Research on the Story of Captivity in 18th Century Massachusetts

Williams's son Stephen was reunited with him in 1705, exactly the fate of seven-year-old Eunice was much more than problematic. Although Williams was permitted to meet and speak with Eunice, commencement at a Jesuit mission near the mohawk community where she had been taken and later in Montreal, he was not allowed to take her back home to Deerfield.

In the years following, Williams undertook to regain Eunice, with family members and colonial officials alike negotiating with french officials and Indians for her return. They were murderly un conquestful. The whole bewilder of attempting to secure Eunice's put down from captivity must be mute in the context of the rather complex rules of eng growment, rivalry, captivity, negotiation, and ransom normal in saucy England and eastern Canada among the Protestant English, the Catholic French laymen and clergy, and the various communities of Indians scattered across the area. Demos explains that the prude charter of the milliampere Bay Company called in no small while for the conversion of the hea accordingly Indians to (Protestant) Christianity, which was by and large a complete failure. The French Jesuit missions in Canada had had much more success in converting Indians to Catholicism, or more exactly to a species of Christianity suffused with Indian spirituality. The point is that French administration of Indian behavior and legal action bes to have coexisted with Indian self-determina

The particular that the French were not particularly motivated to secure the release of English prisoners of the Indians has to be set beside the fact that, when asked by Williams, members of his family, or officials of Massachusetts Bay to facilitate negotiations with the Indians, French officials in Montreal appear to have been cooperative (at least when Britain and France were not at war), expiration so far as to test the limits of the government's uneasy descent with the Jesuits and the Indian communities that were the object of the Church's religious mission by press that Eunice be given an opportunity to leave Kahnawake. Yet Eunice would not be moved.

Eunice was given an Indian name, A'ongote, and in her mid-teens Eunice married a Kahnawake Indian and converted to Catholicism, much to the consternation of her devout Puritan father. Only as an adult did Eunice and her family travel to visit the Williamses, and then only for brief periods. Eunice remained in Canada until her death at age 89.

tion, at least where the taking of English captives from English grunge was concerned. To put it an opposite way, the fact that there was no cacoethes lost between the English and French in the New World meant that the French would not (and did not, in the Williams case) incur an favorable obligation to redeem captives on behalf of the English. The French were much more interested in curbing Indian smuggling of furs and other goods of foreign trade.

Williams, John. "John Williams on His Captivity Among the French, 1707." study Problems in American Colonial History. Ed. Karen Kupperman. New York: D.C. Heath, 1993. 506-8.

Axtell, "The White Indians of Colonial America." Major Problems in American Colonial History. Ed. Karen Kupperman. New York: D.C. Heath, 1993. 527-38.

Mary Rowlandson's narrative, which predates Williams's by about 25 years, is hostile to her Indian experience and is replete with biblical verses and God-laden language: "It is a solemn sight to se
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