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If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, ad-free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.EmpirePodUK.com. Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Danger grows in darkening corners. Nights of winter, nights of want, nights of war. They have already shocking news from the eastward. The mischief done by their French and Indian enemies along the main frontier. Will it be their turn next?
next. It is now about 4am, time for the attackers to move. Over the river, on the ice. Across a mile of meadowland, ghostly and white, past the darkened houses at the north end of the street, right up to the fort. The snow has piled hugely here.
The drifts make walkways to the top of the fence. A vanguard of some 40 men climb quickly over and drop down inside. A gate is open to admit the rest. The watch awakens, fires a warning shot, cries, arm! But too late, surely, far too late. The attackers separate into smaller parties and immediately set upon breaking into doors and windows. The townspeople come to life with a rush
Some find opportunities to escape by jumping out of windows or roof lines. Several manage to flee the stockade altogether and make their way to neighbouring villages. The minister's house is a special target, singled out in the beginning of the onset. Later, John Williams will remember his violent experience in detail, roused out of sleep by their violent endeavours to break open doors and windows with axes and hatchets. He leaps from his bed, runs to the front door, sees the enemy making their entrance.
awakens the pair of soldiers lodged upstairs and return to his bedside for my arms. There is hardly time for the enemy immediately break into the room. I judge the number of 20 with painted faces and hideous acclamations. The minister does manage to cock his pistol and put it to the breast of the first that came up.
Fortunately for both of them, it misfires. Whereupon Williams is seized by three Indians, disarmed and bound. In this posture, he will remain nearly for the space of an hour. With their chief price secured, the invaders turn to rifling the house. There is killing work too. Some were so cruel and barbarous as they took to carry to the door two of my children and murder them. By the time the sun is about an hour high, the sequence described by John Williams has been experienced with some variations.
Blimey. Hello. Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.
And me, William Dalrymple. Gosh, that was quite dramatic. It is dramatic. What have you just been reading to us? So that is John Deimos's Unredeemed Captive, which was one of the most influential books for me that I ever read. I...
had the idea while reading that of writing a story in that manner, written as if it would read like a novel, but which tells the story in great detail using only primary sources and only eyewitness reports. But what is so interesting about these captive narratives, which is what we're going to be talking about today from early America, is that they're both a very American story, the story of
white settlers taken by First Nations to their villages, sometimes redeemed, sometimes killed, sometimes stay on as members of the village. If you like the reverse of our story last week of Pocahontas, who obviously marries a Brit and ends up in London. These are the stories of those early Americans who ended up by choice or otherwise joining the First Nation and becoming part of the villages of the Native Americans.
And John Deimos, whose entire life's work has been about this very early period of early Puritan and early English settlement of the American seaboard, came across this story and followed it, ransacking archives and reconstructing
from all the different angles, the story of the Reverend Williams, but particularly his daughter, Eunice Williams. And Eunice is captured in this raid on Deerfield. And what's different about her story is that she goes, marries one of her captors and refuses to come back, which is why it remains a kind of a story that is being documented online.
on and on and on until she's an old lady because they want her back. They can't understand why she chose them to go over. Why do you want to stay with them when you could come back and be with us? Look, I think there's so much to unravel. There's a lot here. Absolutely. And I say what's interesting to me is that it's very specifically a story of early America, but it's also a story that's very specifically 17th and 18th century. Our last episodes before we started this America series were on Queen Victoria.
And the Victorians are so much part of our imagination, they've dominated the narrative, and particularly the narrative of the British expanding abroad so much, that we forget the fragility of a lot of these early settlements in all the different parts of the world.
So many attempts by the early British to establish themselves beyond their borders ended in disaster, in massacres, in captives and death. And we've forgotten that story. We forget how small Britain was then as it is now. And often when we look at imperial history, we imagine Britain
the Britain of the Victorians with its gumboats and Palmerston and the ease with which they dominated world affairs. And I think a story like this, the story of the unredeemed captive, John Demas' book, and these early captives, which have been written wonderfully also by Linda Coley, which is another wonderful book. Anyone wanting to read more at the end of this should look at Linda's book, Captives, Britain, Empire, and the World 1600 to 1850, all of which I think have in common this
ability to capture a much more fragile imperial entity than we're often led to imagine. And realizing that so much that went wrong, the disasters of these early settlements, these early colonies, and the ease with which you could move from being a settler in your village with your muskets to being a captive in some Indian village or with Tipu Sultan or
or of the Maori in New Zealand, or whatever. There are versions of this story across the globe, and I think it's a very interesting exercise to explore them. So can we, can I take you right back before the raid? Because I mean, that raid is startling, and that is a graphic description of fear, terror, creeping into your, I mean, it's home invasion is what it,
sounds like. It is the stuff that people would have grown up with who've watched Westerns, as I did with my father. How the West was one kind of storyline, where people were always telling the story of
And often there was a young woman who's taken by a tribe and then they have to try and get her back and it's all a matter of honour. So this becomes actually a trope of Hollywood in the early days of colour filmmaking. But let's talk about the reality of this. So we're talking, this is a raid that takes place in a place called Deerfield. And Deerfield is a town on the western side of Massachusetts. Now tell us a bit more about what it was like back in the day. So initially it was called Pockhamtuck.
if I'm pronouncing it right, and was home to a small tribe of Indians of the same name. And it is settled in 1670 by white settlers who take it as a sort of revenge for land of theirs, which had been taken by a different Native American tribe.
And so there's some sense that this was already a cause of resentment. This was not virgin land which had never been settled. This is land which was taken during a time of hostility. And so it's already a land which is disputed. And
In the period that we're talking about, it's the beginning of what will be effectively a hundred-year war between France and Britain as the two vie for global control. And the battles between these two imperial powers will be fought in India, the Caribbean, but it'll also be fought in the New World. And this complicates the story in America.
Because you have in the north various tribes that owe their allegiance to the French, and south of them in what's now Massachusetts, upstate New York, you've got English frontier tribes who are in mutual hostility with each other.
And Deerfield is at various different fault lines. It's on the fault line between the English and the French, but it's also at the fault line between the settled and the indigenous. And it's likely to be a place of conflict if either of those two fault lines heats up and become active states of war. It does seem certainly as if it's sort of, as you say, fault lines are a really good way of putting it. Any kind of quake could bring this place crumbling to the ground.
What's interesting to me is that just 10 years after this place is founded, they sort of set it up as almost like a posterville for the way in which settlers make things happen. They put up a meeting house, they put up a new mill, they have craftsmen arriving, they're making permanent settlements.
structures, not just out of wood and nails, but also a system of governance as well. And tell me a little bit about the beliefs of the people who've come and settled in this new place, Deerfield. Well, these guys are very much Puritans. They are those that resist the established Anken church. They have a particularly zealous and we would say fundamentalist
strain of Protestantism. It's the Puritans in England who take over during the Civil War under Oliver Cromwell and create the Puritan Commonwealth, closing the theatres, banning festivals such as Christmas. Banning Christmas, yeah. No figgy pudding. I know, no more Christmas, I know. Many of these Puritans go to the American colonies in order to escape the dominance of the Anken Church and their bishops and
And they are, in their eyes, idealist, striving to create a utopia on Earth. But like many utopians, they live in the bubble of their utopia and don't often think of the effects it has on those around them. And as we've seen, Deerfield is settled very much that the indigenous consider to be their own. And
The character that we met in that first reading from the opening of The Unredeemed Captive, Reverend John Williams, is the head of the community. And the reasons that the indigenous make a grab of him is that he is both the spiritual and the political leader of Deerfield and the high status captive.
who they hope can be traded in turn for captives on the French side. I'm quite fascinated in this guy, Reverend John Williams, because, you know, like many of the Puritan families, a lot of them went and settled around Massachusetts Bay Colony. As far back as 1629, you can trace their origins. They immediately dig their roots very, very deeply into the ground that they take.
But he has also got a very large family. I mean, you just mentioned his daughter at the beginning of this, but there are eight children and those are the surviving ones. So there must have been other children as well. But that was the way to survive in those early settler colonies is you have as many children as you can because...
It could be war, it could be starvation, it could be disease. You don't know how many of you will last and therefore you need to build up your numbers. And one of the features of this raid and others like it is that the children often suffer at the beginning. They're often the ones who are killed. And this is interpreted by the settlers as barbarism, as savagery. Why would they kill innocent children?
And John Deimos, in his analysis of this, struggles to comprehend the killing of the children. And he comes up with two things. First of all, they're just too fragile to make the walk. They'll slow down the war party as they make their way back into French territory behind the border into what will become Canada. And therefore, they kill them for pragmatism. But there's also a sense, he presumes, that they are targeted because so many of the Indian children...
he writes, are dying at this time of disease, that they are particularly vulnerable to the diseases which the Europeans have brought with them, like smallpox, and that the extraordinary fertility of families like John Williams, with eight children, often contrasts to their own stunted families, where so many of the kids die in their infancy of
of European diseases. Rage and pain, as always, sort of inspiring enormous violence and more rage and pain. You can read that as you will, but I think it's an interesting idea. But what I'm really interested also in is that, you know, we talked about Deerfield having put down things, you know, they would call civilised Western behaviour. That's what they would have called it at the time, you know, a system of governance, having somebody in charge of this, a municipal leader or whatever it is, town hall, a library, all of that kind of thing.
However, the way in which the media and films presented is that you have indigenous people who are living an itinerant life and who are not organized. That is not the case because there is this remarkable thing I want you to tell me a lot more about.
which is among the Iroquois people in particular, which is an Iroquois confederacy. And this binds together people from different backgrounds, indigenous people from different backgrounds, different tribes, and unifies them in a system as well, another system of governance. Tell us more about that. So this is like the Scottish borders at the same period, a land with a political frontier running through it. And
and tribes can sometimes find themselves on either side of the border and often have cousins on the other side. So with the Iroquois, you've got some of the tribes on the English side of the frontier and some fighting for the French. And just to muddle the issue, you've also got some from the English side that have fled over and are now, because of internal fighting, on the French side of the border. And I think these are the ones that are used by the French in the raid on
on Deerfield. I think what I was trying to get at is that this Iroquois Confederacy was a really big deal because it was uniting disparate tribes from different parts. And they were united in teachings, rituals, practices. They had similar clan systems and chieftainships, but it was like a government.
It's like a local government. So for those who say, or said at the time, there is civilization on a scale where you have structure and governance that the indigenous people didn't have. It's not true. They had their own. It's not as if they were living wild. And I think that's interesting. Anyway, there is a sense of crisis amongst the indigenous people. Tell me why that
comes about. So this is a time of terrific crisis. There are wars on numerous fronts. There are intertribal conflicts. There's conflicts between the English and the French growing, but there's also the fight for survival against epidemics, which have wiped out 90% of the Native American population in the
And the fight for resources and the settlers are taking over more and more of the land. And when, for example, as we heard in that raid, the war party slaughters the animals. This is, again, just taken to be savagery by the colonists. It could be interpreted as Demos interprets it in the book as a complaint against the European methods of husbandry.
of farming, which eat up the habitat which they use for their hunting. And so they regard the livestock, the pigs and the cattle and all the farm animals which the settlers have so been rearing at great cost through these cold winters, they regard them as competition for the resources. So it's a violent place. It's a place riven with sickness. 90% of the indigenous have died in the previous century. You can't underestimate that much. So these are the survivors of
a precarious life then for the Indians, but also for those who are trying to settle land that in many ways doesn't want them. You know, the people there don't want them. The land is hard to farm when it hasn't happened before. They have to secure their boundaries. Can we focus on Deerfield though and what it was like in particular? Describe to me a little more about what it looked like, what it felt like to live there. I think it would have been very uneasy. You are on a frontier. There's great fear of the Native Americans.
There is a history of violence running in both directions. And as far as the Native Americans are concerned, Deerfield is on occupied land. This is on land that they used to hunt in, that used to live in. And Deerfield is vulnerable. One of the important things I think that is really crucial to understanding this is
is that in this system of colonization, where there are commercial companies that are leading the colonization, you don't have the same level of protection from the government that you might have in something that was a more organized crown colony. And these people are vulnerable, and they haven't maintained their stockade as strongly as they should have, the stockade being the wooden fence running around the kind of tall picket
They call it a fort, but that's really prosaic. It is just a high fence, isn't it, in many of these instances? Yes, it's not a fort in the sense of Edinburgh Castle or Jobpore Fort. The village is only 30 years old. They've heard reports that there have been other war parties attacking other villages on the same frontier. Absolutely.
And as the war intensifies, they are expecting trouble. Did you know that I think the French actually mistakenly referred to Deerfield as a guerre fille, which was the daughter of war, because it was a place that was so riven with battles. Isn't that interesting? I don't know if that's apocryphal or not.
William, you started off the podcast with this enormous raid on Deerfield, but it wasn't the first raid on Deerfield. They'd experienced this before, hadn't they? They had. The War of the Spanish Succession, which had been long anticipated. Everyone knew that England and France were going to get a war. It finally breaks out in 1701.
And by 1703, the war is two years in, and there's been a whole succession of raids across the border, including one on Deerfield. So you mean the sort of the European politics is being played out on American soil? Exactly that. This happens not just in North America, but in the Caribbean, in India, across the world. You have these European conflicts now engulfing
quite different parts of the world and that these colonies are not only bringing with them settlers and diseases, but they're bringing their own conflicts with them. Right. Okay. So the first raid on Deerfield or one of the early raids on Deerfield, is it as bad as the one that you started us off with? Or is it a warning that more is coming your way? No, it's just a preliminary raid. On the evening of the 8th of October, 1703, two men go into the meadow, are ambushed by Indians and are carried off to Canada. Okay.
And John Williams himself manages to escape capture on that occasion. And by October, the people have abandoned their homes and gone to the safety of the fort. But then nothing happens. And so for a while, they relax and go back to their houses. And this is the occasion after they've let down their guard on the last night of February 1704 that they experienced the big attack.
The big raid where he's carried off and his daughter Eunice is carried off. It's quite interesting, you know, that whatever the government response is, you know, they don't send more soldiers to protect them because I guess they just don't have the men to do this. But what they do say is you won't have to pay provisional taxes. And, you know, there are some soldiers who come for some space of time, but they can't be there all the time because who's going to pay them and where are they going to be and what are they going to eat? So that's what probably makes these settlers, these early settlers, so very vulnerable.
It was a dangerous thing. Now, look. There's very little to fall back on. If things go wrong, they're on their own. Very much so. In the big raid, the February raid, 48 people are killed. But more importantly, 112...
are captured. And they are marched off by their captors in the direction of Canada, including a woman named Sarah Burt, who's seven and a half months pregnant. And almost immediately, the raiders start to kill those who lag behind. They need to leave and get back across the border before the troops that may or may not be pursuing them capture them.
And so they need to go at speed. And so what you see in this sort of tragic retreat, if you like, all the women that can't keep up, the old people and several of the children are killed as they retreat back towards their homelands. And
What are the survivors? I mean, there must be survivors. Are there people who do escape and stick around to tell the tale of what happened? So I think a lot of the village survives and the efforts are quickly made to try and get the captives back. Let's take a break there. There is a big journey ahead of these captives. They don't know where they're going and they don't know what's going to become of them. Join us after the break to find out.
Welcome back. So just before the break, there was the raid, the capture, the slaughter and the survivors who are now on the march and they're heading north. That's what they know. They probably don't know very much more than that towards Canada. And this is actually a vast, uncharted stretch of land, isn't it, William? What would it have been like? It is. And it's the middle of winter. This is February in Massachusetts. And you've got these people that have literally been raised from their beds. Some of them are still in their nightclothes. And
It's the most brutal march. They're heading back in the direction of Montreal over the border. And it is, in many ways, a death march. On the afternoon of the 29th of February, the...
They are marching through deep snow. And the second day, John Williams's wife is killed. Everyone is hoping that they can be used as ransom because there is an established barter system. And one of the possible reasons for the raid is that the French want back captives of theirs, which have been taken by the English.
Perhaps because they're fearing pursuit, perhaps they think that they're vulnerable. The Indians are killing their own captives if they can't keep up. And among those who die are John Williams's wife on the second day. She is six weeks out of childbed.
Her baby daughter's already murdered. So John Williams is losing more and more of his family on this terrible march. It's a brutal march. In four days, they cover 65 miles of mountainous, snowy territory. At some point, the Indian War Party recover their own stores and dog sleighs.
But at that point, they also kill eight women who can't keep up. And so this is a kind of nightmarish march. And while they are expecting to be ransomed, and while there is an established system of barter, the war party is simply too nervous to pause or to take on stragglers. And out of the 112 Deerfield captives, it's believed that 20 die on the trail. Right.
Right. It's also when you look at the records from the time and the survivors who talk about what it was like, you know, they're marching through almost chest-high snow. Their stops are very brief because the longer you stop, the colder you get and cold is the enemy of any kind of long march for everybody, for the captors as well as the captured.
And at night, there are these sort of makeshift spruce branch tent-like coverings, which I suppose in the old Westerns, they would have called wigwams for people to sleep beneath. So you've got these beleaguered people who are marching and they think they possibly could be marching to their death. They've been kidnapped on order by the French. You know, they don't know what's going to become of them. And some of the people they love most in the world have died in front of their eyes. I think it's really interesting because we've got Williams' own account to lean on a lot of the time here. And he sort of suggests that there's a
you call it Stockholm syndrome these days or whatever it is, but a strange relationship between him, the person who is always at his side where he's on a leash, and this is the man who will kill him. And at one point after this group is sort of split into a main group and a smaller group, his indigenous guard approaches Williams and he has a pistol in his hand and he says, now I will kill you for at your house, you would have killed me with this if you could. Because Williams had indeed
tried to shoot at the man when the raid took place and the gun had misfired. But he doesn't pull the trigger. And later, this man who has him captured and who has pointed this out, that you would have killed me and I can kill you now, I've got the power now. William says he shows some surprising kindness towards him. He makes a pair of snowshoes for Williams. He provides him with the best food, this is according to Williams himself, the best food that is possible and a piece of the Bible and allows him frequent opportunities for prayer and scripture reading.
And a little by little, if you look at William's account of this, there is an understanding that never existed behind the walls of the fort. I mean, it's just unthinkable that in this sort of system of horrible horror and privation that a human relationship can develop. But you do hear about it, don't you? Even with sort of hostage-taking today that these things occur. Anyway, so look, they are on their way. They are on their way to Montreal. What is going to happen to them in Montreal? So in Montreal, they are kept...
by the French at a place called Chambly. Now, what's interesting about all this is we haven't really talked about how the French and the Indians related to each other. We've talked about the war party coming because of a European war. But perhaps we should have mentioned earlier is there are some French on the war party helping direct it. But when they get back to Montreal, they're back very much in a sort of colonial French environment.
And once they get back there, the negotiations for redemption begin. In a sense, the commercial underpinnings of this raid become clearer. In the weeks to come, we'll see negotiations, particularly for Williams, to be redeemed. And he is redeemed by the governor. What then follows is that the children, some of the boys, manage to be redeemed too. But from the beginning, Eunice is not redeemed.
So, yeah, tell me what's happened to Eunice. So, just remind me, how old is Eunice? What is this going to be like for her? And where is she? Because she's missing on this list of...
of those who have been, you know, ransoms been paid for them. So she's born in 1696, so she's only seven at this age. And what her father fears as much about her being killed or being led away is the fact that she's now entering a Catholic environment. And for Puritans, this is like sort of entering the devil's own kitchen. She'd been brought up very much with a Puritan upbringing. She'd learnt to read, to pray, to recite scriptures.
She is now being taken away by a Catholic Indian war party. Now, they may only have a veneer of Catholicism, but it's enough to make John Williams quake. He does write about, though, you know, later on, he says, you know, he finds out along the way that his daughter, his little seven-year-old little girl, on this long march that almost kills him and does indeed kill a lot of other people that he knows, that she is being looked after. I'll just quote from one of his letters here.
Yes, the last time I think he sees her, she's carried off on the shoulders of one of the war party when they're separated. And he says, you know, she was carried all the journey and looked after with a great deal of tenderness. But the fact that she now belongs to the Indians.
And the fact that the Indians also have sort of Catholic tinges, all of that really flies out of the window because he's now worried not just for her bodily safety, but also her mortal soul. Yeah. And for someone of that background and that religious fervor, that's almost worse than anything else.
So where does Eunice go? I mean, what happens to Eunice when she disappears? This is a period when there is a strong system in place for swapping of captives and for the bartering of captives. But what is clear from the beginning is that Eunice is not up for negotiation and the family don't understand why that is. And eventually they discover that she has been effectively adopted into an Indian family and that within two years of leaving
Dear Field, she's forgotten how to speak English. And this is everything that these people fear most, the ultimate colonial nightmare, the colonizer becoming the colonized. So, you know, his worst nightmare as a father, he's lost his daughter, but also as a Puritan, he's worried for her soul. That's all happening at the same time. That is not to say that people aren't trying to get Eunice back.
They are willing to pay. But for a while, they're just, you know, her captors are not willing to let go of her. And ultimately, actually, there's a real strange shift that takes place because Eunice is shown love and care and warmth.
And eventually, I mean, you can tell us about all the efforts to get her back in a moment, but when she's given a choice, she doesn't want to come back, does she? So she's come from this very harsh Puritan background. And what has clearly happened is that she's been shown kindness by her captors. It's very difficult to get inside Eunice's head,
because she has left no letters. We very, very rarely get her own voice. We hear about what she thinks and what she wants through the voices of others. She's only a baby, for God's sake, seven till nine. She's a baby. I mean, you know, what is she going to do? You have to survive, don't you? So I'm always a bit cautious when people say that you've been treated very kindly. It's like, you know, the whole thing of lifting up childbirth
children during the Ottoman Empire as well. But they like it in the end because they have a good position. It's hard, but she does seem to be settled, doesn't she, with the language and with the people? So a year on, William sees her. And at that stage, she begs him to take her away, but she's not allowed to go. And according to Williams, again, this is the sort of thing he minds about, she still remembered her catechism and how to read
And she says that her captives make her pray in Latin. She doesn't understand the words, but they're speaking to her. But by the next contact, it's clear that she doesn't want to come. This has become her new home. And she's learnt Mohawk. She's crossed over. She's turned cultures.
And the only letter that we have for her is her words spoken in the Mohawk language, taken down in French and then translated into English. And so what happens to her is that she grows up among the Indians. And despite all the efforts of Williams and all the community in Massachusetts to get her back,
In the end, by this stage, she won't come. Instead, she gets married and she has children. She's baptized into the Catholic Church and she takes on an Indian name. Well, it's also very interesting. It's not for want of trying. Now it's become a diplomatic incident. If a child doesn't want to come back to you, if one of yours doesn't want to come back, it sort of turns everything on its head that you have been saying, that you are the civilized and they are the savages.
So there was one very interesting thing, William, I know you've seen this, but spies are sent to Canada, right? And they go to see what is happening with Mr. Williams' daughter. They see that she's sort of hunting with the rest of her new family. They describe her as being owned.
don't they in the letter they say that yeah they say the Indian who owns her is the phrase they use but what they also then describe is you know she's in good health but she seems unwilling to return and the Indian not willing to part with her she being as she says a pretty girl but perhaps he may exchange her if he can get a pretty Indian in her
Rome, I think, instead. In her Rome, in other words, maybe they mean a Catholic girl. I don't know. I don't know. You may assume, Mr. Williams, I will do all that lays in my power to serve him as I have formerly wrought to him. So, you know, tell Mr. Williams we're trying our best, but she's not playing ball.
And if we can find another pretty girl to swap, we'll try. But, you know, she's not playing ball. She's very clearly not interested in coming back. Perhaps she can even barely remember her family by this stage. But they will not give up. And one of the reasons that we know so much about this case is that the family continued, despite being told no, to continue to try and get her back. There is still war between England and France, and that gets in the way of any further negotiations at that stage. But by...
August 1712, there is peace, what they call a secession of arms. And the news reaches Boston by the fall of 1712. And there's a formal proclamation of the end of fighting in October. And this, the family thinks, is the moment that they can move in and get their daughter back. But just when they hope that this can happen, the news comes that she's got married and that her husband is what they describe as a Philistine, which in our terms means an Indian and a Catholic.
But what's interesting, and one of the reasons that we know so much about the case, is that this isn't the end of contact between the two families. And years later, there are still meetings between the brother and the sister. This is her brother Stephen writing, "'We had ye joyful, sorrowful meeting of our poor sister,'
who we have separated from now for above 36 years. Wow, that long. But it's only after her father's death that Eunice comes down to New England. And Demos in his book suggests that partly maybe the trauma of seeing her father helpless when the mother was killed...
or his failure to be able to rescue her has left some sort of psychological inability of the daughter to trust her father again. Because it's only when he dies that she'll come back. It could be that. It could be that. Or it could be that she was actually living happily ever after and she knew if she saw her father, he wouldn't let her go back. I mean, who knows? Who can tell? I think there's every indication that she was happy, that she'd found a life very much for herself in her new incarnation.
And there's another visit when she sits in the church with her family wrapped in her blankets. They say their prayers, but she doesn't understand it because she's forgotten her English. The authorities, even at this stage, offer a lump sum payment for her, but she's not coming over. Yeah. So even in her 40s, they're still trying.
So the hope continues among her brothers, who seem remarkably optimistic, considering that for 40 years that she's been very clear that she doesn't want to come back and that she's chosen the life she wants. But right up until the end, there are contacts. Eunice herself gave a reason that her family would have not wanted to hear. She said that living among heretics would endanger her and her children's salvation. So she now regards the pure
But then she's sounding more Catholic than she's sounding sort of indigenous. So it's the Catholicism that is overriding everything, isn't it? So often there's this porous world, the Catholic, French and the Indians living cheek by jowl with, I think, a fairly thin Christian veil over the still traditional tribal society. But certainly she has imbibed enough Catholicism to regard the Puritans from whom she sprung as heretics.
And so at the end of it, her last word was,
is that living among heretics would endanger her and her children's salvation. So she doesn't come home for the same reason that her father is feared for her. It's a matter of salvation for both of them, but looking down at different ends of the telescopes. Do we know how she died and what condition she died in? Was she happy when she died? Yes, I think contrary to what her family, in a sense, would like or imagine, there's every indication that she's living an extremely happy family life with her new culture.
And she doesn't forget her family. She continues to bother to meet them. But now she regards them as heretics and she's got absolutely no intention of staying with them. The family visits continue until she becomes too old to travel and she dies at the age of 89. And
you know, leaves behind her this considerable archive. There's more about Eunice Williams than there is about any other captive of the period. So we were able to reconstruct from her story, put the flesh and bones on this extraordinary culture, living over these various different boundaries between white Puritan and French Catholic, between the different Iroquois tribes, the frontiers between England and France.
And in the middle of this, poor Eunice Williams trying to make her life. But I think the thing to take away from this is that at this early period of colonialism, these sort of crossings of culture that you get with Eunice Williams are not unusual. People often cross in both directions. We had in the last episode, Pocahontas coming and choosing ultimately to go to England and keeping in contact with her family.
while staying with her English family. The same sort of crossings over happen in India, in New Zealand, and many other parts of this early colonial world. As I say, this is at once a very specifically North American story, and one that tells us a lot about this early period, but it's also a period that has global repercussions. It's all we've got time for on this episode of Empire. Do join us again, and until you do, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William.
William Turnpike.
