One that got away Cressida Connolly THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE by
John Demos Papermac, £10, pp. 250 On a freezing morning in February 1704, the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, was attacked by a band of French and native Indian soldiers from Canada. Some 40 townspeople were killed, houses and barns were burned, and 112 people were captured and taken hostage. Several of these died on their enforced journey north. Among these casualties — slain by a single blow of the hatchet — was Eunice Williams, taken hostage along with her husband John and their five children. Both Mr and Mrs Williams came from respected Puritan families, and John was a minister of some note. Of those taken from Deer- field, it was the Williams family who attracted the most publicity. Two and a half Years later, when the widowed Reverend Williams was released and returned to Boston, he found that his ordeal had made him famous. He published a narrative about his captivity which became an instant bestseller. He was the Terry Waite of his day,
But it was his daughter Eunice who was to become the more notorious. The other Williams children were restored to their family, and subsequently lived lives of piety and restraint suitable to their background. Eunice, captured by the Indians, never came home again. John Demos, a formidably well qualified Professor at Yale, has traced the history of this unredeemed captive with a detective's thoroughness. Every note her father wrote, her brother's diaries, reports by contempo- rary Jesuits, letters to and from French officials, pamphlets and sermons of the time; all these are used to recreate the jig- saw which is her story. What emerges is both brilliant and tantalising: a picture in Which everything but the central character Is revealed.
For Eunice herself remains a mystery. Why did she reject her family? When her father visited her — which he did on more than one occasion — she refused to accom-
pany him, but chose to stay with her Mohawk captors. This first rejection was compounded when she forgot her native English, when she adopted Catholicism; finally, and most dramatically, when she married an Indian. To her family, and to a lesser extent the whole of New England, she became a subject of fervent prayer, a hapless victim of Popish savagery.
In fact Eunice stayed with the Indians from her own free will. Demos gives a short description of life among the Mohawks (an insufficient four pages of the book's 250) but draws no conclusions as to her motives in wishing to remain with them. He is too scholarly to allow much conjecture about Eunice's story, but it's easy to see the appeal of life with the Indians. Theirs was the kind of existence which hippies the world over have been attempting to emu- late for the last 30 years.
They were big on feasts and dancing and sharing. They were gentle (at least to their kinspeople), hospitable and liberal. They carried babies around in slings and never reprimanded their children. They enjoyed hanging out (Indians were amazed at the way Europeans paced about all the time. When they weren't working, the Mohawks just sat around.) They even had group therapy (Demos doesn't say so, but it's obvious). According to a description by a priest in 1694, they also invented Alco- holics Anonymous:
The men, gathered together according to the savage custom, expressed their detestation at the drunkenness which mastered them. Each spoke as the spirit of penance moved him; and some did more eloquently by the team that flowed in abund5nce from their eyes ...
Demos notes that male captives were far more often redeemed than their female counterparts. One can see why. Life among the Mohawks was feminist heaven. Where else could a woman in the late 17th century have full control over property and blood- lines? And their practice of protracted breastfeeding" acted as an effective form of birth control. Whereas Puritan women gave birth, on average, every two years, Indians had a child only every third or fourth year. The Mohawk word for mother applied to aunt as well — there was child- care assistance on tap. No wonder Eunice went native.
These answers to the mystery of Eunice's captivity the reader must imagine. They are the only gap in this otherwise full and always fascinating book. John Demos describes holding a document from the 1690s in his hands:
The pastness of history briefly dissolves — or rather reforms as the succession of present moments it was (and is).
Reading The Unredeemed Captive has the same effect.
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