The Unredeemed Captive, by John Demos

At the start of John Demos' book The Unredeemed Captive, a group of Native Americans attack the English town of Deerfield, kidnap a few of its people, and take them to Canada. On October 21, 1703, in response to the attacks, the "Reverend Mr." John Williams, the town's leader, writes to Joseph Dudley, the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for tax relief, funding to rebuild the fort, a prisoner exchange to free the captured residents, and soldiers to protect the town. Governor Dudley agrees to fulfill the reverend's requests, and stations 16 soldiers at the town's fort (Demos 1994, 11-13). In response to English counterattacks, Governor Pierre de Rigaud, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, begins to plan an February "expedition" of 48 French troops and 200 of France's "domiciled Indians." During the expedition, the soldiers destroy the town of Deerfield. Many of the residents that do not manage to flee or hide are killed or captured, including the reverend and his family. The troops then take the captured colonists to Canada, where they will be held hostage in an attempt to negotiate the release of many French prisoners under English control, including Vaudreuil's best "privateer," Pierre Maisonat, the infamous "Captain Baptiste" (Demos 1994, 15-19). In The Unredeemed Captive, Demos uses the incident at Deerfield as a lens to reveal the underlying political, cultural, and religious conflicts in colonist-Native American relations, and those between the European colonizing nations themselves.

Just over two centuries before the Deerfield incident, many European countries, including Spain, England, and France, began to establish colonies in the Americas. Although many of their motives varied, almost all of the colonists sought to "ci...

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... become "Indianized." In his Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur notes that thousands more European children that were captured by the Indians have either forgotten their true parents entirely or refused to follow them. Many adult European captives also became Indianized, marrying the "squaws" that had adopted them. The converted Europeans cited many reasons for their decision to stay with the natives, including the relative freedom and ease of the Indian lifestyle. Crèvecoeur then explains that the natives must not be as "savage" as he and his fellow colonists claimed, because the sheer number of Europeans that have converted indicates that there is something "singularly captivating" about the Indians' "social bond" (Crèvecoeur 305-06).

Works Cited

John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive

Crevecoeur, Letters From An American Farmer