The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson by Mary Rowlandson: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson
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The title page and the tenth of February
The sovereignty and goodness of GOD, together with the faithfulness of his promises displayed, being a narrative of the captivity and restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, commended by her, to all that desires to know the Lord’s doings to, and dealings with her. Especially to her dear children and relations. The second Addition [sic] Corrected and amended. Written by her own hand for her private use, and now made public at the earnest desire of some friends, and for the benefit of the afflicted. Deut. 32.39. See now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me, I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand.
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. There were five persons taken in one house; the father, and the mother and a sucking child, they knocked on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive. There were two others, who being out of their garrison upon some occasion were set upon; one was knocked on the head, the other escaped; another there was who running along was shot and wounded, and fell down; he begged of them his life, promising them money (as they told me) but they would not hearken to him but knocked him in head, and stripped him naked, and split open his bowels. Another, seeing many of the Indians about his barn, ventured and went out, but was quickly shot down. There were three others belonging to the same garrison who were killed; the Indians getting up upon the roof of the barn, had advantage to shoot down upon them over their fortification. Thus these murderous wretches went on, burning, and destroying before them.
The excerpt gives the book’s title page first, with its full claim to be a narrative of the captivity and restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, ‘written by her own hand for her private use’ and made public ‘for the benefit of the afflicted’, followed by the note that this is ‘The second Addition’ corrected and amended, and then the verse from Deuteronomy. It then opens the narrative proper on the tenth of February 1675, when the Indians came with great numbers upon Lancaster about sunrising and several houses were seen burning and the smoke ascending to heaven.
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Captivity narrative
20,241 words
1.1 h
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Lancaster, Massachusetts, and the country crossed by the removes, 1675-1676; the narrative is written in English, in the plain Puritan manner, with Scripture cited by chapter and verse.
Twenty removes, five providences and the return, in eleven parts
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Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #851
The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson is a first-person account of the attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts, on the tenth of February 1675, and of the eleven weeks and five days its author spent among the Native forces of King Philip’s War. Thirty-seven people were in the Rowlandson house that morning; twelve were killed and twenty-four taken alive, and a bullet passed through the child in her arms. The child died nine days later. The book follows the twenty removes that carried her through the wilderness to a ransom of twenty pounds and a return home, and it reads the whole ordeal as the providence of God.
The narrative is built from twenty removes, from Lancaster to the Connecticut valley and back to Wachusett, and it closes with five numbered passages of providence and the gathering of the surviving family. Rowlandson writes as a Puritan believer, measuring every hunger and every kindness against Scripture, and her book became the model for the American captivity narrative. Nothing in it is fiction, and nothing is merely reported; the events are selected to show a hand at work. The Wikipedia article on Mary Rowlandson gives the biography and the setting. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #851.
The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson by Mary Rowlandson: Summary, Ideas & Arguments
This summary and analysis follows The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson from its title page to its last page, keeping the order of the twenty removes and the five passages of providence that close the book. Rowlandson writes in the first person and in the plain style of Puritan testimony: short sentences, named places, exact dates, and a Bible text for nearly every turn of her condition. The book was published in 1682, and its title page describes it as ‘The second Addition [sic] Corrected and amended’, written by her own hand for her private use and made public at the earnest desire of some friends. Nothing in it is shaped as a modern memoir; it is an argument about providence, and the events are the evidence. The title page’s own phrase for the book is ‘The sovereignty and goodness of GOD’. The reader is asked to judge the case the narrative presents.
The attack came about sunrising. The house stood on the edge of a hill, with two flankers at opposite corners and one of them unfinished, and it was fired with flax and hemp from the barn; her brother-in-law fell dead as they came out of the house, and a bullet passed through her side and through the child in her arms. Of the thirty-seven people in the house, twelve were killed and twenty-four taken alive. ‘their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit’, she writes, that she chose captivity over death. Her wounded child died on Feb. 18, 1675, nine days after the wounding, and was buried by the Indians on a hill. The narrative dates the attack to February 1675/6, the Old Style reckoning of the period, and this page keeps that calendar.
She was sold to Quinnapin, ‘a Sagamore, and married King Philip’s wife’s sister’, and lived in his household among his three squaws, one of them ‘Wattimore [Weetamoo]’, ‘a severe and proud dame’. Her account is full of work: knitting stockings, making shirts, a cap for Philip’s boy, a shift for an apron, a shirt for her master’s papoose. It is equally full of food, from ground nuts and the broth of horses’ feet to cakes so dry ‘it was like little flints’. The Puritan colony she came from is the same one Hawthorne would imagine in The Scarlet Letter, though Rowlandson writes as a participant and not as a novelist. Her captivity is an economy as much as an ordeal; every garment and every meal has a price. The names of the places and the prices of the goods are the record of a working life carried into captivity.
Scripture is the spine of the book. The Bible is ‘my guide by day, and my pillow by night’; her mistress throws it out of doors and she catches it up again; a Bible from the Medfield plunder leads her to Deuteronomy 28 and then to the promises of chapter 30. The title page sets the whole story under Deut. 32.39, ‘I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal’. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress belongs to the same Puritan world, and the two books were read by the same households, one as allegory and one as report. ‘He laid upon me less than I deserved’, she writes, and the argument is less that she is innocent than that she is spared. Her reading is not private comfort only; it is the framework that makes the events intelligible to her and to the friends who asked for the book.
The last removes turn on a ransom. The Sagamores ‘said they were the General Court’ and asked what her husband would give; she named twenty pounds, and ‘it was a Praying Indian that wrote their letter for them’. The sum was raised by Boston gentlemen and Mrs. Usher, and John Hoar of Concord brought the third letter. She came home to Lancaster to find ‘not one Christian to be seen, nor one house left standing’, and was received at Charlestown by Mr. Thomas Shepard, where the family stayed eleven weeks. Her Wikipedia entry records the bare dates of her life, and the text itself is at Project Gutenberg #851. Readers who want the company it keeps can begin with the classic fiction shelf. It ends not with the war but with a household, and its last pages are a list of debts to friends.
Historical Context
King Philip’s War broke out in 1675 between the English colonies of New England and a coalition of Native peoples, and the removes cross the country of the Nipmuc, Narragansett and Wampanoag. Rowlandson names the places as she passes them, Wenimesset, Squakeag, the Connecticut river, Wachusett, and the narrative is a witness to the war from inside the Native camps as well as a document of English fear. The ‘Praying Indians’ appear in it as enemies and as individuals who help her, and the period’s dating means that the tenth of February 1675 falls in 1676 by the modern calendar. Lancaster was a frontier settlement, and the house that was attacked stood on the edge of a hill above it.
The book appeared in 1682 with a preface signed ‘Per Amicum’, the address of a Puritan minister and not of Rowlandson herself, usually attributed to Increase Mather. That preface frames the narrative as evidence of God’s dealings with New England, and the title page makes the same claim in the author’s name, calling the book ‘The second Addition [sic] Corrected and amended’. The captivity narrative was already a recognized form, and Rowlandson’s book gave it its most influential example, read as history, as sermon and as adventure. Its popularity belonged to a colony that had lost its confidence and wanted to hear that the loss was a lesson.
Rowlandson’s purpose is stated on the title page: the book is published ‘for the benefit of the afflicted’. Her affliction is read as chastisement, not as abandonment, and the narrative is a jeremiad in prose, a call to repentance addressed to a colony coming to terms with defeat. The sentence about her captors, that ‘not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me, in word or action’, is part of that argument: the mercy shown her is evidence of providence, and the reader is asked to see his own prosperity the same way. It is also a woman’s account of work, hunger and fear, and that plain record has outlived the sermon. Its influence runs through the captivity narratives that followed, and through the American habit of reading a private ordeal as a public lesson.
Key Ideas & Arguments
- Providence, not chance: Every remove is read as God’s hand: the attack, the hunger, the lost child and the ransom are all ‘the works of the Lord’. The argument is not that the captors are innocent but that nothing happens without permission, and the dates and places are gathered as evidence of a design. The proof is cumulative.
- Affliction as chastisement: ‘He laid upon me less than I deserved’, she writes, and the book treats suffering as a father’s correction rather than a sign of rejection. The turn comes in Deuteronomy 30, where the curses are followed by a promise of gathering, and the return home is read as that promise kept. The turning point is a text, not a battle.
- Scripture as daily bread: The Bible is her ‘guide by day, and my pillow by night’. Texts are quoted by chapter and verse as they occur to her, in the wigwam and in the swamp, and the book’s structure is a chain of such occasions rather than a chronicle of battles. The verse is the day’s event as much as the meal is.
- The captive as witness: She writes because the story is not hers alone: it is made public ‘for the benefit of the afflicted’, and her private grief is offered as public proof. The first-person voice is the instrument of that proof, and its plainness is deliberate rather than artless. It is an argument addressed to readers she will never meet.
- The wilderness as stripping: Prosperity is the danger and affliction the lesson. She has seen ‘the extreme vanity of this world’, and sets the plenty she lost against the bare walls of the Boston house where the family set up house-keeping; the book ends with gratitude for small mercies. The contrast between the two houses frames the lesson.
- A peaceable return: She urges goodwife Joslin not to run away, and she waits for God’s due time; she also insists that no abuse was offered her. The ending is not revenge but gathering: the ransom paid, the children redeemed one by one, the family ‘now gathered together’, and the dead child left in the wilderness. The last page is a thanksgiving, not a complaint.
Core Arguments & Influence
- The jeremiad in prose: The book belongs to the sermon culture of New England: it reads a military disaster as a call to repentance and prints the evidence in order. Rowlandson does not argue in the abstract; she lists dates, places, prices and texts, and the accumulation is the argument. The title page’s verse from Deuteronomy sets the terms, and the last pages turn the same lens on the colony’s uneasy peace. The form is the captivity narrative, but the purpose is exhortation, and the two are not separated. What looks like a diary is a designed sequence of proofs, arranged so that the reader arrives at the same conclusion as the writer. The dates are not decoration; they fix the argument in a public calendar.
- Typology and the wilderness: Puritan preaching read New England as Israel in the wilderness, and the removes give that figure a literal shape: a chosen people led through swamps and rivers, fed with strange food, and tried by hunger. The texts she chooses, Isaiah 43.2 at the river crossing, Psalm 137 by the waters, Deuteronomy 30 for the return, are the typological map of the journey. The narrative works because the map and the ground are the same, and because she never lets the allegory replace the hunger. The Bible is not decoration in this book; it is the instrument by which the journey is understood while it is still being made. She reads her own story as the text of a sermon, and the sermon is addressed to the colony.
- Work, gender and the economy of captivity: The wigwam is a workplace. She knits stockings, makes shirts and a cap, and is paid in broth, a hat, a handkerchief, an apron; she is also a valuable object whose redemption has a price. The book records women’s labour in captivity with unusual precision, and it records the bargaining over her body, from Quinnapin’s household to the twenty pounds raised in Boston. Her mistresses, Wattimore and the old squaw, are drawn as employers as much as captors, and the domestic detail is part of the argument: the captivity is survived by work. The price of a shirt, the price of a cap and the price of a woman are all recorded in the same ledger.
- The making of the captivity narrative: Rowlandson’s book fixed the pattern that later captivities would follow: the sudden attack, the march, the death of a child, the Scripture in the wilderness, the ransom and the return. It was printed in 1682 and read as providential history, and later writers would borrow the frame and change its purpose. Its influence is visible wherever an American narrative turns a personal ordeal into a national lesson, and its plain report has proved more durable than its sermons. Its brevity made it easy to imitate.
- Providence and the Praying Indian: The book’s attitude to Native people is not simple. The same pages that call the enemy ‘ravenous beasts’ record acts of kindness, and the ‘Praying Indians’ appear as letter-writers, messengers and threats. Rowlandson’s theology requires the enemy to be an instrument, and her experience keeps showing them as persons; the tension is part of the book’s historical value, and it is why the narrative is still read as a document of contact as well as of faith. The mercy she receives from strangers is, in her reading, the strongest proof of all.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson?
The text here is the Project Gutenberg transcription, set for an e-reader rather than a facsimile. The title page is kept with its own spelling, including ‘The second Addition’, and the removes are grouped into eleven parts so that a reader can follow the journey without losing the thread of the argument. The paragraphs are the narrative’s own, and nothing has been modernised or abridged. The result is a book that reads as it was printed and still fits a pocket. The running headings are kept where the transcription prints them, so the reader can see where the edition divides the journey.
Rowlandson’s prose rewards slow reading. The sentences are short, the places are named, and the Scripture references are given, so the book can be read as a historical document, as a religious argument, or as the first American story of survival. Students of the war, of Puritan religion and of women’s writing will each find a different book in the same pages, and the groups below make the shape of it easy to see. There are no notes to get in the way, and no modern paraphrase to soften the text.
The book is in the public domain, and the files are offered in the formats most e-readers use. It can be read straight through or by the removes. For a reader coming to the captivity narrative for the first time, this is the place to begin, and for a reader returning to it, the text is here without apparatus. There is no introduction to read first; the narrative begins at the title page.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #851, the public-domain text this edition was set from, with the title page and the running headings kept as printed.
- The twenty removes in eleven parts Each group follows the narrative’s own unit, from the attack at Lancaster to the twentieth remove and the five passages of providence that close the book. Short removes are paired and the longer stretches are kept whole.
- The title page as printed The 1682 title page, with ‘The second Addition [sic] Corrected and amended’ and the verse from Deuteronomy, stands at the head of the text rather than being summarised away. Nothing has been paraphrased.
- Original spelling and paragraphing The text keeps its own spelling and punctuation, so the reader meets Rowlandson’s prose as the transcription gives it, without modernised dialogue or broken-up sentences. The original punctuation is left alone.
- Hawthorne’s novel of the same Puritan colony, where the scaffold and the meeting house set the terms of the story, free in the same e-reader formats, with the same care for the printed text. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Bunyan’s allegory of the same Puritan world, the book that taught a century of readers to see the Christian life as a journey through danger, free here in the same formats. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The shelf of classic novels and memoirs, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, all free and formatted for e-readers, with the same clean text as this edition. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The contents of this transcription list twenty removes, and the running headings begin at the ninth, with the sixteenth printed ‘THE SIXTEENTH REMOVAL’, the text’s own variant. After the twentieth remove come five numbered passages of providence, then the account of the return home and the gathering of the family. The eleven groups below follow that order, pairing short removes where the narrative runs them together; no group adds an episode the text does not contain. The first eight removes run on without headings in this transcription, so the opening groups cover more ground.
- Part 1 — The tenth of February at Lancaster: On the tenth of February 1675 the Indians came upon Lancaster about sunrising. The house stood on the edge of a hill and was fired with flax and hemp from the barn; her brother-in-law fell dead as they came out, and a bullet passed through her side and through the child in her arms. Of thirty-seven in the house, twelve were killed and twenty-four taken alive. Several houses in the town were burning.
- Part 2 — Nine days and the death of the child: The company marched into the wilderness, and for nine days she sat with her wounded child in her lap, in the snow and then in a wigwam. The child died on Feb. 18, 1675, about six years and five months old, and was buried on a hill. She lay beside the body that night, and in the morning was taken back to Quinnapin’s wigwam. Her daughter Mary was nearby, and was kept from her.
- Part 3 — The first removals and the Bible from the plunder: While the English army pressed nearby, the company moved from swamp to river, and at the Connecticut, with her foot on the canoe, an outcry stopped the crossing and her son Joseph came to her through the company. A Bible taken at Medfield reached her, and she read Deuteronomy 28 and then the first seven verses of chapter 30, where the promise of gathering stands after the curses. The promise was the one she held to.
- Part 4 — The ninth remove, five miles up the river: From the Connecticut the company went five miles up the river and crossed. Here she made a shirt for an Indian who paid her nothing, and here the text’s own headings begin. Hunger, a heavy load and the search for ground nuts fill these days, with no news of the English army and no sign of the ransom. The river country was strange to her.
- Part 5 — The tenth and eleventh removes, a mile at a time: A part of the company moved three-quarters of a mile and then a day’s journey up the river, over hills so steep she had to creep. She was kicked for going back for food, and refused a bit of venison; the narrative records these small cruelties beside the larger ones, and the hunger that made every stop a calculation. She counted the miles and the nuts alike.
- Part 6 — The twelfth remove, a Sabbath of packing: On a Sabbath morning she asked her master whether he would sell her to her husband; he answered ‘Nux’, and her spirit rejoiced. Her mistress snatched the Bible from her and threw it out of doors, and she caught it up and kept it in her pocket. A slap, a heavy load and a turn back followed, and Psalm 46.10 stilled her. The scripture came to her hand, she says, when she needed it.
- Part 7 — The thirteenth remove in the thicket: Instead of turning toward the Bay the company went five or six miles down the river into a thicket of brush and stayed almost a fortnight. She made a shirt for a papoose and was paid in broth thickened with bark; an Indian told her that her son had been roasted and eaten, a lie she set against their ‘horrible addictedness to lying’. Ashes thrown in her eyes left her blind until morning. She had begun to think her hopes would come to nothing.
- Part 8 — The fourteenth and fifteenth removes toward the Bay: The company packed again and turned toward the Bay towns, and she had nothing all day but crumbs of cake so dry ‘it was like little flints’. Ground nuts and a heavy load carried her over the hills to the Banquang river once more, with the English army somewhere behind and the ransom still only a rumour. Philip’s shirt brought a shilling and his boy’s cap a pancake fried in bear’s grease.
- Part 9 — The sixteenth remove, wading the Banquang: ‘We began this remove with wading over Banquang river’, she writes, the water up to the knees and so cold she thought it would cut her in sunder. On the far side came word that a letter from the council about redeeming the captives had reached the Sagamores, and that another would follow in fourteen days, when she must be at Wachusett. The hope lifted her, and a troop of near thirty horsemen in English clothes frightened her by looking like deliverance.
- Part 10 — The seventeenth to nineteenth removes to Wachusett: A comfortable remove, she calls the seventeenth, because hope had returned, but her strength failed and she was fed a spoonful of samp and the broth of horses’ feet. Then came a dead Englishman on the ground, a bitter day of travel, the swamp below Wachusett, and Philip taking her by the hand with ‘two weeks more and you shall be mistress again’. She washed for the first time that month.
- Part 11 — The twentieth remove, the letters and the return: The last remove built a great wigwam for a day of dancing; goodwife Kettle came in, and her sister and daughter were near but kept from her. Then John Hoar arrived with the third letter, eight of the company danced, and her master agreed to let her go for a pint of liquors. Five passages of providence follow, then Lancaster in ruins, Boston, and the family gathered. The dead child stayed in the wilderness.
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Part of: Classic Fiction · Mary Rowlandson
