In 1692 it was ordered in Kings County that a good pair of stocks and a pound be made in every bound within Kings County, and kept in sufficient repair. In repair and in use were they kept till this century. Pillories too were employed in punishment till within the memory of persons now living. The whipping-post was really a public blessing,--in constant use, and apparently of constant benefit, though the publicity of its employment seems shocking to us to-day. The public whipper received a large salary. In 1751, we learn from an advertisement, it was twenty pounds annually. Some of the punishments were really almost picturesque in their ingenious inventions of mortification and degradation. Truly it was a striking sight when “Jan of Leyden”--a foul-mouthed rogue, a true _blather-schuyten_--was fastened to a stake in front of the townhouse, with a bridle in his mouth and a bundle of rods tied under each arm, and a placard on his breast bearing the inscription, “Lampoon-riter, false accuser, defamer of magistrates.” Though he was banished, I am sure he never was forgotten by the children who saw him standing thus garnished and branded on that spring day in 1664. In the same place a thief was punished by being forced to stand all day under a gallows, a gallows-rope around his neck and empty sword-scabbard in his hand, a memorable figure. And could any who saw it ever forget the punishment of Mesaack Martens, who stole six cabbages from his neighbor, and confessed and stood for days in the pillory with cabbages on his head, that “the punishment might fit the crime;” to us also memorable because the prisoner was bootlessly _examined by torture_ to force confession of stealing fowls, butter, turkeys, etc. He was not the only poor creature who suffered torture in New Amsterdam. It was frequently threatened and several times executed. The mate of a ship was accused of assaulting a sheriff’s officer, who could not identify positively his assailant. The poor mate was put to torture, and _he was innocent_ of the offence. The assailant was proved to be another man from whom the officer had seized a keg of brandy. Still none in New Amsterdam were tortured or pressed to death. The blood of no Giles Corey stains the honor of New Netherland. Sometimes the execution of justice seemed to “set a thief to catch a thief.” A letter written by an English officer from Fort James on Manhattan Island to Captain Silvester Salisbury in Fort Albany in 1672 contains this sentence:-- “We had like to have lost our Hang-man Ben Johnson, for he being taken in Divers Thefts and Robbings convicted and found guilty, escaped his neck through want of another Hangman to truss him up, soe that all the punishment that he received for his Three Years’ Roguery in thieving and stealing (which was never found out till now) was only 39 stripes at the Whipping Post, loss of an Ear and Banishment.”