Free Final Voyage by Peter Nichols Page A

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    In 1656, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws stipulating steep fines for ship captains who brought Quakers into the colony, steeper fines for those who sheltered them, and for “what person or persons soever shall revile the office or persons of magistrates or ministers [i.e., by not removing their hats], as is usual with the Quakers, such persons shall be severely whipped or pay the sum of five pounds.” The Quakers of course refused to pay the fines, embraced the opportunity to make public spectacles of their persecution, and were routinely flogged, eliciting sympathy and often converts. And so, in 1657 the court got tougher:
    If any Quaker or Quakers shall presume, after they have once suffered what the law requireth, to come into this jurisdiction, every such male Quaker shall for the first offense have one of his ears cut off, and be kept at work in the house of correction till he can be sent away at his own charge, and for the second offense shall have his other ear cut off, and kept in the house of correction, as aforesaid; and every woman Quaker that hath suffered the law here and shall presume to come into this jurisdiction shall be severly whipped, and kept at the house of correction at work till she be sent away at her own charge, and so for her coming again she shall be alike used as aforesaid; and for every Quaker, he or she, that shall a third time herein again offend, they shall have their tongues bored through with a hot iron, and kept at the house of correction, close to work, till they be sent away at their own charge.
    The court now also made provisions aimed at the growing trend of local converts: “And it is further ordered, that all and every Quaker arising from amongst ourselves shall be dealt with and suffer the like punishment as the law provides against foreign Quakers.”
    But, as the Rhode Island authorities had well understood, these measures were simply red flags to Quakers. After being punished and banished to Rhode Island, three persistent Quaker offenders, Mary Dyer, William Robinson, and Marmaduke Stevenson, returned to Massachusetts in 1659 and were sentenced to be hanged. When asked for her feelings as she was walking to the gallows, Mary Dyer replied, “It is an hour of the greatest joy I can enjoy in this world. No eye can see, no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand, the sweet incomes and refreshing of the spirit of the Lord which I now enjoy.” On the scaffold, Robinson declared more prosaically, “Mind you, it is for the not putting off the hat that we are put to death.”
    Mary Dyer was reprieved after the two men had been hanged, and again sent away to Rhode Island. So profound was her disappointment, and determination, that she returned to Massachusetts and succeeded in getting herself hanged in 1660.
    But many Quakers were less fanatical. They wanted more from life than a martyr’s death. In both the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, groups of Quakers—and others who felt oppressed, if less physically threatened, by these fascist regimes and such interference in their daily lives—began to think of moving away from populated centers: not outside the colonies, for beyond their borders lay an outer space of wilderness, but away from the nosy neighborhoods of towns, toward remoter areas where they might practice religion, dress, and speech to their own tastes and pursue peaceful lives.
    In between cannily tolerant Rhode Island and hyperreactionary Massachusetts Bay Colony lay comparatively mild-mannered Plymouth Colony. There, Quakers were dealt with less hysterically, if not actually embraced by the aging Mayflower Pilgrims and their multiplying children. Quakerish delinquency was seen as a cranky misdemeanor rather than a high crime in Plymouth; fines were levied where ears were severed in Massachusetts; there were whippings instead of hangings for persistent offenders. In 1658, one Humphrey Norton behaved