Flight of the Sparrow

On a bitter winter morning in 1676, the Puritan minister's wife, Mary Rowlandson, is captured by Indians. Her home destroyed and her children lost to her, she becomes a pawn in the bloody struggle between English settlers and the indigenous people. Battling cold, hunger, and exhaustion, she witnesses harrowing brutality, but also unexpected kindness.

To her confused surprise, she is drawn to her captors’ open and straightforward way of life, a feeling further complicated by her attraction to a generous, protective English-speaking native known as James Printer. All her life, Mary has been taught to fear God, submit to her husband, and abhor Indians. Now, having lived on the other side of the forest, she begins to question the edicts that have guided her, torn between the life she knew and the wisdom the natives have shown her.

Based on the compelling true narrative of Mary Rowlandson, Flight of the Sparrow is an evocative tale that transports the reader to a little-known time in early America and explores the real meanings of freedom, faith, and acceptance.

A reader's guide and author interview are included in the book.

Available in French as L’Envol du moineau.

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More on James Printer

The Printer and the Planters: Hassanamesit in King Philip’s War

[A talk given to the Grafton, Massachusetts Historical Society in June, 2011]

When my novel, Mr. Emerson’s Wife, was published in 2005, I began looking around for a likely subject for the next one. My interest soon landed on Mary Rowlandson, the Lancaster minister’s wife who was captured by Indians in the 1600s. I didn’t know when I began researching that James Printer was a part of her story. The same James Printer who’s mentioned on the sign by the Civil War Monument across from One Grafton Common.

He is, of course, the Printer in the title of my talk. The Planters are the Puritan colonists from England, who began to settle Massachusetts Bay Colony in large numbers starting in 1630, ten years after the Pilgrims arrived. Planting was a fundamental theme for the Puritans. They believed that God had planted them here in New England. And they came to plant not only fields, but towns – which they often referred to as “plantations,”— and the gospel as well.

Many of us, when we learned our early American history, skipped right from the Pilgrims to the Revolution. But there were more than 150 tumultuous years between those two events. Years that include King Philip’s War, the bloodiest war per capita in American history.

King Philip’s War began in June 1675 when 3 Wampanoag men were executed for killing John Sassamon, a Massachusett Christian Indian. In the minds of many English it ended in August of 1676 with the death of the Pokanoket sachem, Metacomet, also known as Philip. In reality it dragged on for another 30 years in the thinly settled areas north and west of Boston, preventing English expansion into northern and central Massachusetts until the 18th century.

As with any war, its origins were complex. But fundamentally, it was about control of the land. The native tribes in southern New England had been devastated by disease brought by early contact with the Europeans. But they were still viable tribes with long established political and commercial alliances. Native peoples held land in common under the ostensible control of a tribal leader or sachem. They moved seasonally to make the best use of resources, and managed land not by dividing it into small plots, but by landscaping vast areas. For example, to facilitate hunting, they regularly burned off the undergrowth, opening up park-like expanses under the leaf canopy, making it easy for them to sight game. They didn’t domesticate animals, except for dogs.

The English, on the other hand, divided land up into lots, each owned by an individual. Some lots were for housing, and some for planting crops. The early English colonists rarely hunted. Instead they butchered their domestic cattle, pigs and goats. They looked around at the native park-like forests and saw it as “unimproved” land that was being wasted.

The two cultures maintained a cautious peace for about fifty years. They traded goods and knowledge. The natives acquired clothing and iron utensils and muskets. The English acquired knowledge of the area and furs, for which there was a lucrative market in Europe. But there were certainly problems. Not the least of which was the introduction of English livestock. The colonial English generally fenced their gardens let their animals graze. But this practice wreaked havoc on native gardens, causing increasing friction.

Beginning in the 1640’s the English began a campaign to convert native peoples to Christianity. In the forefront of this movement was John Eliot, minister of the Roxbury church. He studied the Algonkian language, worked with Indians, including James Printer, to translate and print the Old and New Testaments of the Bible in Algonkian. By 1660 Eliot and Daniel Gookin, the administrator for Indian affairs, had created a network of 7 praying towns.

These praying towns were set up to run without direct supervision by the English. They ordained Indian ministers and teachers. They were governed by the same principle of local autonomy that all the churches and towns of Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was assumed that the native peoples had been converted and were striving, just as the Puritans in the English towns, to seek and do God’s will.

Hassanamesit, the first Nipmuc praying town, had strategic importance because of its location and because it was influential among neighboring bands. It served as a buffer between the colonists and less friendly native tribes to the west and south.

Although Eliot and Gookin praised Hassanamesit for the English lifestyle of the village – specifically the use of English livestock and the establishment of orchards – there’s reason to believe that most natives followed their traditional customs much of the time. Although it’s recorded that they built a meeting house and a few English style houses, most probably continued to live in their wetus (or wigwams) and moved according to their seasonal patterns.

As more English settlers came to New England, and the second generation assumed adulthood the pressure grew for land acquisition. When the native fur trade collapsed in southern New England, the Indians began trading their land for English goods. As the English lands grew, so did English law and authority.

Around 1674 Philip, the Pokanoket sachem and leader of the Wampanoag confederation, saw that more and more land was being sold to the English. With the enthusiastic encouragement of his warriors, he began to prepare for war. He also sought the support of sympathetic tribes in the area. The Wampanoags formed an alliance with the Pocassets, Pocumtuc, Wobanaki, Narragansetts, and their friends to the north, the Nipmuc.

So that – very briefly – is the context for the war. What did it look like to the people who lived through it? And why do I find James Printer’s perspective so compelling?

I believe James Printer is uniquely positioned to offer us a balanced perspective on the war. He was Nipmuc, fully habituated to native customs and world views. But he was also a Christian Indian, able to speak, read and write English. He served as a translator and interpreter for both natives and English. He was sufficiently assimilated into the English culture so that he could interpret their words and behavior to fellow Indians. A remarkably intelligent man, he served as a “bridge” from which to view the war, its context and consequences.

James Printer, whose Nipmuc name was Wowaus, was the youngest son of Naoas, one of the village elders. He was probably born around 1640. When he was about five years old and after his father was converted, he was sent to live in Cambridge with the family of Henry Dunster. Henry Dunster was a minister and the first president of Harvard College.

At the time James moved to Cambridge, Henry Dunster had recently married his second wife, Elizabeth Atkinson. Recently widowed herself, she brought to the marriage a printing press. At the time it was the only press in New England, and it stood in the Dunster home, where James, who was clearly a clever child, no doubt took a special interest in it. He falls out of the record for the next 13 years, until 1659, when he was apprenticed to the Cambridge printer, Samuel Green.

Then, in 1675, as tensions were rising between the English and the native tribes, James fled his apprenticeship, having served 15 years of a 16-year apprenticeship.

It seems an odd thing to do, when he was so close to finishing. According to some scholars, James left because of his love for his country. He clearly felt the need to be with his family. My guess is that over the years he was back and forth between Cambridge and Hassanamesit quite a lot, despite the 40 mile-distance. His desire to return signals to us – and to the English at the time – where his chief loyalties lay.

When hostilities erupted in 1675, the Massachusetts Council ordered all Christian Indians to stay within a one-mile radius of their village, a restriction that made it next to impossible for the natives to hunt effectively. Soon after Samuel Mosely, one of the most brutal commanders in this brutal war, and his soldiers stumbled across post-hunt celebrations of some Christian Indians near Marlborough. After torturing one of the men until he named names, Moseley arrested fifteen men, including James Printer, chained them together with ropes around their necks and marched them all to Boston. They were eventually tried and found innocent, but not before they had been thoroughly humiliated and confined for days in a filthy jail.

If James was not previously convinced that the English were the wrong people to side with, he surely was now. When he and eight others escaped the jail, they freed some other natives who had not been part of their group. He returned to Hassanamesit, which was located in the thick of the conflict.

The English decided to consolidate the praying Indians in Natick and Marlborough. From there they were rounded up and forcibly removed to Deer Island in Boston Harbor. They claimed that it was for “their and our security.

Deer Island was a harsh, windswept place the Indians were not provided with sufficient food. Huge numbers died that winter of sickness, starvation and exposure. It quickly became apparent that flight – and maybe even joining Philip’s forces – was a better option than being shipped to Deer Island to face starvation and/or being sold into slavery.

In September, 1675, the English mounted an expedition to destroy the dwellings and goods, including the cornfields, of the praying Indian villages. Two months later in November, while about 200 praying Indians were harvesting what grain and corn was left in the fields of Hassanamesit, when they were surprised by a group of Nipmuc, who offered them a choice of going with them peacefully or having all their corn and grain taken. The implication was clear – if the praying Indians did not come with the Nipmuc, the English would confine them to Deer Island. The Hassanamiscoes – including James Printer and his brothers – elected to go with the Nipmucs.

James becomes a shadowy figure at this point. While his brother and father escaped or were allowed to leave in February, and joined their fellow Christian Indians on Deer Island, James stayed with Philip’s forces. He apparently served as a scribe and probably an English translator to the sachems. Scholars believe he wrote a threatening note found nailed to a bridge after the Indian attack on Medford. He also played a part in the negotiations for Mary Rowlandson’s ransom and release in May of 1676.

In that same month, English soldiers attacked a group of natives near the top of Keith Hill and killed several Indians whom they believed to be people of importance.

In the summer of 1676 the English declared a brief period of amnesty for the rebellious Indians. If they came in and submitted to English authority, and helped to bring in more “rebels” they could be restored. The price of this amnesty was that they had to present to the authorities the heads of two of their fellow Indians.

James Printer accepted the amnesty and came in to Boston – presumably carrying his grisly payment. He purportedly helped to bring in about 200 of his fellow Nipmuc. He returned to the printer’s trade and in a strange coincidence, set the type in 1681 for Mary Rowlandson’s bestselling book about her captivity.

I’m not quite sure how James managed to survive when so many of his fellow natives were sold into slavery or executed or starved to death. In this, he was like Mary Rowlandson, who survived her captivity in part by virtue of her intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit. James Printer seems to have had a rare intelligence and the ability to seize what so many could not – the profound changes that were taking place in his world – and manipulate them to his advantage.

When the war ended, there were so few Hassanamisco that they were grouped with residents of Natick. They were essentially confined there so they could be closely supervised by the English. Most of the praying towns were dissolved. Hassanamesit continued to exist on paper, but it was not occupied by native residents for the next 20 years. In the 1680s the government decided to partition the “empty” Nipmuc lands for English settlement. The Hassanamisco who lived in Natick managed to retain their claim to the abandoned village. In 1682 a deed conveying tracts of Nipmuc land to the English included the signatures of 22 Nipmuc, only two of whom were associated with Hassanamesit. One of those two was James Printer.

The natives weren’t allowed to leave Natick until the 1690s. In 1698 about five Indian families returned to Hassanamesit, including the family of James Printer.

As I researched this book I found myself increasingly saddened by the brutality and blindness of the war. I was also struck by the parallels between the time of King Philip’s War and our own time. The use of terrorist tactics. Brutal raids on civilians. The torture of captives. And perhaps most insidious was the stereotyping of people.

The Indians set fire to houses and made a point of destroying the colonists’ livestock. The English often didn’t know where they were or when they were about to attack. They used their familiarity with the land and their ability to move quickly and often to confuse the English. And the English reaction was not very different from ours today. Once hostilities broke out many English no longer bothered to distinguish between Christian and friendly natives and those allied with Philip. They lumped all Indians together as “murderous savages” and many were incarcerated, starved and sold into slavery.

It saddens me is that we don’t seem to have learned very much from our experience. Perhaps it is simply human nature, but the demonization of the enemy and the inability to differentiate between friends and foes has continued in our history over many generations. First it was the Indians, then the Germans, and the Japanese. And now it is Muslims.

I’m also sorry that we, here in Grafton, give only lip service to that part of our history that predates English settlement. I admit to thinking it was somewhat ironic that we’re celebrating only our 275th anniversary as a town when the General Court approved the establishment of a praying town in this place in 1654.

By failing to recognize that part of our history, we deny ourselves the opportunity to honor one of the most admirable, though brief, moments in our town’s past. Because, in the early 1700s there was a brief period of social equality between Indian and English.

When the English investors and settlers agreed with the Hassanamisco on land purchase, there were seven Indian landowners who could claim a right to the whole 4 square mile property granted in 1654. Each of the seven Indian “planters” was on an equal footing with each English settler when it came to portioning out the land. It was a somewhat complicated process which I’m not going to go into here, but it’s significant that the Indian planters were assigned an additional 100 acres to be held in common among them in as well as an additional 20 acres to make up for land set aside for the town’s minister and school. A clause in the deed required the English proprietors to provide preaching and schooling without cost to the Indians. Thus, for a brief time, the Indians were considered equal in social standing to the English. When the first meetinghouse was seated, space was assigned to the Indians. They were not taxed for it as were the English settlers. Indians and English were educated together in the school. This was a remarkable and unusual arrangement in colonial history.

James Printer died in 1717, before the land was partitioned. But not before he could return to his beloved Hassanamesit. I like to think of him sitting on a hill overlooking the Blackstone River, thinking about all he had seen and done in his lifetime. I like to imagine he took some satisfaction in being a bridge between two worlds. His intelligence, his knowledge, and his unique experience make him – in my view – the most compelling figure in the 356-year history of Massachusetts.