Captured by Indians

In 1675, during the bloody Puritan-Indian conflict known as Metacom’s War, the town of Lancaster is sacked by Pequot warriors.  Amidst burning buildings and the slaughter of family members, Mary Rowlandson is carried off.  That’s how her captivity narrative begins…

In the following pages, Rowlandson candidly expresses her hardships through the lens of her Puritan worldview.   Her narrative is a fitting end to the semester, because it brings out several of the main themes I’ve focused on, including Puritan attitudes toward self-examination, the Bible, and affliction.

Rowlandson not only chronicles events, but also candidly shares developments within her soul—hope and fear, suffering and anguish, and deep communion with God.  She is honest about discouragement, homesickness, and grief.  She sees her times of solitude cooped up with the Indians as an opportunity for spiritual growth: “Now had I time to examine all my ways…” (13).  She expresses her true situation, exposing all her weakness and doubts, and then measures her thinking against God’s word.  Her self-examination never ends in condemnation but in hope and comfort through the Scriptures. 

“This was a sweet cordial to me when I was ready to faint,” she writes (4), also calling the Scripture “my guide by day and my pillow by night” (12).  Rowlandson’s source of guidance and comfort in all circumstances is the Bible.  After observing its importance as a source for the sermons and poetry I’ve read, through Rowlandson I see the Bible in action in a Puritan’s life, reviving her hopes and giving her the eyes of faith in hardship.  “Some Scriptures we don’t understand until we’re afflicted,” Rowlandson reflects (15). 

Her narrative is an example of the Puritan attitude toward affliction as a source of sanctification.  Of a small mercy, she writes, even while her child is dying in her arms, “As he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other” (3).  Her terrible sufferings have spiritual benefits for her soul, and she sees God’s mercies in the small blessings afforded even in extreme situations.  She realizes the need for gratitude in times of peace and plenty: “So little do we prize common mercies when we have them to the full!” (19).

In recording violence, bereavement, solitude, and fear during the bloodiest war of New England, Rowlandson’s ultimate aim is to set down “the sovereignty and goodness of God,” especially in sustaining and encouraging her through Scripture.  She ends the narrative with her hope to now live differently: “If trouble with smaller things begin to arise in me, I have something at hand to check myself with, and say, why am I troubled?...I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles, and to be quieted under them.”

*The numbers cited refer to the “removes” into which Rowlandson divides the book.