Among the sects of the time dangerous to Puritanism, were the Quakers or Friends. The first of the sect who appeared conspicuously in New England were Mary Fisher and Anna Austin, who arrived at Boston in the summer of 1656, when John Endicott was governor. There was no special law against them; but under a general act against heretics, they were arrested; their persons were searched to find marks of witchcraft, with which they were suspected; their trunks were searched, and their books were burned publicly by the hangman. After several weeks of confinement in prison, they were sent back to England. Mary Fisher, a violent religious enthusiast, afterward visited the Sultan of Turkey and, being mistaken for a crazy woman, was permitted to go everywhere unmolested. The harsh treatments of the first comers fired the zeal of the more enthusiastic of the sect in England, who sought martyrdom as an honor and a passport to the home of the righteous. They flocked to New England and fearfully vexed the souls of the Puritan magistrates and ministers. One woman came from London to warn the authorities against persecutions. Others came to revile, denounce and defy the powers of the church. From the windows of their houses they would rail at the magistrates, and mock the institutions of the country, while some fanatical young women appeared nude on the streets and in the churches, as emblems of "unclothed souls of the people." Others with loud voices proclaimed that the wrath of the Almighty was about to fall like destructive lightning on Boston and Salem. The Quakers of 1659 were quite different from that honorable body of people of the present age. Horrified by their blasphemies and indecencies, the authorities of Massachusetts passed some cruel laws. At first they forbade all persons "harboring Quakers," imposing severe penalties for each offence, then followed mild punishment on the Friends themselves. These proving ineffectual, the Puritans passed laws which authorized the cropping of the ears, boring the tongues with hot irons, and hanging on the gibbet offending Quakers. Even these terrible laws could not keep them away. On a bright October day in 1659, two young men named William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, with Mary Dyer, wife of the Secretary of State of Rhode Island, were led from the Boston jail, with ropes around their necks and guarded by soldiers, to be hanged on Boston Common. Mary walked between her companions hand in hand to the gallows, where, in the presence of Governor Endicott, the two young men were hung. Mary was unmoved by the spectacle. She was given into the care of her son, who came from Rhode Island to plead for her life, and went away with him; but the next spring this foolish woman returned and began preaching and was herself hung on Boston Common.