Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife in Lancaster, Massachusetts, was one of many settlers taken captive during Metacom’s War. She spent twelve weeks in captivity before being ransomed by her family for the considerable sum of £20. Her account of this ordeal, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), was written in part to assert her moral purity (that she had not been sexually exploited) so that she could again live as a respectable Puritan woman. But Rowlandson’s dramatic and literary skills made her short book one of the most popular prose works of its time.

MARY ROWLANDSON

On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: their first coming was about sunrising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven. … [T]he Indians laid hold of us, pulling me one way, and the children another, and said, “Come go along with us”; I told them they would kill me: they answered, if I were willing to go along with them, they would not hurt me. …

The first week of my being among them I hardly ate any thing; the second week I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash; but the third week … they were sweet and savory to my taste. I was at this time knitting a pair of white cotton stockings for my [Indian] mistress; and had not yet wrought upon a sabbath day. When the sabbath came they bade me go to work. I told them it was the sabbath-day, and desired them to let me rest, and told them I would do as much more tomorrow; to which they answered me they would break my face. …

During my abode in this place, Philip [Metacom] 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. Afterwards he asked me to make a cap for his boy, for which he invited me to dinner. I went, 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. …

My master had three squaws, living sometimes with one, and sometimes with another one. … [It] was Weetamoo with whom I had lived and served all this while. A severe and proud dame she was, bestowing every day in dressing herself near as much time as any of the gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with necklaces, with jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her hands. When she had dressed herself, her work was to make girdles of wampom and beads. …

On Tuesday morning they called their general court (as they call it) to consult and determine, whether I should go home or no. And they all as one man did seemingly consent to it, that I should go home.

SOURCE : C. H. Lincoln, ed., Original Narratives of Early American History: Narratives of Indian Wars, 1675–1699 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1952), 14: 139–141.