Review: "The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright"

By Paul Carrier

Relatively few people, even here in New England, have ever heard of Esther Wheelwright, who was born in Wells, Massachusetts (present-day Maine) in 1696. Yet she lived a remarkable, almost unbelievable life until her death, at 84, in 1780. In fact, Wheelwright’s life was so unusual it might be said she had three lives rather than one, as scholar Ann M. Little explains in her 2016 book: The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright.

Born into a staunchly religious Puritan family, Wheelwright lived with her parents and siblings, as well as the family’s servants and slaves, for seven years until August 1703, when 39 Wells residents were killed or kidnapped during a French and Indian raid. The captives, including Wheelwright, were marched north to a Wabanaki village at Norridgewock, in what is now Maine. There, she was adopted by an Indigenous family and raised as a Catholic.

Wheelwright’s third life began to take form in 1708, when she moved still farther north, to Québec, where she lived briefly in the Chateau St. Louis, the governor’s palace. The following year, she was enrolled in a convent school run by the Ursuline nuns, eventually joining that teaching order. She rose to the position of mother superior of the Ursulines of Québec in 1760, after Québec fell to the British during the French and Indian War.

Little, a professor at Colorado State University, does a valiant job of detailing and analyzing Wheelwright’s life. But the task must have been daunting. As Little makes clear, the historical record is spotty.

No one knows, to cite one example, precisely where Wheelwright was when she was first taken captive in Wells in 1703. It’s assumed she was not in the family home at the time, because she was the only member of her immediate family to be seized by the raiding party.

Similarly, while Little makes it clear that much is known about how the Wabanaki of Norridgewock lived in that time period, and informed assumptions can be made about how Wheelwright was treated there, available records shed no light on precisely who adopted her in Norridgewock or how she reacted to the dramatic change in her circumstances. Wheelwright's relocation to Québec in 1708 leaves us with a whole new set of unanswerable questions. Why did she go there? Did she do so willingly?

The author blends exhaustive research with keen insight and a solid grasp of the available facts, but she cannot craft biographical details out of whole cloth, nor does she try to do so. Inevitably the reader learns almost as much about Wells, Norridgewock and Québec as about Wheelwright herself.

Still, that does not diminish Little’s accomplishment, which highlights the unusual prominence and power of the adult Wheelwright in the male-dominated world of the 18th century.

When the British conquered Québec in 1759, they converted sections of the Ursuline monastery into a military hospital and a barracks. The following year, the Ursulines elected Wheelwright, by then 64 years old, mother superior. She would serve three terms in the role, followed by two as the assistant superior.

Wheelwright led or helped lead the Ursulines during their most difficult years, which witnessed the military occupation that immediately followed the conquest of Québec and the uncertainty that plagued French Canadians until the British Parliament finally passed a law in 1774 declaring Catholicism legal in British-ruled Québec.

Little notes that Marie-Joseph de l'Enfant-Jésus, the name Wheelwright took as a nun, “was still considered a foreigner” and an “arrogant autocrat” by some Ursulines during her years at the helm. To her critics, she apparently remained a New England-born Wabanaki adoptee, despite her many years as a French-speaking Ursuline. Yet when her third term as mother superior ended in 1772, Little writes, the monastery had “more students, more novices, and more money” than the nuns could have hoped for “in the dark hours of 1759 and 1760.” 

Wheelwright’s personal story, which made her “remarkable in her lifetime,” probably is responsible for dooming her to obscurity in our time, Little writes. She is “too English or American” for French Canadians, and “too foreign and too Catholic” for Americans. She remains, to this day, the only foreign-born mother superior of the Ursulines in Québec.