SURVEYING TIME: HANNAH DUSTON’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE IN THE WORKS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU
SURVEYING TIME: HANNAH DUSTON’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE IN THE WORKS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Summary/Abstract: During the turbulent times of Colonial America, skirmishes between European settlers and Native Americans were frequent and in one such incident Hannah Duston was taken captive. Duston and two other captives, Mary Neff, the wetnurse of Duston’s late newborn, and 14-year-old Samuel Lennarson, made their escape by murdering and scalping their captors. With hatchet and scalps in her hands, Duston later became a symbol of Puritan America and famous nineteenth-century writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry D. Thoreau told her story both as a cautionary tale and as a fictional reimagination of Early American life. This article focuses on the ways in which Thoreau, as a travel and nature writer and as a land surveyor, uses Duston’s captivity narrative to reinscribe violent deeds within the realm of natural history.

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