An account of the Puritan minister John Williams and his family, who were taken prisoner in a raid by a party of French and Indians on a Massachusetts village in 1704, during Queen Anne`s War. Williams was eventually released by the French; however his wife and several of his children died while in captivity. The unredeemed captive of the title was his daughter Eunice, who converted to Roman Catholicism, married an Indian, and lived the rest of her life in Canada. John Demos explores the details of this story and interprets its meaning for 18th-century English-Americans.