10. Samuel Sewall may have been the first to record Hannah’s story of her captivity and escape
Samuel Sewall was a leading citizen of Colonial Massachusetts, a proponent of the Salem Witch Trials (for which he later expressed deep regret), a graduate of Harvard College, and a leading officer in the militia. He was also a printer who produced one of the earliest editions of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress to appear in America. He was one of the earliest American leaders to publicly and fervently renounce slavery, as well as to support a 1690 version of women’s rights. From 1673 to 1729 he kept a journal, in which he recorded events and his observations and commentary regarding life in Massachusetts. It includes the story of Hannah Duston, as she recounted it to him in April, 1697, when the events were but a few weeks old (curiously, since according to what she told Mather she was still a captive at the time).
Although Sewall – Harvard graduate or not – used what may charitably be called adventurous spelling in his journal, using several different renditions of Hannah’s last name for example, he describes the events with the tantalizing introduction of a new twist. According to what Hannah told him, in an entry dated May 12, one of the two Indians killed by Hannah, “did formerly live with Mr. Roulandson at Lancaster”. From his entry, it would appear that Hannah recognized the man, whom she described to Sewall as “her master” as one who had evidently frequented the British settlements. Mary Rowlandson, of Lancaster, was the subject of a captivity account of her own, during the King Philip’s War of 1675-76. Beyond the comment recorded in Sewall’s journal, little other evidence exists to indicate that Hannah knew her captors.