The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

Summary

Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts. Rowlandson's husband, the town's minister, is away in Boston seeking soldiers. After a long defense the garrison house is set on fire; a number of her relatives and neighbors are killed, and she is wounded in the side by the same bullet that wounds her six-year-old daughter Sarah in her arms. She and her children Sarah, Joseph and Mary are taken and separated. Rowlandson arranges the story in twenty removes, the marches from camp to camp. At the Nipmuc town of Wenimesset, Sarah dies of her wound after nine days in her mother's lap. Rowlandson is sold to Quinnapin, a Narragansett sachem, and serves in the household of his wife Weetamoo, the Wampanoag sachem of Pocasset, whom she finds a hard mistress. A warrior returning from the raid on Medfield gives her a Bible taken there, and from that point Scripture becomes her chief comfort: she reads Deuteronomy 28 and despairs, then Deuteronomy 30 and takes hope. The company crosses the Baquaug River ahead of pursuing English troops and moves north to the Connecticut River, where she meets Metacom, who asks her to make a shirt for his son and pays her a shilling, and where she trades her knitting and sewing for food. She describes hunger so sharp that ground nuts, horse liver and bear meat taste sweet, her brief reunions with her son and with other captives, and the endurance and skill of her captors in moving whole communities through wilderness with the English army close behind. In the spring the company returns toward Wachusett, and negotiations begin through Native Christian messengers. John Hoar of Concord brings the ransom of twenty pounds, and she is released at the beginning of May 1676. She closes with reflections on God's providence in the war, the kindnesses of Boston friends, the recovery of her son and daughter, and the lesson that affliction taught her: that the things of this world are vanity and that she must rely wholly on God. The narrative was first published in 1682 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in London, under the title The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; the library text follows the corrected second edition and omits the preface and the sermon by Joseph Rowlandson printed with early editions.

Top Lessons

• Reading suffering through Scripture

  Rowlandson interprets nearly every event through a verse of the Bible she was given in captivity. Deuteronomy 28 leads her to despair and Deuteronomy 30 to hope; Psalm 46 tells her to be still. Her narrative shows a Puritan habit of mind that sought God's purpose in every affliction and took Scripture as a daily companion.

• Endurance and the small mercies

  Hunger, cold, grief and constant marching fill the removes, yet Rowlandson counts each handful of meal, each kindness, each meeting with her son as a gift. Her closing pages argue that affliction taught her to rely on God and to be quieted under smaller troubles.

• Seeing the other side of a war

  Rowlandson writes as an English captive in the midst of a war that devastated both peoples. She also records, sometimes against her own expectations, the courtesy of Metacom, the old woman who gave her a mat and a rug, the endurance and skill of her captors, and the losses they mourned. Reading closely shows a war in which both sides suffered and fought for their homes and their way of life.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The narrative records a wound to Rowlandson's side and her daughter Sarah's wound from the same bullet, with no surgeon available; Sarah lingers nine days with nothing but a little cold water before dying, and a fellow English captive, Robert Pepper of Roxbury, tells her he healed his own leg wound with oaken leaves, a remedy she then applies to her side and credits, with God's blessing, for her cure. Hunger runs through the removes in precise detail: ground nuts, parched corn, horse liver, bear meat, and the observation that she could now eat what she once would have refused, together with the scarcity the whole company shared on the march. She notes that she had formerly smoked several pipes in a row and gave up tobacco from the day of her capture, describing it as a bewitching habit. The closing pages describe nights of weeping and sleeplessness after her return while others slept; some modern readers have read these as signs of lasting trauma, but this is an interpretive reading of a text framed throughout as religious testimony, and Rowlandson herself presents her sorrow as part of a providential lesson.

• The attack on Lancaster

  Rowlandson is wounded in the side by a bullet that also wounds the child in her arms.

• The Third Remove

  Nine days caring for her wounded daughter until Sarah dies at Wenimesset, and the remedy of oaken leaves for her own wound, learned from a fellow captive.

• The Eighth Remove

  Her visit to Metacom, her refusal of his pipe, and her account of having given up tobacco since her capture.

• The Fifth to Nineteenth Removes

  Extreme hunger, the foods eaten in the camps, and the scarcity the whole company faces on the march.

• Closing reflections

  Sleepless nights of weeping after her restoration, which she interprets through Psalm 6.