Mary Rowlandson’s View of Her Indian Captors
Hell-hounds and Beasts:
Mary Rowlandson’s View of Her Indian Captors
Mary Rowlandson was a Puritan wife and mother who, in 1676, was captured and taken from her home in Lancaster, Massachusetts by a raiding band of Narragansett Indians (Canada n.p.). She related the story of her eleven months of captivity in her book, Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, a best-seller in the popular captivity-narrative genre of the era. The combination of her Puritan faith and the brutality of the incidents she witnessed during her capture and captivity led Rowlandson to view her Indian captors as less than human. Instead, she saw them more as beasts, or demonic creatures that were fit for residence in Hell and not on Earth.
Attacks and raids by Indians terrified the colonists of early America. On the day of her capture, Rowlandson witnessed many terrible sights as the Indians ravaged their settlement. She describes a scene where her “brother-in-law . . . fell down dead, wherat the Indians scornfully shouted, and hallowed, and were presently upon him, stripping off his clothes” (Rowlandson 5). To her, this was completely uncivilized behavior, and she refers to the Indians as “infidels” and “a company of hell-hounds” (Rowlandson 5). In the past, Rowlandson thought that if Indians were ever to attack her own settlement, she hoped she would be killed, but during the actual event she realizes she preferred to live, writing, “I chose rather to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous beasts” (Rowlandson 8). Her use of the words “as I may say” shows her credibility as a person experienced with Indian ways because she survived her ordeal. She categorizes the Indians as “ravenous beasts,” and in the Puritan, Christian scheme of things, God made beasts for use by the more elevated human beings created in God’s own image.
Little happens on the First Remove to change Rowlandson’s opinion of her Indian captors. The group of Indians and captives is constantly on the move to escape the English pursuers, as well as to hunt, gather, and meet with other Indians for trade. She describes the scene, writing, “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” (Rowlandson 8). This new description depicts the Indians not as simple, lowly “beasts” as she wrote before, but as something far worse, demons of Hell. In her Puritan view, beasts may be lowly, placed on Earth for the use of humanity; however, demons are a big step below beasts. Demons are evil creatures of Hell, and not human at all.
During their Fourth Remove, the captives see a particularly violent incident involving a pregnant woman who continually asks the Indians to let her go home. The Indians gather about the woman in a large group and strip her naked, “and when they had sung and danced about her (in their hellish manner) as long as they pleased they knocked her on head, and the child in her arms with her” (Rowlandson 19-20). The Indians then burn the woman and her child, and tell their captors that anyone else desiring or attempting to go home will receive the same treatment (Rowlandson 20). Therefore, it is not surprising that as her time with her captors continues, the events Rowlandson witnesses only increase her view of the Indians as demonic creatures.
Throughout the narrative, Rowlandson refers to the Indians as pagans and heathens. She is owned by a Sagamore Indian named Quinnapin, whom she refers to as her “Master,” and he required her to work as any slave-owner would. However, during their Fifth Remove, she finds that her captors have little regard for the Sabbath day. She asks to be allowed to rest on the Sabbath, telling them that she will do twice as much work tomorrow to make up for it, and their response is that if she did not work, they would “break her face” (Rowlandson 23). After this incident, she reflects, “here I cannot but take notice of the strange providence of God in preserving the heathen” (Rowlandson 23). It is interesting that she does not lament that the Indians do not convert to her Puritan Christian faith and become worthy of God’s protection. Instead, she wonders why God does not simply destroy them. If Rowlandson viewed the Indians as humans capable of redemption, she might instead offer prayers that they might turn from their “heathen” ways. Because she does not consider this idea makes it apparent that she sees them as less than human creatures incapable of conversion and redemption according to her faith.
However, during the Nineteenth Remove, Rowlandson encounters some Praying Indians, whom are members “of an indigenous No. American people converted to Christianity by English colonial settlers” (Merriam-Webster n.p.). Any hope that these Praying Indians would offer sympathy or solace is dashed in her interactions with them. One tells of “a brother, that would not eat horse; his conscience was so tender and scrupulous” (Rowlandson 58). This Praying Indian goes on to tell Rowlandson how he used, and probably in her mind twisted, Scripture to show his brother that “it was lawful to eat that in a famine which is not at another time. And now, says he, he will eat horse with any Indian of them all” (Rowlandson 59). She also tells of a Praying Indian who “betrayed his own father into the English hands, thereby to purchase his own life,” and of another who was “so wicked and cruel, as to wear a string about his neck, strung with Christians’ fingers” (Rowlandson 59). Although these Indians claimed to be Christian, the stories she heard from them only increased her belief that Indians were an unredeemable group, incapable of true Christian faith that she felt any human being should follow.
After the Indians sell her back to her husband, Rowlandson decides the horrific captivity she endured was a trial sent to her by God to make her better appreciate His gifts and mercy. She ruminates, “Though many times they would eat that, that a hog or dog would hardly touch; yet by that God strengthened them to be a scourge to His people” (Rowlandson 70). She also writes, “I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God in providing for such a vast number of our enemies in the wilderness” (Rowlandson 71). The terms she uses throughout her narrative like “scourge,” “creatures,” “beasts,” and “hell-hounds,” as well as her perspective of e the Praying Indians as unredeemable clearly show that to Rowlandson, Indians were less than human.
Works Cited
Canada, Mark, ed. Mary Rowlandson. Canada’s America, 1997.
“Praying Indian.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web.
Rowlandson, Mary. Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Project Gutenberg, Kindle Edition, 3 November 2009. Web.
