The picket, picquet or piquet was a form of military punishment in vogue in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. It consisted of the offender being forced to stand on the narrow flat top of a peg for a period of time. The punishment died out in the 18th century and was so unfamiliar by 1800 that when the then governor of Trinidad, Sir Thomas Picton, ordered Luisa Calderon, a woman of European and African ancestry to be so punished, he was accused by public opinion in England of inflicting a torture akin to impalement. It was thought erroneously that the prisoner was forced to stand on the head of a pointed stake, and this error was repeated in the New English Dictionary.