Massacre on the Merrimack

July 13, 2015
A strong sense of place and vivid narration underscore journalist Atkinson’s tale of war, survival, and murder in colonial Massachusetts. Atkinson (Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man) opens with a heart-pounding account of the 1697 Abenaki raid on Haverhill, Mass., the English frontier town on the Merrimack River that was home to the Duston family. It was near the end of King William’s War, a bloody contest waged by the French, English, and various Native American tribes for control of northern New England. Thomas Duston got everyone in his family safely to the garrison house except his wife, Hannah, and their newborn daughter, Martha, who were taken prisoner. Grief-stricken when one of the Abenaki killed Martha, Hannah, a sturdy goodwife and devout Puritan, plotted and carried out a horrific revenge. Atkinson’s storytelling skills are superb; he crisply moves from events in Haverhill across the panorama of colonial rivalries in North America to Hannah’s captivity experiences. Yet there is a disconnect between Atkinson’s emphasis on the Merrimack landscape and the questions about motivations for Hannah’s revenge that he considers central to understanding her story. In failing to fully consider the religious, social, and cultural life of colonial women, Atkinson’s otherwise excellent account remains incomplete.

June 1, 2015
A woman's life in dangerous times. In 1697, Hannah Duston, a Haverhill, Massachusetts, wife and mother, was abducted by Abenaki Indians and forcibly marched north toward French-occupied Canada to be ransomed. Her week-old infant was brutally murdered during the march, other captives were beaten to death, and the survivors were starved and abused. Desperate, Duston managed to take revenge, slaying not only her captors, but squaws and children, as well, hacking off scalps for monetary reward. Journalist and fiction writer Atkinson (Writing/Boston Univ.; Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man, 2012, etc.) narrates Duston's story in gory detail, aiming to convey "the moral truth of what happened" and allow readers to judge whether Duston's act of savagery was justified. Her contemporaries had no doubt: Cotton Mather wrote a sympathetic account; Maryland's governor sent Duston an appreciative gift of three pewter chargers; in recognition of her valor and the scalps, the General Court of Massachusetts awarded her 50 pounds. Atkinson implies his own admiration, as well, in presenting Duston's experience "through the lens of the prejudices, preconceptions, and preoccupations of the seventeenth-century colonial settlers and the Indians." Although he acknowledges that Indians had suffered "decades of insult and abuse," were driven from their land, "preyed upon by corrupt traders and swindlers, [and] demeaned by colonial authorities," he still depicts them as terrorizing savages: marauding, whooping with "devilish noise," ruthlessly murdering with axes, clubs, hatchets, pikes, knives, and rifles given to them by the French. The French, greedy and bellicose, inflamed Indian hatred of the colonists and disrupted their traditional hunting and gathering by seducing them into the lucrative fur trade. The competition for animal hides, Atkinson maintains, pitted tribe against tribe. Drawing on archival documents and contemporary and recent histories, Atkinson has written a compelling narrative, but his reprisal of 17th-century prejudices makes for discomfiting reading.

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