captivity narrative

Captivity narratives are typically personal accounts of people who have been captured by an enemy, generally a enemy with a foreign culture. The best-known captivity narratives in North America are those concerning Europeans and Americans taken as captives and held by the indigenous peoples of North America. These narratives have had an enduring place in literature, history, ethnography, and the study of Native peoples.

They were preceded, among English-speaking peoples, by publication of captivity narratives related to English people taken captive and held by Barbary pirates, or sold for ransom or slavery. Others were taken captive in the Middle East. These accounts established some of the major elements of the form, often putting it within a religious framework, and crediting God or Providence for gaining freedom or salvation. Following the North American experience, additional accounts were written after British people were captured during exploration and settlement in India and East Asia.

Since the late 20th century, captivity narratives have also been studied as accounts of persons leaving, or held in contemporary religious cults or movements, thanks to scholars of religion like David G. Bromley and James R. Lewis.

A famous example of a captivity narrative, that historians regard as one of the first of its kind, is the personal account of Mary Rowlandson. Mary Rowlandson was a colonial American woman who was captured by Native Americans in 1676 during King Philip's War and held for 11 weeks before being ransomed. In 1682, six years after her ordeal, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson was published.

Certain North American captivity narratives related to being held among Native peoples were published from the 18th through the 19th centuries. There had already been numerous English accounts of captivity by Barbary pirates.

Other types of captivity narratives, such as those recounted by apostates from religious movements (i.e. "cult survivor" tales), have remained an enduring topic in modern media. They have been published in books and periodicals, in addition to being the subjects of film and television programs, both fiction and non-fiction.

Background

Because of the competition between New France and New England in North America, raiding between the colonies was frequent. Colonists in New England were frequently taken captive by Canadiens and their Indian allies (similarly, the New Englanders and their Indian allies took Canadiens and Indian prisoners captive). According to Kathryn Derounian-Stodola, statistics on the number of captives taken from the 15th through the 19th centuries are imprecise and unreliable, since record-keeping was not consistent and the fate of hostages who disappeared or died was often not known. Yet conservative estimates run into the thousands, and a more realistic figure may well be higher. Between King Philip's War (1675) and the last of the French and Indian Wars (1763), approximately 1,641 New Englanders were taken hostage. During the decades-long struggle between whites and Plains Indians in the mid-19th century, hundreds of women and children were captured.

Many narratives included a theme of redemption by faith in the face of the threats and temptations of an alien way of life. Barbary captivity narratives, accounts of English people captured and held by Barbary pirates, were popular in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. The first Barbary captivity narrative by a resident of North America was that of Abraham Browne (1655). The most popular was that of Captain James Riley, entitled ''An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Brig Commerce'' (1817).

Jonathan Dickinson's Journal, ''God's Protecting Providence ... '' (1699), is an account by a Quaker of shipwreck survivors captured by Indians in Florida. He says they survived by placing their trust in God to protect them. The ''Cambridge History of English and American Literature'' describes it as, "in many respects the best of all the captivity tracts."

Ann Eliza Bleecker's epistolary novel, ''The History of Maria Kittle'' (1793), is considered the first known captivity novel. It set the form for subsequent Indian capture novels.

Origins of narratives

New England and the Southern colonies

American Indian captivity narratives, accounts of men and women of European descent who were captured by Native Americans, were popular in both America and Europe from the 17th century until the close of the United States frontier late in the 19th century. Mary Rowlandson's memoir, ''A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson'', (1682) is a classic example of the genre. According to Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Rowlandson's captivity narrative was "one of the most popular captivity narratives on both sides of the Atlantic." Although the text temporarily fell out of print after 1720, it had a revival of interest in the 1780s. Other popular captivity narratives from the late 17th century include Cotton Mather's "A Notable Exploit: ''Dux Faemina Facti,''" on the captivity of Hannah Duston