Mayflower

house and began firing on the garrison “so that the bullets seemed to fly like hail.” In no time at all, three of the men stationed at the windows had been hit, one of them quite badly in the jaw. The Indians found large quantities of flax and hemp in the barn, and jamming the combustibles up against the sides of the house, they attempted to set the clapboards on fire. One of the men was able to douse the flames with a bucket of water, but the Indians “quickly fired it again,” Rowlandson wrote, “and that took.” Soon the roof of the house was a roaring maelstrom of flame. “Now is the dreadful hour come,” she remembered. “Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out.” Mothers and children were “crying out for themselves and one another, ‘Lord, what shall we do?’”
    With six-year-old Sarah in her arms and her other two children and a niece clustered around her, she resolved “to go forth and leave the house.” But as they approached the doorway, the Indians unleashed a volley of “shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house as if one had taken a handful of stones and threw them.” Mary and the children paused, but with the flames roaring behind them, they had no choice but to push ahead, even though they could see the Indians waiting for them with their muskets, hatchets, and spears. Her brother-in-law John, already wounded, was the first to die. The Indians shouted and began to strip his body of clothes as they continued firing at anyone who dared leave the house. Rowlandson was hit in the side, the bullet passing through her and into the abdomen of the child she clutched protectively in her arms. Her nephew William’s leg was broken by a bullet, and he was soon killed with a hatchet. “Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen,” she wrote, “standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.” Rowlandson’s oldest sister, who had not yet left the house and had just seen her son and brother-in-law killed, cried out, “Lord let me die with them!” Almost immediately, she was struck by a bullet and fell down dead across the threshold of the house.

    A 1771 woodcut depicting the attack on Mary Rowlandson’s house
    An Indian grabbed Rowlandson and told her to come with him. Indians had also seized her children Joseph and Mary and were pulling them in the opposite direction. Unbeknownst to Rowlandson, Wadsworth and his troopers had just arrived, and the Indians had decided it was time to leave. She cried out for her children but was assured that if she went along quietly, they would not be harmed. Rowlandson had anticipated this moment and, like many New Englanders, had vowed that “if the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than be taken alive.” But now, in the presence of the Natives’ “glittering weapons” and with Sarah in her arms, she thought differently. She and twenty-three others were taken that day and so began what she later described as “that grievous captivity.”
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    They spent the first night on a hill overlooking the smoldering wreck of Lancaster. A vacant house stood on the hill, and Rowlandson asked if she and her injured daughter might sleep inside. “What, will you love Englishmen still?” mocked the Indians, who exultantly feasted on roasted cattle while Rowlandson and the others were given nothing to eat. “Oh the roaring and singing and dancing and yelling of those black creatures in the night,” she remembered, “which made the place a lively resemblance of hell.”
    They left early the next morning. Rowlandson’s wounds had begun to fester, making it impossible for her to carry her daughter. One of the Indians had a horse, and he offered to hold Sarah, who whimpered, “I shall die, I shall die” as Rowlandson staggered behind “with [a] sorrow that cannot be expressed.” That night she sat in the snow with her fever-racked daughter in her lap. “[T]he Lord upheld me with His gracious and merciful spirit,” she remembered, “and we were both alive to see the light of the next morning.”
    That afternoon they arrived at the great Nipmuck gathering spot of Menameset. There Rowlandson met Robert