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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| William Henry Foster. The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 205. $29.95.
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| Growing up in the United States in cities like Boston, New York, or Minneapolis, just a few hundred miles south of the longest (fairly) unprotected border on earth, one would think "Americans" would know something of their joint history with their "neighbors to the north." In most cases, that would be wrong. Recently, however, readers of North American history have become aware of the interconnections between French and English colonizers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the works of James Axtell, John Demos, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which offer a subtle and a more interesting understanding of border stories. |
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The next generation is now in the camp. William Henry Foster builds on earlier works and focuses our attention on captive Puritan men and women. Several of these women converted to Catholicism in the war years between 1689 and 1712. Many British-American men lived under the wing or, as Forster tells it, under the thumb of women in New France. His book's title tells us that it is also about French Canada's Catholic women, but it is more sympathetic to New England captive men and underlines the gender differences for those men as opposed to their sisters and female counterparts. |
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Foster sets out to examine why there was a discrepancy in the number of Puritan women vs. Puritan men who remained apparently happy in Canada rather than returning when ransomed or attempting to escape from the areas around Montreal and Quebec. The book is divided into five chapters: without their subtitles these are "The Farm," "The Frontier," "The Hospital," "The Seigneury," and "The Household." In each case, Foster takes us to the early French settlements during and following wars and lets us see the lives of English captives and French captors. It was with French women that Puritan men were often forced to settle in a condition Foster calls slavery or indentured servitude. |
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Alden T. Vaughan and Daniel K. Richter disclosed that between 1675 and 1763, 1,641 members of the British colonies were taken captive by either French or a variety of Native people in the New England, New York, and Appalachian areas. Males outnumbered females 1,249 to 392 with between 30 percent and 37 percent of the females never returning to New England. ("Crossing the Cultural Divide: Indians and New Englanders, 1605–1763," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 90 [1980]: 23–99). Foster's book focuses on the male captives, trying to explain why almost all of the men returned and why Puritan men were so unhappy with their life in the North. |
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French Catholic women are the captors here. Some British-American colonial women and girls converted to Catholicism and became leaders in religious institutions in New France as well as captors. Lydia Longley from the Groton, Massachusetts area, became Soeur Ste. Madeleine. She arrived in Canada in her early twenties. Ultimately, she worked in Pointe-Saint-Charles, a woman's community on the Saint Lawrence River. The settlement "was defined in significant part by the men who worked that land," most of whom were Puritan captive males—some from Longley's Massachusetts neighborhood (pp. 20, 21, 32). |
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