Write a 500 word essay that compares and contrasts the mission of the the puritans in the new world as described in bradfords narrative and rowlandsons captivity narrative

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Explanation:

William Bradford and the English settlers that established the Plymouth Colony near Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, were ”separatist” Puritans: strict Calvinists who had given up on the Church of England. Contrary to most Puritans, who were keen on reforming the Church of England, cleansing it of Popish rituals and beliefs, Separatists believed the Anglican Church to be beyond repair.

Young Bradford joined a separatist congregation that met at Scrooby Manor, in Yorkshire. When the Archbishop of York learnt about it many of them were arrested, Bradford included. Many of the Scrooby brethren decided they’d better move to the Dutch Republic, a country with religious freedom. They first arrived in Amsterdam, which they left for the smaller, mostly Calvinist, city of Leyden.

Yet, Separatists grew uncomfortable with the Dutch influence on their children. Bradford, now a husband and a father, joined other English separatists in Holland who were negotiating with a company of London merchants who’d invest in and seek permission for a settlement in the Colony of Virginia; the Laiden separatists would contribute with their labour for seven years.

Puritans were not really seeking religious freedom for everyone in America; they had enjoyed it in the Netherlands. Rather, they wanted to create a society from scratch, a theocracy with freedom for themselves only. Their political ideas were also quite heterodox and, in part, the cause of their being persecuted. Most Separatists had sworn secret covenants of allegiance to their own community, as opposed to allegiance to the King (The Mayflower Compact wasn’t one of such covenants because some colonists on board were not Separatists).  

Their ideal society was based on their own principles to the exclusion of other Protestant groups such as the Quakers, who saw the angry side of the Puritans. Their aim was to set the world aside and establish the City of God on earth, what Massachusetts Bay colonist John Winthrop would call a “City upon a Hill”, an utopian dream that soon showed an uncanny resemblance to other people’s dystopian stories, as utopian narratives usually do.

Captivity narratives were the first best-sellers of American literature. Mary Rowlandson was a seventeenth-century settler of the Massachusetts Bay Colony* who was held captive by a group of Algonquian Indians for about eleven weeks during the King Philip’s War.

Mrs Rowlandson was captured in the raid of the town of Lancaster, described in all its cruelty in her narration and represented in the woodcut above. In fact, Rowlandson’s narrative starts with very stereotypical descriptions of the “savages”, but her opinion of some of these people is nuanced day by day, when she gets to know them better and starts to see them as individuals, human beings with some of whom she is capable of empathy, and vice versa.  

Before she was captured she had led the wife of a Puritan Englishwoman and a housewife married to a minister but perhaps the reason she didn’t produced the typical Manichaean portrait of her captors was that, contrary to other women who were kidnapped in the late 1600s, she had the erudition to write her own story herself. When other women shared their ordeal with someone else it would usually be a minister, who would also be the one writing the story. Their version of events would be dramatised and exaggerated, and the natives would always be portrayed as the stereotypical demonic savage.  

Both narratives are very different. In Bradford’s text he describes the origin and evolution of a colony, its utopian principles and down-to-earth experiences. Mrs Rowlandson’s story focuses on the period of her captivity and her personal interaction with the native society, so we can witness how some particular tenets of her world-view are sometimes questioned during her captivity.