Note 18 — NOTE

The first Quakers to reach America were two women, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher. When they arrived at Boston, their luggage was searched, their books were burned in the market-place by the hangman; they were stripped and examined for signs of witchcraft, and after five weeks’ imprisonment and cruelty were shipped back to Barbadoes. Then followed a series of persecutions too horrible to be detailed, increasing in severity from fines—fireless, bedless, and almost foodless—imprisonment in chains in the Boston winter, floggings (one part alone of the punishment of the aged William Brand consisted of 117 blows on his bare back with a barred rope, while two women were stripped to the waist in the mid-winter snow and lashed at the cart-tail through eleven towns), ear-croppings, and tongue-borings, to the death penalty suffered by three men and one woman. The intervention of Charles II. referred only to the death penalty. Whippings continued until 1677, and imprisonment for tithes until 1724.