sage way was
formed with three rows of soldiers on either side. Each soldier was
given a lash or a switch and ordered to strike with force. The offender,
stripped naked to the waist, was made to run between the lines, and he
was preceded by a sergeant who pressed the point of his reversed halbert
against the breast of the unfortunate culprit to prevent his running too
swiftly between the strokes. Thus every soldier was made a public
executioner of a cowardly and degrading punishment.

Several cases are on record of running the gantlope in Virginia; and an
interesting case was that of Captain Walter Gendal of Yarmouth, Maine, a
brave soldier, who for the slightest evidence of a not very serious
crime was sentenced to "run the gauntelope" through all the military
companies in Boston with a rope around his neck. This sentence was never
executed.

It is certainly curious to note that the first two parsons who came to
Plymouth, named Oldham and Lyford, came in honor and affection, but had
to run the gantlope at their leaving. They were most "unsavorie salt,"
as poor, worried Bradford calls them in his narrative of their
misbehaviors (one of the shrewdest, most humorous and sententious pieces
of seventeenth century writing extant), and after various "skandales,
aggravations, and great malignancies" they were "clapt up for a while."
He then writes of Oldham:

"They comited him till he was tamer, and then apointed a guard of
musketiers, wch he was to pass thorow, and every man was ordered to give
him a thump on ye breech wth ye end of his musket, then they bid him goe
and mende his manners."

Morton of Merry-mount tells in equally forcible language in his _New
England Canaan_ of the similar punishment of Lyford.

A Dutch sailor, for drawing a knife on a companion, was dropped three
times from the yard-arm and received a kick from every sailor on the
ship--a form of running the gantlope. And we read of a woman who
enlisted as a seaman, and whose sex was detected, being dropped three
times from the yard-arm, running the gantlope, and being tarred and
feathered, and that she nearly died from the rough and cruel treatment
she received.

Similar in nature to running the gantlope, and equally cowardly and
cruel, was "passing the pikes."

In the fierce _Summarie of Marshall Lawes_ for the colony of Virginia
under Dale, I find constantly appointed the penalty of "passing the
pikes:" it was ordered for disobedience, for persist