Inside the Story of Mary Rowlandson, the Courageous Colonial Woman Who Endured Captivity and Lived to Share Her Tale

On August 4, 1675, King Philip’s War reached the Quaboag Plantation in central Massachusetts (now Brookfield), and the settlers were attacked by Nipmuck tribes. An illustrated plate of the Indian Assault on Sergeant John Ayres’s Inn, from “Soldiers in King Philip’s War” by George Madison Bodge, 1906. (Public domain)

Not many people today have heard of King Philip’s War. Though a small-scale event by modern standards, it devastated colonial America. As Plymouth Colony expanded in the years following the Mayflower’s arrival, the famous positive relations between Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians started to break down. Plymouth’s second-generation leaders began to violate treaties negotiated by their fathers and encroached upon tribal lands.

The Wampanoag chief Metacom—the son of Massasoit, who had ensured the colony’s survival during its difficult first year—started holding a series of councils with the colonists to express indigenous grievances. They respected Metacom and gave him the name “King Philip” as a title of honor. He expressed a desire to continue the friendship between their peoples that his father and former Plymouth governors like William Bradford had maintained, and he negotiated an agreement that he would sell the settlers no more land for a period of seven years. Land sales continued, however. In 1671, half a century after the first Thanksgiving, Metacom made a series of concessions and agreed to be subject to English law. Over the next four years, diplomatic relations continued to deteriorate until war broke out.

Mary Rowlandson’s Test of Faith

The most famous record of the war is not a history of the event itself, but rather a personal account written by a woman who lived through it: “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” On February 10, 1676, a coalition of native tribes descended on Lancaster, Massachusetts. The town was destroyed and its colonists either killed or taken prisoner. Among the latter group was Rowlandson, a reverend’s wife. She described the carnage of watching neighbors and family members being killed, calling it “the dolefullest day that ever mine eyes saw.” A bullet killed the child in her arms and wounded her in the side. Mary was captured with her three surviving children, two of whom were separated from her. Her injured 6-year-old daughter, Sarah, died a week into the journey as they were forced to travel long distances to a series of native encampments.

After being captured, Mary Rowlandson carried her wounded, 6-year-old daughter in her arms for nine days. An illustrated plate from “Our Greater Country; Being a Standard History of the United States From the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present Time” by Henry Davenport Northrop, 1901. (Public domain)

Rowlandson’s faith was the key to her survival. She made sense of her terrible experience by interpreting it as a trial from God. She blamed herself for her misfortune, noting her “carelessness” in “how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent,” and observing “how righteous” it would be for God to “cut off the thread of my life, and cast me out of his presence forever.” She continued to hold out hope, however, saying that “the Lord still shewed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.” Rowlandson found comfort and resilience in a plundered Bible given to her by a native warrior after a raid.

She survived by knitting clothes for her captors in exchange for money and food. During this time, she was reunited with her eldest son and daughter. Mary also met with the Wampanoag leader, Metacom, numerous times (whom she refers to by his English title). At their first meeting, he cordially invited her to the ceremonial use of tobacco, which she declined, considering it a vice.

She continued: “During my abode in this place, Philip spake to me to make a shirt for his boy, which I did, for which he gave me a shilling: I offered the money to my master, but he bade me keep it: and with it I bought a piece of Horse flesh.”

Rowlandson’s account is a testament to Metacom’s magnanimity. After she knitted more personal items for relatives, Metacom invited her to dinner, and she hosted a dinner for him in turn. One day, while an exhausted Mary was wading through a swamp and suffering from “little spirit,” Metacom took her by the hand and told her that in two weeks’ time he would ransom her to the English. Upon reaching an Indian village, he gave her water to bathe and fed her a meal of “beans and meat, and a little ground-nut cake.” In her relief, she quoted Psalms 106:46: “He made them also to be pitied, of all those that carried them Captives.”

Rowlandson wrote that 20 pounds was “the price of my redemption.” Her journey of more than 150 miles, which she saw as something like a religious pilgrimage, had lasted 11 weeks and 5 days.

Rowlandson was held captive for 11 weeks before being ransomed, during King Philip’s War. An illustrated plate from Harper’s Monthly, 1857. (Public domain)

The Aftermath

Mary Rowlandson lived out most of her remaining days in Boston. She published the account of her ordeal six years after being released. It was a bestseller of its time. She remarried after her first husband died and lived until 1711.

Metacom himself was killed a few months after ransoming Rowlandson. The casualties of King Philip’s War were high: It is estimated that Plymouth Colony lost nearly 10 percent of its adult male population. The Plymouth colonists’ military coalition with the colonists of Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island began the formation of a national identity distinct from the English, which would culminate in the American Revolution a hundred years later. The Wampanoag suffered much heavier losses, but they survived and eventually recuperated. They live on today as federally recognized nations like the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe on Cape Cod and the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.