Captivity

The first cross-cultural captives in early North America were actually Indians taken by Europeans during the first decades of exploration and colonization. We know that Columbus captured Arawaks for export to Spain as slaves and exotic symbols of the New World, but even the English in Virginia and New England took Indians hostage during the 17th century to train them as interpreters. Few went willingly. One of the most famous of these Indian captives, Squanto, was a Patuxet seized on the New England coast by seafarers in 1614 and sold into SLAVERY in Spain. He escaped and returned to his home, only to find his people ravaged by disease and a group of English Separatists (Pilgrims) living at Plymouth. The same year settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, kidnapped Pocahontas, the daughter of the Algonquin werowance Powhatan. Acting as diplomat for her father and a bridge between cultures, Pocahontas agreed to marry John Rolfe and returned with him to England, where she died in 1616.

Nevertheless, popular notions about captivity usually come from the harrowing narratives of white colonists taken by Indian warriors during times of crisis. Indeed, Jamestown more often evokes memories of Captain John Smith’s tale of his own capture and trial before Powhatan, than Pocahontas’s captivity. Mary White Rowlandson dictated one of the first published accounts of captivity after spending nearly 12 weeks with Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians in 1675 and 1676. Taken from her frontier home in Lancaster, Massachusetts, at the onset of King Philip’s War, Mary described her experience as a test of her faith in God. Demoted from mistress of her own household to the servant of an Indian “Master,” Mary struggled with privation and hunger as she tried to make sense of her captors’ motives. Although she condemned their actions, Mary’s narrative also revealed a familiarity that existed between Native Americans and English colonists even outside of captivity.

For Native Americans, captivity had a variety of purposes. Traditionally, Native groups adopted Indian captives to strengthen political ties and replenish populations decimated by war and disease. Sometimes individuals were taken to replace specific members of a clan. The Iroquois, for instance, took captives during mourning-war campaigns against customary enemies and revenged the death of a family member by either killing or adopting a captive. Women and children were most often adopted. By the mid-18th century non-Iroquois people made up as much as two-thirds of the Iroquois population.

Contrary to prevalent fears among colonists, Indians tortured or killed white captives only under specific circumstances. They sometimes killed white people during their initial attack or as an example to force obedience from other captives. More often, Indians kept prisoners alive to exchange for ransom or to adopt them into their households. Once in a Native community, captives were adopted through a series of sometimes dangerous rituals. They might be required to run a gauntlet of villagers wielding sticks and other weapons. Native Americans also symbolically washed and reclothed adopted captives to mark their rebirth as Indians. Although captives sometimes became servants, as did Mary Rowlandson, many white people found themselves equal members of Native families. Some adapted well to Indian life and, especially if taken as children, even rejected Euro-American society. To her family’s horror, Eunice Williams, the daughter of minister John Williams, repeatedly refused to return to Puritan society after her capture from Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704 by Catholic Mohawk. Like Eunice, Mary Jemison, captured at age 15 by Shawnee in western Pennsylvania, stayed with her Native family, eventually marrying a Delaware and then a Seneca man. During the Seven Years’ War Delaware and Shawnee took many white people captive from frontier plantations in Pennsylvania. When peace came after 1763, Col. Henry Bouquet oversaw the return of more than 200 captives. He found that many of those who had been adopted into Indian families as children could no longer speak the language of their birth and proved difficult to repatriate. Some ran away to rejoin Native American kin but were recaptured by Bouquet’s men and forcibly returned to the English. Euro-Americans equated kinship or cultural identity with biology and one’s national origins. Native Americans, on the other hand, had more flexible definitions of kin that allowed them to absorb others into their communities more easily, whether by capture or choice.

Further reading: John Demos, The Unredeemed Cap-tive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Knopf, 1994); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

—Jane T. Merritt