Mary Rowlandson, Captivity Narratives, and King Philip's War. (02/28/2002)
In 1542, Bartolome de Las Casas, in his work entitled The Black Legend, documented the annihilation of the indigenous population of the islands first discovered by Columbus. His account of those events are reputed to be ones he actually witnessed himself and, while some of his numbers have been disputed as possible, if not probable, exaggerations, since no effort was made to count the number of native people occupying Hispaniola at the time, little doubt exists that what he reported did actually occur. He says, for instance, that the Spaniards
"came . . . like most cruel Tygres, Wolves, and Lions, enrag'd with a sharp and tedious hunger; for these forty years past, minding nothing else but the slaughter of these unfortunate wretches, whom with divers kinds of torments neither seen nor heard of before, they have so cruelly and inhumanely butchered, that of three millions of people which Hispaniola itself did contain, there are left remaining alive scarce three hundred persons."
In just 40 years, then, and at a rate of 75,000 people a year, the Spaniards managed to depopulate an entire island of its indigenous inhabitants. Las Casas characterizes the Spaniards' attitude toward native people as one where they "so contemned them . . . that they used them not like beasts, for that would have been tolerable, but looked upon them as if they had been but the dung and filth of the earth." He suggests that an unbridled lust for gold and wealth drove the Spaniards to work men, women, and children alike to the point of death before they dispatched them with all manner of cruel and inhumane methods of torture. He describes one such favored means in the following terms:
"They erected certain Gallowses, that were broad but so low, that the tormented creatures might touch the ground with their feet, upon everyone of which they would hang thirteen persons, blasphemously affirming that they did it in honour of our Redeemer and his Apostles, and then putting fire under them, they burnt the poor wretches alive."
While Las Casas sees this form of murder as blasphemous, it is clear that the perpetrators of these crimes against native people saw their mission in the New World as one that affirmed the righteousness of every Christian's duty to destroy heathen people by whatever means they could contrive or invent.
Such brutality in attitude and action was not restricted to areas under the control of Spain either. In New England, for instance, during a period when the Puritans were following a similar course of pursuing annihilation against native Americans, in a series of events now referred to as King Philip's War, one early massacre accounted for the deaths of 600 people of the Narragansett nation, people who were burned to death after the settlers trapped them in their long-houses as they slept and set fire to their village. Cotton Mather, in a sermon celebrating the event, referred to the glorious victory as a "barbecue" (David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Oxford UP, 1992, 115). A point one can take here again is that people long-honored as leaders of the colonial Christian church in the Americas were in the forefront of efforts to destroy the indigenous population of lands later appropriated as part of the new nation only a hundred or so years before its inception.
One literary means of portraying native people as brutal savages who only received treatment from Europeans according to what they deserved appeared in the aftermath of King Philip's War. Mary Rowlandson's account of her captivity (The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson), which first appeared in 1682 and spawned a plethora of imitations, both "factual" and wholly invented accounts of captivity among native peoples, created a virtual lexicon of terms and descriptions of such stereotypical power that many of them have survived in popular imagination into the 21st Century. In her initial account of the Indians' attack, which began just after sunrise on February 10, 1675, she says, "Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels." Soon after characterizing the natives as "merciless," she compares her own people to "a company of sheep torn by wolves, all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out." After the raid was finished, Rowlandson says that the Indians who captured her promised not to harm her and she was forced to go away with "those barbarous creatures" to a place about a mile from her house where the Indians intended to camp overnight. She says: "This was the dolefulest night that ever my eyes saw. Oh the roaring, and singing, and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell." In the space of only a few paragraphs, then, Rowlandson tells her audience that white settlers are as docile, as harmless, as "sheep" set upon by a pack of "merciless" heathens who are both "wolves" and "hell-hounds," if not "black creatures in the night," whose victory celebration turns her world into "a lively resemblance of hell."
It would, of course, be unseemly to challenge Rowlandson's account of these events on any reasonable ground whatsoever, since she, like any other victim of violence, is entitled to her memory of that experience. Having said that, however, it is true that this account was written seven years after the attack occurred, or six years and eight months after she was restored safely to the European side of the conflict, contains numerous Biblical quotations in support of various perceptions she has of her captivity, and was obviously crafted in a way to depict native people in the worst possible light while suggesting that Europeans had never done anything at all to deserve being attacked by native Americans. This perception is especially obvious in those instances when Rowlandson acknowledges any of the numerous occasions when her captors acted out of character by performing small and large acts of kindness and consideration toward her. In virtually every case she attributes such things to the Providence of God and never once to the kindness of the "savages." Three examples are typical:
"I cannot but admire at the wonderful power and goodness of God to me, in that, though I was gone from home, and met with all sorts of Indians, and those I had no knowledge of, and there being no Christian soul near me; yet not one of them offered the least imaginable miscarriage to me." (Ninth Remove)
"Then I went to another [wigwam], and they said the same [that there was no room]; at last an old Indian bade me to come to him, and his squaw gave me some ground nuts; she gave me also something to lay under my head, and a good fire we had; and through the good providence of God, I had a comfortable lodging that night." (Twelfth Remove)
"it rained, but they quickly got up a bark wigwam, where I lay dry that night. I looked out in the morning, and many of them had lain in the rain all night, I saw by their reeking. Thus the Lord dealt mercifully with me many times, and I fared better than many of them." (Fourteenth Remove)
That "heathens" are essentially a godless people, from whom Christians can expect nothing except the most barbaric treatment, is an idea reinforced here by the fact that Rowlandson never once attributes their kindness, even when it comes at their own considerable expense (sleeping all night in the rain so she will not have to), to anything other than God's goodness in looking out for her best interests. In short, she never once breaks with a determination to show her fellow Europeans how terribly savage native people are.
Rowlandson's experience was terrible. Her six year old daughter was wounded in the initial assault and later died of her injuries as they traveled with their captors, who were continually pursued by the English army. The Indians gave the child a "proper" burial according to their own customs before moving beyond reach of their enemies. Rowlandson understandably complains about her loss. However, when the infant child of her "master" becomes fatally ill, and perhaps millions of native Americans died as a result of the plagues introduced into their population by Europeans, Rowlandson comments that there was a benefit in its death (she does not mention the child's gender but seemingly prefers to leave it as a thing)-"that there was more room" in the wigwam afterwards (Thirteenth Remove). Her whole reference to the event was expressed in a single sentence; that is, "My mistress's papoose was sick, and it died that night, and there was one benefit in it--that there was more room." To say that Europeans did not consider native people to be human at all seems confirmed by her callousness toward the death of this child. In another case involving a child, this one English, she reports that a squaw was boiling horses feet, which was all any of them had to eat, and gave her and the child a small piece of the meat. Rowlandson ate hers straight away but watched as the child struggled to bite through the piece given to him/her. She says: "Then I took it of the child, and eat it myself, and savory it was to my taste." (Eighteenth Remove) Perhaps out of fear that the child would choke on food he/she could not eat . . . .
In a final episode, and one I cannot resist, Rowlandson complains about the fact that native Americans, especially the ones she meets along the way, seem to her incapable of telling the truth. She questions an Indian about the health of her son, who had also been captured by the natives in the initial raid. The man's response creates a moment of high humorous irony so far removed from Rowlandson's comprehension that she never guesses the sarcastic intent he means to communicate. She reports that
"He answered me that such a time his master roasted him, and that himself did eat a piece of him, as big as his two fingers, and that he was very good meat. But the Lord upheld my Spirit, under this discouragement; and I considered their horrible addictedness to lying, and that there is not one of them that makes the least conscience of speaking of truth." (Thirteenth Remove)
The irony here functions on several levels. The first falsehood is the endlessly repeated European opinion that native Americans were cannibalistic. This man had obviously become acquainted with that slander and decided to turn it around on its source, to throw it back in the face of its European origin. That Rowlandson accuses him of lying, not to his face at the time, of course, because she discovers later that her son had not been eaten, must be taken as a knowledge grown out of retrospective reflection. At the time she probably believed him since he was speaking directly into the most profound expectation of European fantasy. After the fact of her restoration, she becomes increasingly bitter toward her captives, toward "their horrible addictedness to lying," for instance, when she realizes that her distress over the potential loss of her son, even eight years before she recorded it, had resulted, not from any truth spoken by her kind about the nature of the others among whom she was forced to live, but by the falsehoods told by her own people in their determination to justify the annihilation of their native American enemies. Killing cannibals, after all, cannot be condemned by anyone, especially when any kindness they might have shown you is only the effect of God's Providence.