ith family members and colonial officials alike negotiating with French officials and Indians for her return. They were completely unsuccessful. The whole project of attempting to secure Eunice's release from captivity must be understood in the context of the rather complex rules of engagement, rivalry, captivity, negotiation, and ransom prevailing in New England and eastern Canada among the Protestant English, the Catholic French laymen and clergy, and the various communities of Indians scattered across the area. Demos explains that the Puritan charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company called in no small part for the conversion of the heathen Indians to (Protestant) Christianity, which was by and large a complete failure. The French Jesuit missions in Canada had had much more success in converting Indians to Catholicism, or more exactly to a species of Christianity suffused with Indian spirituality. The point is that French administration of Indian behavior and activity appears to have coexisted with Indian self-determination, at least where the taking of English captives from English territory was concerned. To put it another way, the fact that there was no love lost between the English and French in the New World meant that the French would not (and did not, in the Williams case) incur an affirmative obligation to redeem captives on behalf of the English. The French were much more interested in curbing Indian smuggling of furs and other goods of foreign trade.
The fact that the French were not particularly motivated to secure the release of English prisoners of the Indians has to be set beside the fact that, when asked by Williams, members of his family, or officials of Massachusetts Bay to facilitate negotiations with the Indians, French officials in Montreal appear to have been cooperative (at least when Britain and France were not at war), going so far as to test the limits of the government's uneasy relationship with the Jesui...