Introduction

As a member of the New England elite, minister's wife Mary White Rowlandson wrote this earliest female captivity narrative in 1682, six years after her eleven-week ordeal.  King Philip's War had wrought devastation on Massachusetts settlements for six months before February 1676, when the Narragansetts and Wampanoags attacked Lancaster, burning houses, killing settlers, and capturing prisoners to hold in exchange for weapons and goods. Rowlandson's story, tracing her pathway in twenty "removes" to northern Indian campsites, is more than a simple tale of war.  As you read the excerpts, consider why she wrote the narrative, who the anticipated audience was, and how her pronouncements about the nature of her captors differ from her observations of Algonquian culture.