviving children, fourteen-year-old Joseph and ten-year-old Mary. “All was gone (except my life),” she laments, “and I knew not but the next moment that might go too” ( 71 ). In these extremities Rowlandson learned that even the Bible--her “guide by day,” her “pillow by night"--could cease to comfort her if God so willed it. She found that she “could not sit still . . . but kept walking from one place to another,” going “up and down mourning and lamenting” ( 90, 76, 84 ). 48
Like job returned to the naked human condition of isolation and vulnerability, Rowlandson at last abandoned all pride and vanity, acknowledging her utter dependence upon God’s power. Upon recounting a brief reunion with her son, Joseph, she reflects:
We had Husbands and Father, and Children, and Sisters, and Friends, and Relations, and House, and Home, and many Comforts of Life, but now we may say as Job, Naked came I out of my Mothers Womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, Blessed be the Name of the Lord. ( 81 - 82 )
When at last Rowlandson was “sold” to her husband ( 88 ), she felt herself to be spiritually as well as physically redeemed. Although she recorded being redeemed from captivity in exchange for a ransom payment of silver coins and cloth, it is rather as “the redeemed of the Lord” that she writes. Comparing her ordeal to Daniel’s in the lion’s den, she invokes Psalm 107: “Oh give thanks unto the Lord for He is good, for his mercy endureth forever. Let the Redeemed of the Lord say so, whom He hath redeemed from the hand of the Enemy” ( 107 ).
Rowlandson’s narrative bears witness to the spiritual trials and opportunities for redemption constituted by her radical displacement from her home, family, and accustomed social role. Seeking to read every experience as evidence of the work of Providence, Rowlandson portrays her captors as instruments of God whose actions, whether abusive or merciful, were ultimately oriented to her own spiritual condition rather than to Algonquian values, grievances, or interests. Although she views herself as an economic asset to Quanopin and Wetamo--both because of the substantial ransom payment she would bring and her highly valued handiwork--she fails to acknowledge any other motives her captors might have for holding her. Echoing her contemporaries, Rowlandson characterizes her captors, particularly when they act collectively, as bestial and diabolical Others: They are “wild beasts of the forest,” “bears bereft of their whelps,” “ravenous wolves,” “a company of hell-hounds,” “black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell” ( 39, 68 - 71, 105 ). Inhuman as they might be, however, her captors were not simply satisfying their animal appetites; rather, they were serving God as a “scourge to His people” ( 105 ). Likewise, when they treated her with compassion and generosity, they were restrained in their “savageness and brutishness” by God’s hand ( 71 ).
Puritan hermeneutics provided a totalizing poetics within which the unfamiliar complexity of her captors’ actions and motivations could be reduced to an instrumentality in which they entirely lacked rationality, morality, or agency. Even so, Rowlandson"s narrative demonstrates a pragmatic, if limited, familiarity with the cultural world and individual variability of her captors--one that, to some extent, appears to date back to her interactions with Nipmucs prior to her captivity. Rowlandson uses quite readily such Algonquian words as wigwam, wampum, squaw, papoose, sagamore (a local variant of sachem), powwow (ritual shaman), sannup (husband), samp (corn porridge), nux (yes), and matchit (bad). She describes a pre-battle divination ceremony and a celebratory feast with an attention to detail that gives her accounts ethnographic value even today. 49 She secured her survival by finding protectors and engaging in numerous economic exchanges. 50 Although she repeats conventional typifications of Indian brutality, she also offers somewhat nuanced characterizations of particular individuals, including Metacom. Even the individuals who are not described sympathetically are sometimes identified by name: Among the captors Rowlandson most despised are former Nipmuc residents of praying towns, including James Printer. Characteristically, however, Rowlandson offers no worldly reason for the hostility of Christian Nipmucs. Whether they hailed from the praying towns of Nashobah and Hassanamesit or the English town of Marlborough, Christian Nipmucs found themselves caught between the colonists and Metacom’s forces and subject to the suspicions of both. 51
Neither does Rowlandson offer any worldly motivation for the antagonism of Wetamo, whom she describes as threatening, taunting, and striking her, and depriving her of food, fire, shelter, and the solace of the Bible. Most distressing of all to Rowlandson was her sense that Wetamo and her compatriots acted in a completely unpredictable and arbitrary fashion. 52 Rowlandson was eager to please the Indians she called “master” and “mistress,” offering them gifts and once even inviting them to a dinner of bear and peas. But she found that “sometimes I met with favour, and sometimes with nothing but frowns” ( 85 ). Unable to anticipate whether her actions would bring approval or punishment, Rowlandson considered her captors “unstable and like mad men.” She attributes her own disorientation entirely to her captors’ sins: “There was little more trust to them than to the master they served” ( 97 ). That devious master was, of course, Satan, “him who was a liar from the beginning” ( 89 ).
Besides being cruel and inconstant, Rowlandson considered Wetamo to be ludicrously vain. She describes her mistress as “bestowing every day in dressing herself neat as much time 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.” Once Wetamo was dressed, Rowlandson reports, “her work was to make girdles of wampom and beads” ( 97 ). Wetamo and Quanopin wore wampum belts and necklaces at a dance during the night of the negotiations that led to Rowlandson’s release. Rowlandson describes the dance as
carried on by eight of them, four Men and four Squaws; My master and mistriss being two. He was dressed in his Holland shirt, with great Laces sewed at the tail of it; he had his silver Buttons, his white Stockins, his Garters were hung round with Shillings, and he had Girdles of Wampom upon his Head and shoulders. She had a Kersey Coat, and covered with Girdles of Wampom from the Loins and upward: her armes, from her elbows to her hands were covered with Bracelets; there were handfulls of Neck-laces about her neck, and severall sorts of Jewels in her Ears. She had fine red Stockins and white Shoos, her hair powdered and her face painted Red, that was alwayes before Black. And all the Dancers were after the same manner. There were two others singing and knocking on a Kettle for their musick. . . . They held on till it was almost night, throwing out Wampom to the standers-by. ( 103 )
Rowlandson can not be expected to realize that this was a “give-away” ceremony in which Wetamo, Quanopin, and others of chiefly status were demonstrating their wealth (through displays of wampum and trade goods), their generosity (through gifts of wampum), and their goodwill and desire for peace (through wearing red face paint instead of black). 53 But she hardly could have missed Wetamo’s elevated status. Nor could she have been unaware, at least by the time she wrote her narrative, that her mistress was the very squaw sachem whom Increase Mather de scribed as “next unto Philip in respect of the mischief that hath been done.” The narrative, however, completely fails to acknowledge Wetamo’s status and authority, just as Rowlandson herself sometimes did while in captivity--refusing, for example, to follow an order to hand over a piece of her apron for a child’s loincloth. Not acknowledging Wetamo’s authority as either her mistress or her people’s sachem, Rowlandson interprets all signs of Wetamo’s elevated status as personal vanity, pride, and “insolence” ( 86 ). Ultimately, all were signs not of Wetamo’s authority but of her subservience to that diabolical master, Satan. 54
It is notable that foremost among Wetamo’s sins in Rowlandson’s eyes were her pride and vanity--two of the very sins for which Rowlandson chastises herself. Indeed, Rowlandson came to believe that the captivity experience was God’s way of bringing her own pride and vanity to her attention. “The Lord hath showed me the vanity of these outward things,” she wrote in closing the narrative, quoting from Ecclesiastes. “That they are the Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit; that they are but a shadow, a blast, a bubble, and things of no continuance” ( 112 ) Although Rowlandson does not acknowledge it explicitly, Wetamo served her captive not only as God’s scourge but as a spiritual object lesson--possible only because of the qualities Wetamo shared with her captor. Paradoxically, it was through identifying with what she saw as her captor’s faults that Rowlandson gained the self-knowledge and strength to further differentiate herself from her captor and from Satan--that is, to be spiritually redeemed.
Contrasting sharply with Rowlandson’s antipathy toward Wetamo was her gratefulness for the kindnesses of her master. Quanopin often protected Rowlandson from his wife’s antagonism, and he reassured the captive that she would eventually be returned to her husband for a ransom payment. 55 Rowlandson also remarks upon the kindness of Metacom himself, and marvels at the respect the other men showed her, declaring emphatically, “I have been in the midst of those roaring Lions, and Salvage Bears, that feared neither God, nor Man, nor the Devil, by night and day, alone and in company: sleeping all sorts together, and yet not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me, in word or action” ( 107 ). Instead of finding this an occasion to question the typification of these men as “roaring lions and savage bears,” however, she seizes the opportunity to defend her own reputation and magnify God’s power. “Though some are ready to say, I speak it for my own credit,” she writes in response to rumors that her chastity had been violated, “I speak it in the presence of God, and to His glory” ( 107 ). 56
Rowlandson also notes with gratitude the many “common mercies” she experienced at the hands of “strangers,” often involving the provision of food, clothing, or shelter, sometimes but not always in exchange for a handmade shirt, shift, cap, or stockings. Early in her captivity she was given a Bible; she also notes several times when someone facilitated a visit with her children. But such benign interactions, like her captors’ chastity, do not lead Rowlandson to cast doubt upon the assumption that she was in the hands of Satan’s servants. Rather, they confirmed her belief in the “sovereignty and goodness of God.” Although God had ample reason “to cut the thread of my life, and cast me out of his presence forever,” she notes, “as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other” ( 74 ). If Wetamo was a scourge wielded by one hand, then Quanopin, Metacom, and others were instruments wielded by the other. just as God utilized her captors’ depravity in order to enable Rowlandson to recognize and examine her own failings, so God restrained it in order to insure the possibility of His chosen servant’s redemption.
The vivid and differentiated details of Rowlandson’s descriptions, however, supplement and potentially subvert the providential interpretation she offers. 57 Only in abstract generalizations, or when committing or celebrating acts of violence, do Rowlandson’s captors resemble Increase Mather’s diabolical Weetamoo and treacherous Philip. More often Rowlandson’s captors appear quite human in scale, understandable in terms of the same qualities she would (and did) apply to herself and other Puritans: mercy, kindness, and restraint as well as pride, insolence, and deviousness. Even though Rowlandson interprets these qualities in the self-serving terms of providential hermeneutics, the concrete “particularizing” of these virtues and vices is a movement in the direction of humanizing her captors. The contrast she draws between being “hemmed in with the merciless and cruel Heathen” during captivity and “with pitiful, tender-hearted and compassionate Christians” upon her return is subverted not only by the implication that Rowlandson felt equally confined by the Christians but also by the examples she herself provides of tender and compassionate actions on the part of her captors ( 108 ).
To “particularize” and interpret experience is the imperative of the spiritual autobiography. Apart from certain passages near the close of the narrative that enumerate the offenses of praying Indians ( 98 - 100 ), or as in a jeremiad, censure her society’s shortcomings ( 104 - 107 ), Rowlandson’s narrative focuses upon the condition of her own body and soul under adversity. 58 Her interpretations are closely intertwined with the course of the events she relates, and her references to Biblical precedents or “types"--Babylon, Job, Daniel, and Rebecca, among others--are in the context of her need for comfort or insight at particular times. Although Scripture was essential in sustaining her, in true nonconformist fashion the narrative presents experience as the sine qua non of knowledge. “Mine eyes have seen it” ( 69, 111 ) is the leitmotif of the narrative, which stresses how much one takes for granted--about oneself, others, the material world, and God--until one is utterly removed from everyday experience.
In reflecting upon her captivity Mary Rowlandson emphasizes the transformative nature of what she experienced as isolation, nakedness, and vulnerability--all classic characteristics of what Victor Turner ( 1967) has called the liminal stage of a pilgrimage or rite of passage. Having partaken of the “wine of astonishment,” Rowlandson resembled neither her past self nor those surrounding her upon her return. “When others are sleeping mine eyes are weeping,” she reports, her mind full of “the thoughts of these things in the particulars of them” ( Rowlandson 1997:111, 112). Telling her tale serves an act of reincorporation, an attempt to fit her transformed self and the “particulars” of her experience into the redemptive structure her society offered. 59 Granted, the particulars do not all fit readily into a providential hermeneutics, leading to the “double-voicedness” and uncanny “excess” that have perhaps been as central to the narrative’s enduring appeal as its strong interpretive frame. But it was those particulars that could be publicly narrated that would be most influential upon the subsequent development of “Indian captivity” as a selective tradition.
Publication Information: Book Title: Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives. Contributors: Pauline Turner Strong - author. Publisher: Westview Press. Place of Publication: Boulder, CO. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: 103.
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