The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

Chapter 4 descripts the process of captive exchange between the French and the British, by which New Englanders would exchange French and/or Canadian prisoners for British captives and vice versa.

Because taking captives was commonplace during the colonial period in New England, there was an entire flow of industry and business relations centered around the movement of captives. Toward the end of 1706, a great many British captives had been returned to their homes in New England in exchange for French captives:

The closing months of 1706 had brought a harvest of prisoner “redemptions.” Two major missions to Canada—Sheldon’s in late summer and Appleton’s in the fall—had between them retrieved approximately 100 English captives; meanwhile, a similar number of Frenchman had gone the opposite way (78).

Demos examines the Native Americans’ approach to taking captives, finding it to be “a fluid mix of cultural inheritance, personal whim, and vigorous pursuit of the main chance” (80). For those Native American tribes allied with the French in Canada and in the American colonies, the traditional practices of torturing and cannibalizing captives were no longer in use, although the practice of “adopting” captives into Native American families was still very much alive, as found in the case of Eunice: “And there was the matter of ‘adoption’—of incorporating (some, not all) captives into particular Indian families” (81).