JOHN SMITH, MARY ROWLANDSON AND OLAUDAH EQUIANO

Apart from being part of the greatest early American writers, what John Smith, Mary Rowlandson
and Olaudah Equiano have in common is the experience of having spent time in captivity among
members of a different race. They also felt compelled, each one for their own personal reasons, to
leave an autobiographical narrative of their ordeal for posterity, although todays readers are likely
to experience different reactions from those experienced by the writers contemporary readers.
Between the 1608/09 events narrated by Captain Smith and Equianos capture in 1756, with M
Rowlandsons story taking place in 1675, a century and a half of North American colonization had
been taking place, predominantly by the English. In The General History of Virginia, New England
and The Summer Isles, Captain Smith, an English explorer and pioneer, writes about his three
weeks time as a prisoner of Powhatan, an Indian leader from Virginia. During that time, the narrator
goes alternately from fearing for his life to feeling honored as a valued guest, and back to feeling
threatened by the captors. All the time the author calls them savages, and he explicitly compares
them to devils. This gives the reader the impression that the Natives were dangerously
unpredictable, reinforcing the prejudice going at the time and, maybe inadvertently, upsetting the
Virginia Company policy of encouraging settling. It seems like C J Smiths main goal was selfpromotion, focusing on his heroic antics whilst silencing the voice of the Natives.
Mary Rowlandsons 11 weeks in captivity come at a time when the relationship between New
England colonists and Natives is especially tense, due to the colonists expansion claims. As a Puritan,
Rowlandson agrees with the view that the colonization is right because it is part of Gods plans, and
is justified by the words of the Bible. In A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson she refers to her captors in religious terms, such as the bloody heathen. Her
suffering during captivity is great, but despite the many acts of kindness towards her from the tribe
people, like her being paid for jobs, fed and allowed to see her surviving son, she is only grateful to
God. Her autobiography had a didactic purpose, in a religious kind of way.
By the time of Equianos capture in 1756, recounted in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olauda Equiano or Gustav Vasa, the African, the colonies are fully settled and dependent on slaves
for their growth. As a black African who slaved for 10 years in American soil, his tale of the whites
cruelty and avarice is extremely chilling. To his eyes, they looked and acted as savagely as the Natives
had looked to the English. Based in Christian and Enlightenment principles, this piece of literature
served as a powerful weapon to the abolitionist cause.
All three writers, however, failed to show American colonization for what it really was: Native land
invasion and butchering of Natives. The modern reader can hopefully see that.

The life-versus-death opposition in On my Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet dominates the

entirety of this brief elegy by Anne Bradstreet. Death is the all-pervasive force in the poem from the
first verse, and in the following three it makes its presence be felt strongly. The rhythm imposed by
the rhymed iambic pentameters evokes feelings of solemn sadness; however, from the fifth verse on,
we can perceive a change in the tone of the author, growing defiant in the face of a God whose
actions she can barely understand. Bradstreet has lost at least two other small grandchildren in the

recent past, so she is ready to acknowledge Gods power over matters of life and death (with
humble hearts and mouths put in the dust). On the other hand, her repetitive use of the exhortative
lets, as if to force herself to keep believing, and the vocabulary she chooses to express her
emotional state (dreadful awe, bitter crosses), can lead us to believe that she is losing faith in
Gods goodness.
The whole pessimistic mood is somewhat reversed in the last two verses, when the writer employs
an apostrophe to speak directly to baby Simon as if he was still alive, reinforcing her trust in God and
giving the reader a final sense of the existence of eternal life after death.