Learning that the merchant had bought and repatriated to Boston two other English slaves revived Gyles’s spirits (and probably raised false hopes). Seeing his distress, the priest made a deal with Gyles: if in ten days, he still preferred living with the Maliseet rather than the French, the friar would buy him back from the merchant and restore him to Meductic.
But Gyles once more adapted quickly, this time to life at the French outpost. He referred to his new master as “Monsieur Decbouffour,” but the man was actually Louis d’Amours, Sieur des Chaffours, a successful farmer and trader around forty years old, born in Quebec, recently married, and a new father. D’Amours and his brother owned large farms growing wheat, peas, and corn, as well as several dozen head of cattle and a large herd of pigs. Their establishment sat along the lower St. John River at a place the French called Jemseg and that Gyles rendered as “Hagimsack.” Both names come from the Maliseet word ah-jem-sik, sometimes translated as “the picking-up place,” a sign of the location’s importance in trade long before the Europeans arrived.
Given Gyles’s fluency in Maliseet and Mi’kmaq, and despite the fact that he initially spoke no French, the quick-witted sixteen-year-old rapidly assumed responsibility for the trading post. “I had not liv’d long with this Gentleman before he commited to me the Keys of his Store, &c and my whole Employment was Trading and Hunting, in which I acted faithfully for my Master, and never knowingly wrong’d him to the value of one Farthing.” D’Amours and his wife, Marguerite, called Gyles “Little English,” and his master trusted him enough that when d’Amours returned to France for an extended visit, he left Gyles in charge.
That trust was tested in October 1696, when word swept through the village that an English fleet with several hundred men was ascending the river to attack the French at Fort Nashwaak. To Gyles, it must have seemed that salvation was at last at hand—except that he was responsible for the store, a charge he took seriously. As the English soldiers approached, the goods from the trading post were hidden in the woods, but there was every reason to expect that they’d burn d’Amours’s home, store, and farm.
“‘Little English,’ we have shewn you Kindness; and now it lies in your Power to serve or disserve us, as you know where our Goods are hid in the Woods,’” his mistress told him. Instead of confining him to the fort, she explained, she had decided to trust him once again. If he would protect their property from the English raiders, they would give him leave to return to Boston at the first opportunity.
It must have been an excruciating decision for Gyles. All he had to do was slip through to the English lines, and he’d be free. Instead, he agreed not to escape, nor to betray his master’s family or property. Leaving a note pinned to the door, explaining that the owners had saved English captives in the past and shown him kindness, Gyles shepherded Madame d’Amours and her two young children to a remote hiding place on the far side of Grand Lake. They stayed there until the brief siege of the fort ended and the New Englanders, fearing an early freeze that would trap their boats, departed.
Gyles and the d’Amours family found their home and business untouched. Colonel William Hathorne, the English commander, had discovered the note and ordered his men not to burn the buildings or harm the livestock, save for the chickens and a couple of cattle that they took for eating. In this, Gyles and his French captors were fortunate. Some weeks earlier, Hathorne had taken command from the notoriously erratic and brutal Benjamin Church, whose men had killed King Philip and who would have been unlikely to have spared anything. Although Hathorne had been one of the commanders who had duped the Pennacook with the mock fight some years earlier, he dealt far more honorably with the French outpost.
In the spring, Louis d’Amours returned from France. He tried to persuade Gyles to remain, pledging “that he would do for me as for his own”—a not inconsiderable offer of adoption, given the family’s holdings and titles. Gyles was adamant, however, and so d’Amours arranged the eighteen-year-old’s passage to Boston. Gyles arrived on a dark June night in 1698, and the next morning a young man came aboard the sloop and began asking Gyles questions about his captivity. It was Samuel, John’s youngest brother, who had escaped to the fort the day of the attack. Samuel told his shocked sibling that their eldest brother, Thomas, and two sisters were well but that their mother had died some years earlier.
The same familiarity with the Wapánahki language and customs that had stood Gyles in such good stead with the French proved equally valuable among the English. Within a few months, the young man was in demand as an interpreter, and in 1706, a few years after marrying, he received a captain’s commission. He commanded forts at Brunswick, Maine, and along the St. George River at Thomaston, Maine, and led expeditions under a flag of truce to Port Royal, in French Acadia, to negotiate the release of captives. After his first wife died, he remarried in 1721—a year before his old Maliseet master appeared at the fort at St. George. If there had been any lingering bitterness, it was gone. “I made him very welcome,” Gyles said simply.
Unlike Mary Rowlandson and the Reverend John Williams, Gyles wrote his account late in life, at the urging of his wife and after decades of acting as a liaison between the English and the Wapánahki. At first the account was meant only as a private record for his family, but as more and more people asked to read it, Gyles relented to their requests and, in 1736, published Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, &c. In the Captivity of John Gyles, Esq; Commander of the Garrison on St. George’s River. Written by Himself.
Only a few copies of the original edition survive, but Memoirs of Odd Adventures has been reprinted many times, and it remains the most unusual of all the captive narratives of the eastern frontier. One of the reasons for this is the clear, uncluttered voice of Gyles himself. The reader comes away with the impression of young John as a remarkably resilient boy who, despite his travails, never lost his sense of humor or his innate curiosity.
Besides his own experiences, Gyles discusses the common animals of the Maliseet lands, exploding a few myths along the way. For instance, he calls the prevailing notion that black bears give birth to an unformed embryo and lick it into shape “a gross Mistake . . . I have seen their Fœtus of all Sizes, taken out of the Matrix, by the Indians, and they are as much, and as well Shap’d as the Young of any Animal.” He also gives a brief but fairly evenhanded overview of Maliseet life and culture. Two modern historians have called the short book “part horror story, part ethnography, part natural history, and part sermon.”
There is a fascinating postscript to Gyles’s story, emblematic of the way cultures and personal histories became intertwined on the First Frontier. When the English raiders were advancing in 1696, Gyles rowed Madame d’Amours and her children across a lake to evade capture. One of those children was a girl, Marie-Charlotte, who in 1707 married Bernard-Anselme d’Abbadie—a French officer, Abenaki chief, and privateer, and the son of the man who led the raid in which Gyles had been captured. With his father’s death that year, Bernard had also assumed the title, and there was a new Baron de Saint-Castin in Pentagoet.
If John Gyles, looking back on his youthful captivity from the safety of old age, tells an Englishman’s tale with a fair bit of sympathy for the Indians, then the story of Hannah Duston provides a jarring contrast—one that reinforces not only the differences between white settlers and Natives but also those between eighteenth-century and modern sensibilities. More than three hundred years after the events, its emotionally charged echoes continue to reverberate to this day.
In the winter of 1697, Thomas and Hannah Duston lived on a small farm along the lower Merrimack River in Massachusetts, two miles from the town of Haverhill, which in turn lay about thirty miles north of Boston. With a good supply of clay on the farm, Thomas was making bricks for sale—and with seven children and an eighth on the way, he was also working on a larger, brick house for his family a short distance from their existing home.
Hannah came from what might today be called a
troubled home. When her father, Michael Emerson, first moved the family into Haverhill in 1656, at least one neighbor was alarmed enough to protest to the owners of the plantation. Why the Emersons were considered bad neighbors doesn’t appear in the records, but Michael allowed himself to be bought off, accepting a gift of land if he would “go back into the woods,” which he did. In 1667, he was fined five shillings for “his cruel and excessive beating of his daughter [Elizabeth] with a flayle swingle, and kicking of her.” (A flail, used to pound flax to remove its seeds, has a long handle to which is bound a heavy wooden truncheon—a vicious weapon to use against anyone, much less an eleven-year-old child.)
Still another daughter, Mary, was sentenced to be fined or whipped for fornication before marrying—a common enough charge in those days, and one that didn’t carry a heavy stigma if the accused couple married, as did Mary and her beau. Elizabeth, however, faced fornication charges of her own in 1686, and no one stepped forward to claim the child. In the messy paternity fight that followed, during which Elizabeth claimed she was raped by a neighbor, the Emerson home was publicly denounced as “that wicked house.” Hannah, the oldest child of the family, was deposed as a witness against her younger sister.
Elizabeth, still unmarried, became pregnant again in 1690 and this time managed to keep the pregnancy a secret—not that difficult in colonial days, when heavy winter clothes concealed a great deal and with Elizabeth’s excessive weight aiding in the deception. More remarkable, even though she slept in a trundle at the foot of her parents’ bed, Elizabeth claimed to have somehow given birth to twins in May 1691 without waking anyone. Whether at least one of the babies was stillborn, as Elizabeth claimed, or she killed them both, she hid the bodies in a chest, then sewed them into a cloth bag and buried them outside. Several women of the community, however, were suspicious of her condition and confronted her with a legal order permitting a physical examination. This was executed while her parents were in church, which suggests that the Emersons may have known of their daughter’s actions. While the women examined Elizabeth, their husbands discovered the makeshift grave in the garden.
On the morning of June 8, 1693, two years after the twins’ death, Elizabeth was hanged in Boston. Although she was convicted of murder, it was a capital crime merely to have concealed the death of a bastard child, even a stillbirth. A few hours before her execution, with Elizabeth apparently in attendance, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather (fresh off the Salem witch trials) preached a stem-winder of a sermon in which he read what he said was Elizabeth’s confession and contrition. “I was always of an haughty and stubborn spirit,” she purportedly told him, blaming her troubles on “Disobedience to my Parents.”
Whether Elizabeth Emerson actually said any of this is guesswork; the reputed confession reads more like the sermon it begat than a young woman’s sincere unburdening. Mather, in almost gleeful Puritanical form, saw the fact that Elizabeth’s execution fell on a Lecture Day on which he was to preach as a sign of God’s favor. He later preened in his diary that the sermon was heard by “one of the greatest Assemblies, ever known in these parts of the World” and that printed copies (titled Warnings from the Dead, or Solemn Admonitions unto All People) were “greedily bought up.”
Hannah Emerson Duston seems to have left the troubles of her childhood home behind. By 1697, she and Thomas had been married for almost twenty years, and although they’d lost a number of children—their newest daughter, Martha, was their eighth living, out of thirteen she’d borne—the family was well established. Unlike her father, her husband was respected in Haverhill, having been elected constable for the town’s west end.
On March 15, the weather was profoundly cold, a sharp return of winter that kept the fires stoked throughout Haverhill. Hannah was bedridden, still drained from giving birth to Martha a week earlier. A widowed neighbor, Mary Neff—one of the women who had confronted Elizabeth six years earlier—was nursing them both while Thomas worked on the new house, his horse tethered nearby and a gun at hand. Worries about Indian attacks ran high. The previous August, a neighbor named Jonathan Haynes and his four children had been captured while working in the fields, and rumors of further raids were rife.
Chatter about Indians was incessant on the frontier, both produced by and reinforcing the cycle of tensions born of life at the edge of seemingly endless war. Although King William’s War had begun with grand assaults such as the English siege of Quebec in 1690, it had devolved into a series of guerrilla raids over the years that followed. The Iroquois struck into Canada, though with diminishing strength as the war dragged on, and the English refused to back them up. In turn, the French and their Indian allies repeatedly hit settlements in New York and New England—Schenectady in 1690 and York, Maine, in 1692 being among the bloodiest. In 1693, the French destroyed winter villages and food supplies throughout Mohawk country and took hundreds of captives, while bringing a vast, heavily guarded convoy of more than four hundred canoes laden with a million pounds of furs to Montreal, a prize the Iroquois would have snapped up in earlier years, when they were stronger.
In New England, the combination of Puritan fundamentalism and constant anxiety over Indian attacks was a powder keg. No one felt safe from the drumbeat of violence and the notion that evil could be anywhere—personified by Indians sweeping out of the darkness or hidden in the shadows of even the most seemingly righteous home. As refugees from the Indian war poured into towns such as Salem, the paranoia and hysteria grew. The ravings of one redeemed captive, Mercy Short—who was held for eight months by the Abenaki and who, after resettling in Salem, began ranting about “Tawney” devils in league with the French and with “Indian Sagamores”—added fuel to the witch trials of 1692. Cotton Mather noted that almost all the confessing “witches” said that Satan looked like an Indian, and many scholars have pointed out that most of the so-called afflicted—those women whose fits and hallucinations stoked the witch-hunting flames—had, like Mercy Short, suffered losses and trauma on the northern frontier.
Dustan Covering the Retreat of His Seven Children (1851)
Thomas Duston (the spelling of his last name varies) was faced with a stark choice in March 1697—protect his bedridden wife, Hannah, and their newborn daughter from attacking Abenakis or shepherd their other children to safety. Bluffing with his single-shot musket as they retreated, he managed to save the children, but Hannah, the baby, and a neighbor were taken captive. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-38192)
So as Hannah Duston nursed her newest infant and Thomas made bricks, they were both aware of fresh speculation about skulking Indians. This time, the rumors were accurate. A band of Cowasuck Abenaki had slipped into the area overnight, fanning out through Haverhill. In many cases, the surprise was complete, but just as the Indians opened their attack on multiple fronts, Duston stumbled upon one of the bands. Leaping to his horse, he made a run for the house, with the warriors moving quickly behind him.
Yelling to the children, Thomas sent them scrambling up the road toward the village blockhouse. But the youngest child was only two, and it was clear that they’d never make it in time; they were only a few hundred yards away from the house when the war party arrived. Inside, Hannah was in bed with the baby, whom she refused to leave. She sent Thomas after the children, knowing there was no hope for her. After a moment’s hesitation—one can only imagine how Thomas must have been torn—he ran out of the cabin.
Thomas lashed his horse, thinking he’d snatch up one child at least and make an escape. Faced with yet another agonizing choice, however, he decided he couldn’t take one and simply abandon the others. Instead, he would make a last stand with his children. While most of the raiders swarmed into the farm buildings, a few advanced toward them. Thomas dismounted, using his horse as cover while the Abenakis opened fire.
It was a strange and hapless procession, creeping up the road only as fast as the older children could drag or carry their younger siblings, with their father presenting a near-hopeless rear-gua
rd defense. Although he was armed, he couldn’t risk actually shooting his musket, because in the thirty or forty seconds it would take him to pour powder down the muzzle, ram a ball home, and reprime the firing pan, the Abenakis would overwhelm them. So he had to bluff, raising the gun as if to fire, forcing their pursuers to take cover again and again as his covey moved up the road at what must have seemed like an agonizing crawl.
Incredibly, he succeeded, reaching a garrison churning with frantic activity. Indians were striking across the town, eventually killing twenty-seven and burning nine homes.
As Thomas Duston shepherded most of his family to safety, Mary Neff tried to escape with the Dustons’ baby. She was quickly captured and taken back to the Duston home, where Hannah stood mutely, one foot bare on the ice-cold dirt, while it was sacked and torched. The captives were marched out of the village, with Mary cradling the baby. When the raiders saw that the child was slowing her down, they smashed Martha’s head against an apple tree and left the small body behind.
They set out with eleven other captives, although in typical fashion several were killed when they, too, began to flag and tire. The war party covered twelve miles the first day to put distance between themselves and their pursuers. Over the next several days, the survivors were marched up the Merrimack Valley, covering about forty-five miles as the raven flies, though the paths wound through deep forests, mud, and the remains of the winter snow. It must have seemed an endless nightmare for the English captives, not least for Duston, with only one shoe and just one week after giving birth.
The Cowasuck, whose name means “the people of the white pines,” were on familiar ground, however, moving deeper into the heart of n’dakina, their homeland. It was not the end of March to them, but the beginning of sogalikas, the Sugar-Making Moon, with mozokas, the Moose-Hunting Moon, just past. The river along which they traveled was mol8demak, “deep river,” and the smaller tributary at whose mouth they eventually camped, on an oxbow near the present town of Penacook, New Hampshire, was nikn tekw ok, which the English pronounced Contoocook.
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