The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (35 page)

On the morning of February 10, the residents of Lancaster had taken the precaution of gathering in five different garrisons, one of which included the Rowlandson home, which was built beside a hill, with a barn nearby. When the Indians attacked at daybreak, there were between forty and fifty men, women, and children assembled in the Rowlandson garrison.

First they heard the musket fire in the distance. When they looked cautiously out the windows, they could see that several houses were already burning. They could hear shouts and screams as the Indians worked their way from house to house until suddenly they, too, were under attack.

Dozens of Indians climbed up on the barn roof and on the hill behind the house and began firing on the garrison “so that the bullets seemed to fly like hail.” In no time at all, three of the men stationed at the windows had been hit, one of them quite badly in the jaw. soon enough, the roof of the house was on fire. “Now is the dreadful hour come,” she remembered. “some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out.” Mothers and children were “crying out for themselves and one another, ‘Lord, what shall we do?'”

With six-year-old sarah in her arms and her other two children and a niece gathered around her, Mary decided “to go forth and leave the house.” But as they approached the doorway, the Indians unleashed a round of “shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house as if one had taken a handful of stones and threw them.” Mary and the children paused, but with the flames roaring behind them, they had no choice but to push ahead, even though they could see the Indians waiting for them with their muskets, hatchets, and spears. Her sister's husband John, already wounded, was the first to die. The Indians shouted and began to strip his body of clothes as they continued firing at anyone who dared leave the house. Mary was then hit in the side, the bullet passing through her and into sarah's abdomen. Her nephew William's leg was broken by a bullet, and he was soon killed with a hatchet. “Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen,” she wrote, “standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.” Rowlandson's oldest sister, who had not yet left the house and had just seen her son and brother-in-law killed, cried out, “Lord let me die with them!” Almost immediately, she was struck by a bullet and fell down dead across the entrance of the house.

An Indian grabbed Rowlandson and told her to come with him. Indians had also seized her children Joseph and Mary and were pulling them in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, Captain Wadsworth and his troopers had just arrived, and the Indians had decided it was time to leave. Mary begged for her children but was told that if she went along quietly, they would not be harmed. she and twenty-three others were taken prisoner that day and so began what she later described as “that grievous captivity.”

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A 1771 woodcut depicting the attack on Mary Rowlandson's house.

 

◆◆◆ They spent the first night on a hill overlooking the smoking ruins of Lancaster. An empty house stood on the hill, and Rowlandson asked if she and her injured daughter might sleep inside. “What, will you love Englishmen still?” mocked the Indians, who celebrated by feasting on roasted cattle while Rowlandson and the others were given nothing to eat. “Oh the roaring and singing and dancing and yelling of those black creatures in the night,” she remembered, “which made the place a lively resemblance of hell.”

They left early the next morning. Rowlandson's wounds had become infected, making it impossible for her to carry her daughter. One of the Indians had a horse, and he offered to hold sarah, who whimpered, “I shall die, I shall die” as Rowlandson staggered behind “with sorrow that cannot be expressed.” That night she sat in the snow with her daughter in her lap. “[T]he Lord upheld me with His gracious and merciful spirit,” she remembered, “and we were both alive to see the light of the next morning.”

That afternoon they arrived at the great Nipmuck gathering spot of Menameset. There Rowlandson met Robert Pepper, a captive now for more than five months. Pepper told her to lay oak leaves on her wound, a Native remedy that had helped his injured leg and would also cure Rowlandson. But there was nothing to be done for little sarah, who had caught a deadly fever. “I sat much alone with a poor wounded child in my lap,” she wrote, “which moaned night and day, having nothing to revive the body or cheer the spirits.” Finally on February 18, nine days after being shot, sarah died.

That night, Rowlandson slept in the snow with sarah in her arms. The next morning, the Indians buried her child on the top of a nearby hill. “I have thought since of the wonderful goodness of God to me,” Rowlandson wrote, “in preserving me in the use of my reason and sense, in that distressed time, that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life.” Instead, she went in search of her other two children.

There were more than two thousand Indians gathered at Menameset. Rowlandson had learned that her ten-year-old daughter Mary was somewhere nearby. That day as she wandered from wigwam to wigwam, she found her daughter. But when Mary began to sob uncontrollably, the girl's Indian master told Rowlandson that she must leave—“a heart-cutting word to me.”

“I could not sit still in this condition,” she remembered, “but kept walking from one place to another.” she prayed to the Lord that He would show her “some sign, and hope of some relief.” soon after, she heard her son's voice.

Joseph Rowlandson had been taken to a village about six miles away. But his master's wife had agreed to bring him all the way to Menameset to look for his mother, and “with tears in his eyes, he asked me whether his sister sarah was dead ... and prayed ... that I would not be troubled in reference to himself.” It was too brief a visit, but Rowlandson could not help but interpret her son's appearance as God's “gracious answer to my earnest and unfeigned desire.”

The next day, February 22, several hundred warriors returned from a raid on the town of Medfield, twenty miles southwest of Boston. There had been about two hundred soldiers in the town, but even they were not enough to prevent the Indians from burning close to fifty houses and killing more than a dozen inhabitants. Even worse, the Indians had the nerve to leave a note. “Know by this paper, that the Indians that thou hast provoked to wrath and anger, will war this twenty-one years if you will; there are many Indians yet, we come three hundred at this time. You must consider the Indians lost nothing but their life; you must lose your fair houses and cattle.”

When the war party returned to Menameset, the warriors shouted a total of twenty-three times to indicate how many English had been killed. “Oh! The outrageous roaring and hooping that there was,” Rowlandson wrote. “Oh, the hideous insulting and triumphing that there was over some Englishmen's scalps that they had taken.” One of the Indians had brought back a Bible from the raid, and he offered it to Rowlandson. she immediately turned to chapter 30 of Deuteronomy and read, “though we were scattered from one end of the earth to the other, yet the Lord would gather us together, and turn all those curses upon our enemies.” It was a wonderful gift for the grieving Englishwoman. “I do not desire to live to forget this scripture,” she remembered, “and what comfort it was to me.”

Rowlandson's master was the Narragansett sachem Quinnapin. Her mistress was Quinnapin's new wife, Weetamoo, the sachem from Pocasset. After reluctantly joining her brother-in-law Philip, she had fled to the then-neutral Narragansetts. By marrying Quinnapin, who already had two wives but none as important as the Pocasset sachem, Weetamoo was now partners with the Pocassets' traditional enemy. After the Great swamp Fight, all of them were in this together.

By the middle of February, word had reached Menameset of the Mohawk attack on Philip. The Pokanoket sachem and what was left of his forces were heading to a village site well to the north on the Connecticut River. It was time for the Nipmucks and Narragansetts to meet with Philip and plan for the spring attack. When their scouts informed them that a large Puritan army, including six hundred horsemen, was headed for Menameset, the Nipmucks and Narragansetts immediately broke camp and headed north.

Keeping two thousand Native men, women, and children ahead of an English army on horseback might seem impossible. But as Mary Rowlandson witnessed firsthand, the Indians' knowledge of the land and their talent for working together made them more than a match for the fastest English forces. As a small group of warriors headed south “to hold the English army in play,” hundreds upon hundreds of Indians picked up their possessions and began to flee. “[T]hey marched on furiously, with their old and with their young. some carried their old decrepit mothers, some carried one and some another. Four of them carried a great Indian upon a bier, but going through a thick wood with him, they were hindered and could make no haste; whereupon they took him upon their backs and carried him, one at a time, till they came to Bacquag River.”

Known today as Miller's River, the waterway is an eastern branch of the Connecticut. “They quickly fell to cutting dry trees,” Rowlandson wrote, “to make rafts to carry them over the river.” Rowlandson and her master and mistress were among the first to cross the river. The Indians had heaped brush onto the log rafts to protect them from the frigid water, and Rowlandson was thankful that she made it across without wetting her feet, “it being a very cold time.”

It was now the third week of her captivity, and Rowlandson's hunger was such that she ate what she had earlier called “filthy trash,” from groundnuts and corn husks to the rotting meat of a long-dead horse. Rowlandson was often on the edge of starvation, but so were her captors, whose ability to find food in the winter landscape seemed nothing less than a miracle. “[s]trangely did the Lord provide for them,” she wrote, “that I did not see (all the time that I was among them) one man, woman, or child die with hunger.”

Now that she no longer had her daughter to care for, Rowlandson was expected to work. she was soon knitting a pair of white cotton stockings for her mistress, Weetamoo. As a sachem, Weetamoo wore both English and Native clothing. she was “a severe and proud dame ... bestowing ... as much time as any of the gentry of the land [in dressing herself neatly]: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with necklaces, with jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her hands.”

Just as the last groups of Indians reached the north bank of the river, the English army, under the command of Major Thomas savage, arrived at the southern bank. But instead of pursuing the Indians across the river, savage chose to do as so many Puritan commanders had done before him and quit the chase. For Rowlandson, it was a crushing turn of events, but the Lord must have had his reasons. “God did not give them courage or activity to go after us,” she wrote; “we were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance.”

The Indians continued north for several days until they reached the Connecticut River near the town of Northfield. Philip, Rowlandson was told, was waiting for them on the opposite bank. “When I was in the canoe,” she recalled, “I could not but be amazed at the numerous crew of pagans that were on the ... other side. When I came ashore, they gathered all about me ... [and] asked one another questions and laughed and rejoiced over their gains and victories.” For the first time of her captivity, Rowlandson started to cry. “Although I had met with so much affliction,” she wrote, “and my heart was many times ready to break, yet could I not shed one tear in their sight, but rather had been all this while in a maze, and like one astonished. But now I may say as Psalm 137, ‘By the Rivers of Babylon ... [I] wept.'”

One of the Indians asked why she was crying. Not knowing what to say, she blurted out that they were going to kill her. “ ‘No,' said he, ‘none will hurt you.'” soon after, she was given two spoonfuls of cornmeal and told that Philip wanted to speak with her.

It was one of several conversations she would have with the Pokanoket sachem. Despite everything she had heard of Philip's evil nature, Rowlandson was treated with kindness and respect by the Native leader. In the weeks ahead, she would knit a shirt and cap for Philip's son and even be invited to dine with the sachem. “I went,” she remembered, “and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers; it was made of parched wheat, beaten and fried in bear's grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life.”