Welcome to the first installment of a series of blogs revolving around the literature, religion, and history of captivity narratives, authored by religious collections assistant Colby Townsend!
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Individual Narratives and Subcategories
- Captivity Narratives and Religion
- Indian Captivity Narratives
- Conclusion
Introduction
Numerous books and articles have been written about captivity narratives over the last several decades because of the rich amount of information that can be gleaned about how cultures and peoples from different nations interacted, the ways that empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed, the roles that captivity played in the growth and development of the slave trade, and how identity was shaped and formed around issues like religion, race, and the “Other.” These narratives, whether fiction or non-fiction, are also relevant to readers today trying to understand issues regarding relationships between state governments and immigration, when large numbers of immigrants are being captured off of the streets, often without a trace. Most authors, though not all, of these early narratives of captivity wrote with religion explicitly in mind as a central part of the story they sought to tell. The fear of losing one’s religion to the captive group’s itself becomes a major part of the retelling of captivity, as colonists from a variety of European countries moved across oceans and seized land in the name of their country or sailors were captured on coasts after their ships wrecked. Captivity narratives not only worked to provide information for colonists, sailors, and citizens of their respective countries about the indigenous populations, but they became tools for identity formation at crucial moments during the Early Modern and Modern periods.
This series of blog posts about captivity narratives will describe some of the holdings of the Lilly Library that relate to the study of captivity. I have tried to be as exhaustive as possible within certain limits. First, the majority of the items I will share in this blog series date chronologically from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. If I had gone past about 1850, the series would have to expand far more than it already has—from one post to five. Second, as I will describe further below, the series will also cover a broad variety of subgenres within the larger umbrella of captivity narratives. These include narratives of Indian, barbary, slavery, pirate, and war captivity. Many of the narratives included in the series are non-fictional, historical accounts that tell the real-life experiences of historical persons. Others are fictional. The majority of the narratives are in English, either in original composition or in translation. Some items are in Latin or French. There are far more captivity narratives in the holdings of the Lilly Library than I have been able to gather here, so it is advisable to scholars who study peoples and texts in languages other than English to search for other narratives in the Lilly Library’s online catalogue.
The broad popularity of the captivity narrative in the western world, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, led numerous authors to write fictional captivity narratives, even though the narratives themselves claimed to be based on real accounts. Whether fiction or non-fiction, these accounts played important roles in the development of personal and national identities and to growing imperial powers in Europe and North and South America. This first blog post will cover larger questions about captivity narratives, including information regarding the genre and its subcategories, captivity narratives and religion, and then start to describe some of the Indian captivity narratives. Each description will include at least one photo of the item, with a link to the Lilly catalogue, and then information about the item. I hope that this is a helpful resource for scholars and students that might consider traveling—or those who are not able to travel but might request further information or digitization of any of the below items or others in the catalogue—to the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington to study captivity narratives in more detail. Even though there are a growing number of books that attend to this important historical genre, it is still an understudied topic in several ways. The genre also transcends normative boundaries between fields and invites multidisciplinary approaches, so the topic is ready for scholars and students from a variety of backgrounds and methodologies.
Individual Narratives and Subcategories
The genre of the captivity narrative was not only influential on the development of other genres like the novel, gothic romances, and historical romances, but it was also a malleable medium for authors to write both fiction and non-fiction from a variety of captive contexts. In this series of blog posts, I will cover the following subgenres of captivity narratives in the Lilly holdings that range from the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth: Indian captivity; slave narratives; barbary captivity; pirate captivity; and war captivity. In some of the posts I will describe both non-fictional and fictional accounts of captivity, and many of the accounts fall under two or three of these genres. David Duff explains how, “In the hands of the best creative artists,” the flexibility of “genre is at once an archive and a drawing board, a storehouse of tradition and a spur to originality” (Duff viii). Several of the accounts that we usually identify as Indian captivity narratives describe captives that only spend a few days or weeks with their Native American captors, sometimes being treated rather well, and their troubles only begin once they have crossed the border into Canada and are held as captives of war by the French. In some sense, then, many of these captivity narratives are not simply Indian or barbary or slave narratives but a mixture of the varieties of captivity narrative that became popular in the long eighteenth century.
Captivity Narratives and Religion
The relationship between captivity narratives and religion runs far more deeply than the simple fact that most, if not all, of the authors of captivity narratives were explicitly writing about how the characters—either real or fictional—at the center of their narratives kept their faith during the trial of captivity as they were tempted to convert to their captive’s religion or way of life. In fact, without prior developments in religious biography and autobiography, the genre of captivity would have developed in significantly different ways (Stratton). The genre’s reliance on religious autobiography meant that it would follow not only the forms and structures of Christian autobiography but also, to a certain extent, the genre’s deep interest in confirming the role of Christianity for the individual’s life and legacy.
Indian Captivity Narratives
The majority of the captivity narratives at the Lilly Library are by far Indian captivities. These include numerous fictional and non-fictional accounts, and most describe either the suffering and captivity of the narrator, or the narrator might be telling the story of the person who was held captive. Some, like Ann Eliza Bleecker’s The History of Maria Kittle (1797), claim to be based on real events when they are in fact fictional accounts created by their authors, authors who were often writing under pseudonyms. The accounts I will highlight range from the late seventeenth century, with Mary Rowlandson’s famous narrative, to the mid-nineteenth century with John Gilmary Shea’s collection of Catholic missionaries that experienced shipwrecks and Indian captivity. This first post will cover most of the Indian captivity narratives and part two will include the rest, as well as some resources for studying Indian captivity narratives and Indian captivity in early American fiction.
Readers will notice the difference in title for the Lilly Library’s copy of Rowlandson’s captivity narrative compared to the usual title scholars of American literature usually cite. In Boston, the title was The Soveraignty & Goodness of God but in London, where this copy was published later in 1682, it was titled A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, a Minister’s Wife in New-England. There are no extant copies of the first edition, but several copies of the second edition published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, allowing us to compare the second edition with the London edition. The two are basically identical except for the title pages (Literature in Context). The narrative describes Rowlandson’s capture in 1675 early in King Philip’s War (1675–1678). The Massachusetts Bay Colony was attacked, and she and her daughter were injured and taken captive. He daughter soon passed away, and the bulk of the narrative is then spent describing the Native group’s travels dodging English soldiers on their way to King Philip. Rowlandson is eventually ransomed and returned to her husband and describes the landscape of New England and the manners and ways of the Native Americans that she was with. Often described as one of the first American bestsellers, Rowlandson’s narrative was influential in both North America and Britain on the development of other captivity narratives, the novel, autobiography, and other genres.
Thomas Brown was either fifteen or sixteen years old when he enlisted in the British Corps of Rangers in 1756 during the French and Indian War. This narrative follows his experience from enlistment to a battle in January 1757 with a large group of French soldiers and Native Americans. Led by Major Rogers, the company was initially successful and captured an estimated thirty-five Native Americans and five-hundred French soldiers. While marching these captives back to Fort William-Henry, though, they were ambushed by a larger battalion and suffered major losses. The first shot on the company wounded Brown and he would be shot two more times in the long skirmish that would last the rest of the day. Native Americans discovered many of the survivors that night and either killed them or took them prisoner, Brown included. He then narrates the next three years in captivity in Canada, his failed attempts to escape and return home, the torture and murder of several prisoners, and his experiences as a Protestant with Catholicism in French Canada. He finds that as he goes to mass his owners are more lenient on him. Throughout, Brown provides explanation for the decisions he made that might seem to go against his standing as a British soldier and a man of Protestant faith, each time explaining how he did what he did to survive. In the end he is returned home in January 1760, three years after the initial battle that sent him into captivity and, according to Brown, three years and almost eight months since he had left home. This booklet narrating his experiences was published the same year he was released.
Although he received a good education as a child and entered Winchester College at the age of ten, Henry Grace reported that he did not focus on his education while at Winchester and decided to join the British army around the year 1746 instead. As part of General Lascelles’s regiment, he travelled to Guernsey, Liverpool, and Dublin for a few years, until the regiment was ordered to go to Nova Scotia. In Robinson Crusoe fashion, he did all of this against the will of his parents and comments several times throughout his narrative that it would have been better if he had done what they wanted. This becomes clear as he narrates his experience in Canada. One day Grace was performing guard duties on the edge of a forest and was captured by Native Americans. They march him back to their tribe where he is beaten by a crowd, led to the Chief’s hut, stripped naked, and forced to sit by a fire until his skin starts to blister. He quickly learns that the best chance he has to live is to do whatever he is told.
Grace then narrates the growth in numbers of fellow prisoners and the ways that many of them die, and in passing he attempts to explain as much as he can about the life of the tribe he was with, the tools and items they create for day-to-day life, and the local flora and fauna if he has the relevant information. He shares detailed notes about the geography and the layout of many French and Native American fortifications, seeming to try to provide some information that might help the British military like whether or not a fort has cannons. After many years in captivity and numerous injuries and near-death episodes, Grace is finally freed at the end of the French and Indian War. He serves a few more years in the military and then is discharged without credit for his years in captivity and is not awarded a pension.
This narrative ends in a different way than others. He finally gets to go home after roughly twelve years of captivity, but he finds out through letters first that his father has died and then later that his mother has died, though she left him everything she had. Something happens between him and his friends and family, and they all want to ruin him for an unspecified reason, though possibly to get to his inheritance or maybe because of a potential dishonorable discharge from the military. At the time of writing the History, he is destitute, and what makes this captivity narrative unique is that it is an attempt to ask for financial support to anyone who will give it to him because his arm is too badly injured after a group of Native Americans tattooed it, causing it to swell to the size of his leg, and never being able to fully recover. He cannot do normal day labor jobs and states that he must now rely on the charity and help of others, after spending all he had to try to “recover what was due to” him (55), possibly what his mother left him. Whatever the decision was on his discharge, he is punished for his time in captivity because he receives no pay for the ten years that he was a captive and no pension, though he had seen other soldiers receive both.
Originally published in Philadelphia in 1784, this copy of A Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Benjamin Gilbert and his Family, published in London in 1790, highlights the continuing transatlantic popularity of the North American Indian captivity narrative since Mary Rowlandson’s narrative was published in London a century earlier. This copy is in good condition and was rebounded with some mending to damage some pages done sometime in the twentieth century. The narrative follows the capture and captivity of fifteen people, ranging in age from nine months to sixty-nine years old by a group of eleven Native Americans. Benjamin Gilbert narrated the story to William Walton, a brother of Mrs. Gilbert, who then had the book published. The narrator reports the actions in court-like fashion, stating the facts, dates, and actors as precisely as possible based on the combined memories of the captives after returning from Canada. Six of the eleven captors and their tribes are named, ranging from Mohawks, Cayugas, and Delaware, with the rest simply marked down as “The other 5 were Senecas” (7).
These manuscript documents are unique compared to all of the other captivity narratives highlighted in this series. Rather than having a full narrative description of his capture, march by Native Americans across the US/Canada border, treatment, and eventual escape, these manuscripts are a snapshot in real time on Ketcham’s return home. Although a later version of the story as related by his family was printed in the nineteenth century, these manuscripts document two moments in Daniel Ketcham’s escape from captivity when he arrived at the border of Canada and the United States. One, signed by Edward Baker Littlehales, Major of Brigade, on May 29th, 1793, at Navy Hall on the Canadian side of what is now Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, allowing him to “Pass into the United States without molestation.” The other, signed by Timothy Pickering on the United States’s side of Niagara (maybe even at Old Fort Niagara), describes how Ketcham had “arrived here yesterday”—probably the area in general, not just the US side—and had been taken captive from his home in Kentucky. Pickering details Ketcham’s plan to get home by following the Susquehanna River, and then to “Pittsburg.” Pickering recommends the “humane attention of the citizens of the United States” as he makes his way home. Ketcham lived until 1829, dying at the age of 75.
This item and the next are bound together, though they are different narratives and the title page does not alert the reader to a second narrative at the back of the book. The first, A Narrative of the Extraordinary Sufferings of Mr. Robert Forbes, his Wife and Five Children, does not fit the generic label of an Indian captivity narrative but was clearly read in the context of this genre since it was printed along with the Indian captivity of Mrs. Frances Scott. A case can be made for reading it as general captivity narrative because the family is conned by “three men, by the names of Midstaff, Pancake, and Christian” into thinking that they can move from their residence in Canada (though they resided in Canada, Mr. Forbes and his wife are US citizens) back down to the states and end up stuck in the wilderness because of these conmen.
Their neighbors even warn them ahead of time that the men will likely abandon them in the wilderness, but they do not listen and go forward with the plans anyway. They move in the middle of winter with their five small children and ten days later are abandoned by the three men, after Mr. Forbes, his oldest son, and the men have left a pregnant Mrs. Forbes and four of the children behind due to the difficulty of the terrain. Mr. Forbes and his son have to decide whether to go back to their family or keep moving forward to make it to the settlement and choose to move forward instead of going back. By the time they arrive at the settlement and receive help themselves it has been fifty days since they left Mrs. Forbes and the four children. They find that three of the children have starved to death, but the oldest daughter and Mrs. Forbes are barely alive. They are nursed back to health, and the narrator describes how Mrs. Forbes, their son, and their baby are now all in good health. There are a few reasons to believe that Bradman added a lot of fiction to the history as related by the Forbeses (e.g., the names of the conmen, the decision to move a pregnant wife and five small children in the middle of winter, the wildly different seasonal weather, and a sometimes-omniscient narrator) but it does seem to rely on the information that they gave to Bradman. More importantly for our purposes is its connection to the next captivity narrative.
This short narrative describes the brief Indian captivity of Mrs. Frances Scott after a group of Native Americans attack her home one night. Mr. Scott had accidentally left the door open, and the party let themselves in, yelling at their arrival. Mr. Scott attempted to flee out of the front door but was killed in front of the home. Most of Mrs. Scott’s children were killed in their beds, though one daughter ran over to her after one Native American had told Mrs. Scott to stand against the wall. She begged them to not kill her daughter, but they tomahawked the daughter in her arms. Mrs. Scott is marched away from her home and to the home of the group of Native Americans. The next day she asks her captor if she can go to the river to clean off her blouse, since it still had her daughter’s blood on it, and he allows her to go. Since he is turned the other way, she continues walking past the river and away from her captors. The rest of the narrative is spent describing her travels in the wilderness and her attempt to arrive back at home. She is gone around a month and subsists mainly on leaves and sugar cane. Although she encounters many animals, including bears and other predators, none of them attack her. She is bitten by a snake that she identifies as poisonous but, according to the narrator, the venom might have done little harm because of her emaciated state. Birds help her to find her way home, and eventually she is home safe but mourns the loss of her family, especially her daughter.
The editor, likely the printer, Hori Brown, explains in the preface that though readers in the 1810s might be surprised that at one point New England residents lived in fear that Native Americans might attack their homes at any given moment, all they have to do is read early captivity narratives and they’ll be aware of how lucky they are to live at a time when that was no longer the case. Brown chose the narratives of Mr. John Williams and Mrs. Mary Rowlandson as representative of the genre for a few reasons, including that the narratives are written in a way that pulls in the attention of the children who either read the stories themselves or hear them read out loud and that the stories lead their readers to the conclusion that God had taken care of them and their countrymen by providing the safer living conditions of the early nineteenth century. This copy still has the original bright blue wrappings over the boards, and has a few names scribbled on the cover and inside the pages that show ownership throughout the nineteenth century.
I will only briefly summarize John Williams’s narrative and refer the reader to the beginning of this post for Mary Rowlandson’s. They each take up about half of the volume and appear to have been printed by Brown in September 1811 as separate books and then bound together, since Williams’s narrative comes first and then there is a full title page again for Rowlandson’s about halfway through the book. Originally printed in Boston in 1707 a year after he returned home (see Evans’s bibliography, entry #1340), Williams’s narrative, originally titled The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, had gone through many editions by the time Brown reprinted it in 1811. In his case, Williams was captured with his wife and some of their children (some were killed in their home) in 1704 after a militant French and Indian group attacked the fort at Deerfield where he and his family lived. While they were being marched toward Quebec, his wife was killed by a Native American in a river. Williams quotes scripture throughout the narrative, both to explain to his reading audience how the Christian Bible applies to each episode, and he describes other captives and himself as quoting and discussing scripture as they made their march. Eventually making it to Quebec, Williams is held captive by the French until France and Britain come to an agreement to each release prisoners in November 1706. Though his wife and some of his children were killed, he returns to New England with four of his children and one remained in Canada that was adopted by Mohawks.
Reprinted in 1957, this edition of James Van Horne’s 1817 captivity narrative made Van Horne’s story more widely accessible due to its likely small print run and how the reprinter, Lawrence B. Romaine, rescued the last known copy of the story. This edition was made available in an edition of only 250 copies (the Lilly’s is #16), but it is available at many university libraries and in a later reprint in the 1970s. Van Horne was an American soldier in the War of 1812 and describes in minute detail how his regiment was attacked and nearly wiped out by Native Americans at the start of the war. He was lucky to not be injured and taken captive, owned by an elderly Native American. He describes the travels that he embarks on with his group, the type of work he has to do on a daily basis for the Native Americans and usually sprinkles in connections to events in the war. He also remembers specific dates that events happened and makes sure to note them as he describes his narrative. After suffering badly with other captives, being sold to a trader, and making his way with a large group of prisoners of war to the British, he and the others are returned to the US in May 1814. Van Horne adds some details here and there about how he believed that Native Americans had the body parts, often hearts, of white settlers or militiamen, and claimed that they cooked and ate them. His perception that Native Americans were cannibals seems to have been a big influence on the way he understood his captors.
One of the more interesting and lengthy Indian captivity narratives in the Lilly’s collection, literary historians and other scholars treat John D. Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America (originally published under the title Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes Located West of the Mississippi) with caution. As Tim Fulford has explained, “It’s unlikely that we will ever know for sure whether Hunter was what he claimed to be or, if he wasn’t, how much experience of Indian life he really had.” In any case, his narrative doesn’t seem to have originally fully been intended as a captivity narrative, as the earlier title suggests, and “much of what Hunter reveals about the Kickapoos, Kansas, and Osages was little different from the generalized discussions of Indian customs to be found in many travel books and histories” that were available at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Fulford 248–249). Though Hunter claimed to have been taken and raised by Native Americans that killed his parents, the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. Still, whether or not he had been raised by Native Americans, Hunter’s narrative gave him “social success on a Byronic scale,” and the narrative went through several editions both in the United States and in Britain.
Conclusion
This concludes the first installment of a five-part series of blog posts on the holdings of the Lilly Library related to a variety of types of captivity narratives. I will continue with Indian captivity in Part Two will finish examining Indian captivity narratives proper, with a further look at bibliographies and Indian captivity in fiction. Part Three will examine slave narratives, Part Four barbary captivity narratives, and Part Five barbary captivity in fiction, pirate captivity, and war captivity.
About the Author
Colby Townsend is a dual PhD candidate in English and Religious Studies. His dissertation examines the ways that transatlantic Romantic-era discourse around the origins of Native Americans as being from the East influenced authors of fiction, captivity narratives, and new American scripture. He is the co-editor, with Abby Clayton, of Printing New Religion: Transatlantic Movements of the Nineteenth Century (under contract with the University of Illinois Press), which is a collection of fifteen essays by scholars writing about the agential role print played in the development of New Religious Movements in the nineteenth century transatlantic world.
Works Cited and Consulted
David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford University Press, 2009), viii.
Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford University Press, 2006), 248–249.
Billy J. Stratton, Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War (The University of Arizona Press, 2013).
“The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandsonby Mary Rowlandson.” Literature in Context, anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/work/Rowlandson/rowlandson-sovereignty?section=preface&num=1. Accessed 25 Feb. 2026.
Leave a Reply