Mayflower

Pepper, a captive now for more than five months. Pepper told her to lay oak leaves on her wound, a Native remedy that had helped his injured leg and would also cure Rowlandson. But there was nothing to be done for little Sarah. “I sat much alone with a poor wounded child in my lap,” she wrote, “which moaned night and day, having nothing to revive the body or cheer the spirits.” Finally on February 18, nine days after being shot, Sarah died.
    Before this, Rowlandson had been horrified even to be in the same room with a corpse. Now her daughter’s dead body was the only source of comfort she possessed, and that night she slept in the snow with Sarah cradled to her breast. The next morning, the Indians buried her child on the top of a nearby hill. “I have thought since of the wonderful goodness of God to me,” Rowlandson wrote, “in preserving me in the use of my reason and sense, in that distressed time, that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life.” Instead, she went in search of her other two children.
    There were more than two thousand Indians gathered at Menameset. Rowlandson had learned that her ten-year-old daughter Mary was living somewhere nearby. That day as she wandered from wigwam to wigwam, she found her. But when her daughter began to sob uncontrollably, the girl’s master told Rowlandson that she must leave—“a heart-cutting word to me.” “I could not sit still in this condition,” she remembered, “but kept walking from one place to another.” She prayed to the Lord that he would show her “some sign, and hope of some relief.” Soon after, she heard her son’s voice.
    Joseph had been taken to a village about six miles away. His master’s wife had agreed to bring him to his mother, and “with tears in his eyes, he asked me whether his sister Sarah was dead…and prayed…that I would not be troubled in reference to himself.” It was too brief a visit, but Rowlandson could not help but interpret her son’s appearance as God’s “gracious answer to my earnest and unfeigned desire.”
    The next day, February 22, several hundred warriors returned from a raid on the town of Medfield, twenty miles southwest of Boston. There had been about two hundred soldiers quartered in the town, but even this sizable force was not enough to prevent the Indians from burning close to fifty houses and killing more than a dozen inhabitants. Even worse, the Indians had the audacity to leave a note. One of the Indians had been formerly employed as a typesetter in Cambridge. Known as James the Printer, he undoubtedly penned the letter that was found stuffed into a gap in a nearby bridge: “Know by this paper, that the Indians that thou hast provoked to wrath and anger, will war this twenty-one years if you will; there are many Indians yet, we come three hundred at this time. You must consider the Indians lost nothing but their life; you must lose your fair houses and cattle.”
    When the war party returned to Menameset, the warriors shouted a total of twenty-three times to indicate how many English had been killed. “Oh! The outrageous roaring and hooping that there was…,” Rowlandson wrote. “Oh, the hideous insulting and triumphing that there was over some Englishmen’s scalps that they had taken.” One of the Indians had brought back a Bible from the raid, and he offered it to Rowlandson. She immediately turned to chapter 30 of Deuteronomy and read, “though we were scattered from one end of the earth to the other, yet the Lord would gather us together, and turn all those curses upon our enemies.” It was a wonderful balm for the grieving and godly Englishwoman. “I do not desire to live to forget this Scripture,” she remembered, “and what comfort it was to me.”
    Rowlandson’s master was the Narragansett sachem Quinnapin. Her mistress was Quinnapin’s new wife, Weetamoo, the sachem from Pocasset. Much had transpired since Weetamoo had spoken with Benjamin Church about her unwillingness to go to war. After being forced to join her brother-in-law Philip, she had fled to the then neutral Narragansetts. There is evidence that she once again attempted to surrender to colonial authorities, but as had happened before at Aquidneck Island she was once again rebuffed. By marrying Quinnapin, who already had two wives but none