In 1676 an English minister’s wife named Mary Rowlandson was taken captive from her home in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in a raid by the Nashaway war leader Monoco. As a prisoner, Rowlandson would travel across what is now Massachusetts in a party of Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett people led by Weetamoo, the Pocasset Wampanoag saunkskwa, or female leader. On the day of the raid, one member of the party gave Rowlandson a piece of cake. Rowlandson put the cake in her pocket, where it remained for weeks, molding, crumbling, and finally desiccating into shards. Over her eleven-week journey, Rowlandson would reach into her pocket for those dry crumbs. Whenever she ate one, she thought that if she ever returned from captivity, she “would tell the world what a blessing the Lord gave to such mean food.”
From a modern, secular viewpoint, Rowlandson’s story is a strange one, strangely told. Yet in the late seventeenth century, it was consumed with voracious appetite by English-reading audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1682 Rowlandson published a narrative of her experiences; the title, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, reflected her relief at her deliverance from captivity. The book became a best seller, so much so that few first editions of the text survive because people read it until it disintegrated. It remains a central source in early American studies to this day.
Rowlandson was caught up in King Philip or Metacom’s War, named for the Wampanoag sachem who used both names and was one of the war’s Indigenous leaders. Metacom and others recognized that colonists’ hunger for land would never be sated and united the Native peoples of the Northeast in an attempt to push out the invading English once and for all. In the bloody conflict that followed in 1675 and 1676, between one-fifth and one-third of the colonial New England population died. The war took a horrific toll on Native populations as well. Colonists turned on Native communities who had adapted to Christianity, exiling them to the Boston Harbor Islands in the middle of the winter, where many of them died of disease or exposure; colonial authorities sold the survivors into slavery in the Caribbean. By the end of the war, Weetamoo drowned in the Taunton River while fleeing English troops, and the English mounted Metacom’s head on a pole in Plymouth. Yet while the invaders outlasted the war, so too did Native people in the Northeast, with a resilience that Rowlandson described in detail.