Captivity narratives are stories of people captured by "uncivilized" enemies. The more fictionalized narratives often include a theme of redemption by faith in the face of the threats and temptations of an alien way of life. Barbary captivity narratives, stories of Englishmen captured by Barbary pirates, were popular in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. The first American Barbary captivity narrative was by Abraham Browne (1655). The most popular was that of Captain James Riley, entitled An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Brig Commerce (1817). Ann Eliza Bleecker's epistolary novel, The History of Maria Kittle, first published in 1793, is considered the first known Captivity novel. It set the form for subsequent Indian Capture novels.[1]
Historians treat many captivity narratives with caution, regarding them more as folklore or ideology than historical accounts. But, contemporary historians such as Linda Colley and anthropologists such as Pauline Turner Strong have found the narratives useful in analyzing how the colonists constructed a Native American "other", as well as what the narratives reveal about the settlers' sense of themselves and their culture, and the experience of crossing the line to another. Colley studied the long history of English captivity in other cultures, both the Barbary pirate captives who preceded those in North America, and British captives in cultures such as India, after the North American experience. Other captivity narratives are more historically reliable because they are based on journals that the authors wrote while in captivity.
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As British colonists in North America became subject to capture, some published captivity narratives, which were popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in America. Because of the competition between New France and New England in North America, colonists in New England were frequently taken captive by Canadiens and their Indian allies. (Similarly, the New Englanders and their Indian allies also took Canadians and Indian prisoners captive.) According to Kathryn Derounian-Stodola, statistics on the number of captives taken from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries are imprecise and unreliable since record-keeping was not consistent and the fate of hostages who disappeared or died was often not known.[2] Yet conservative estimates run into the tens of thousands, and a more realistic figure may well be higher. For some statistical perspective, however, between King Phillip's War (1675) and the last of the French and Indian Wars (1763), there were approximately 1, 641 New Englanders taken hostage [3]; and during the decades-long struggle between whites and Plains Indians in the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of women and children were captured[4].
American Indian captivity narratives, stories of men and women of European descent who were captured by Native Americans, were popular in both America and Europe from the 17th century until the close of the United States frontier late in the 19th century. Mary Rowlandson's memoir A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is a classic example of the genre. (Jonathan Dickinson's Journal, God's Protecting Providence ... (1699), an account by a Quaker of shipwreck survivors captured by Indians in Florida, has been described by the Cambridge History of English and American Literature as "in many respects the best of all the captivity tracts."[5])
American captivity narratives were often based on true events, but they frequently contained fictional elements as well. Some were entirely fictional, created because the stories were popular. One spurious captivity narrative was The Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnet, of Massachusetts (Boston, 1793). The Puritans tended to write narratives with negative images of the 'Indian' to show that the captivity was a warning from God concerning the state of the Puritans' souls, and that God was the only hope for redemption.
There are four captivity narratives that were created as a result of New Englanders being captured by the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet tribes in Nova Scotia and Acadia. The most famous was by John Gyles who wrote Memoirs of odd adventures, strange deliverances, &c. in the captivity of John Gyles, Esq; commander of the garrison on St. George's River (1736). He wrote about his torture by the natives at the village Meductic during King William's War. His memoirs are regarded as a precursor to the frontier romances of James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, and Robert Montgomery Bird.[6]
Another was written William Pote who was a New England merchant who was captured during the siege of Annapolis Royal during King Georges War. Among other things, Pote also wrote about being tortured.[7] The third captivity narrative is by John Payzant who writes about being taken prisoner in the Maliseet and Mi`kmaq Raid on Lunenburg (1756) during the French and Indian War. In this account, after four years of captivity, his sister decided to remain with the natives, while he and his mother return to Nova Scotia. The forth captivity narrative was by Anthony Casteel, who was taken during Father Le Loutre's War.[8]
The historian Frederick Turner, in his book Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (1980), discusses the effect of some captivity narratives in which the white captive comes to prefer and eventually adopts a Native American way of life. In some cases, during prisoner exchanges the white captives had to be forced to return to their original cultures. Children who had assimilated to new families found it extremely painful to be torn from them, often after several years' captivity. Having assimilated, numerous adult and young captives chose to stay with American Indians and never returned to live in Anglo-American or European communities. The story of Mary Jemison, who was captured as a young girl (1755) and spent her whole life among the Indians until death at age 90, clearly illustrates this point.
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