Skull discovered in Hempstead still caught in historical limbo

Death or Glory.

That was the slogan of the 17th Light Dragoons, whose distinctive skull and crossbones insignia would have been emblazoned on their helmets when the cavalry regiment — about 350 strong — rode into the village of Hempstead in the autumn of 1779.

Formed at the end of the French and Indian War a decade earlier, the 17th was one of only two cavalry regiments that had been sent across the Atlantic to help crush what the English called the Rebellion, and what Americans call the Revolution.

By the time they were deployed to Long Island, the 17th had fought in several major engagements in the already three-year-old conflict. They were known as an elite, well-disciplined unit of dragoons — meaning, mounted infantry that could fight on and off their horses.

But not long after their arrival in Hempstead, one of the men of the 17th besmirched his regiment’s reputation and honor. He was killed in the act of committing a heinous crime that, in turn, would serve as a chilling reminder of just how brutal the British occupation of Long Island was.

Henry Onderdonk Jr. wrote in his 1846 book “Documents and Letters Intended to Illustrate the Revolutionary Incidents of Queens County: With Connecting Narratives, Explanatory Notes, and Additions” that “downtown” Hempstead consisted of seven homes, two churches and three taverns when the British arrived in late 1779. The 17th regiment had come to this rural backwater to protect the crops, livestock and firewood that were keeping the British army in New York alive. “Long Island is the breadbasket for the British military,” said historian Barnet Schecter, author of “The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution.” “In addition to food, when winter comes, the fact that Long Island is a source of firewood is tremendously important.”

The 17th’s job was to guard these supply lines, and to respond to the hit-and-run whaleboat raids launched across Long Island Sound by American rebels based in Connecticut. Hempstead soon became an occupied town.

While most of Hempstead and the surrounding areas that would later become Nassau County were loyal to the Crown, it didn’t mean the people enjoyed having a force of British soldiers living in their midst (not to mention Hessians, the German mercenaries, who were stationed in parts of what is now North Hempstead). “Soldiers were at times billeted for three or four miles around Hempstead,” wrote Onderdonk, who interviewed eyewitnesses in the early part of the 19th century.

The 17th also used local farms to graze its horses, which angered the locals, he wrote: “Their horses were turned out to pasture on the salt meadows and sometimes in fields just ready to be cut … and continued there till the crop was ruined.”

Targeting a farmhouse

For their part, the men of the 17th were beginning to get antsy. “By the fall of 1779, these guys have been at war for three years,” said Don Hagist, editor of the Journal of the American Revolution and an expert on the British army in Revolutionary-era America. “They’re doing spectacularly well on the battlefield, but yet, where is the war going?”

One of those in the 17th Dragoons who was apparently reaching the breaking point was Robert Silby.

In his 2023 book, “Chronicles of the British Occupation of Long Island,” Rocky Point historian David M. Griffin established that Silby was a private in the 17th, although little else is known about him. According to Hagist, the men of the regiment were all recruits; between 25 and 40 years old, taller in height and generally considered a cut above the average Redcoat, since they needed to be expert horsemen.

But on the night of Oct. 20, duty — not to mention honor or glory — was clearly not on Pvt. Silby’s mind. It was later alleged that he approached two of his fellow cavalrymen with the idea of robbing a local farmhouse. He had one in mind — not too close to their base in Hempstead, but within riding distance. Late that night, he and his two co-conspirators were able to slip out of the village, fetch their horses and gallop about 12 miles across the Hempstead plains until they came to a farmhouse near Flushing. According to testimonies given in a court martial, Silby and another trooper broke into the house, where they confronted the owner — a Quaker woman named Mary Toulmin. When she wouldn’t or couldn’t produce her valuables, Silby began to choke her.

The woman’s screams alerted her brother, James Edger, who was in another room. He tried to pull Silby off his sister, but the cavalryman bludgeoned him over the head with his pistol. As Edger testified later, he staggered back to his room and grabbed his own pistol. When Silby and the other soldier came after him, he fired, drilling Silby under his eye and killing him instantly. His comrades fled.

The incident incensed Loyalists throughout Queens County. The Quakers were not Rebels. The British were here to protect civilians, not burglarize them. While it is unclear whether the two survivors of the raid were caught or confessed when they got back to Hempstead that night, the case was added to a docket of other disciplinary hearings by a military court in New York City about a week later. The other two men claimed that Silby was the ringleader. While their lives were spared, one of them, William Deane, was sentenced to receive 1,000 lashes, a near-death sentence.

Soldier’s corpse displayed

As for Silby, the 17th’s commander in Hempstead, Lt. Col. Samuel Birch, decided to make a show of the late miscreant by hanging his corpse in a practice called gibbeting. Silby’s body was placed in an iron cage and hung from a crossbar on the edge of Hempstead village. The regiment was then paraded by the gruesome sight.

“I think the motive was to terrify the other soldiers,” Hagist said, “because this marauding and housebreaking was becoming a rampant problem.”

And yet, as Griffin’s book details, British soldiers on Long Island continued to terrorize the local population. (Years later, in 1782, James Edger, the man who shot Silby, was killed by renegade soldiers from the 17th in another robbery attempt on his sister’s house.)

As for Pvt. Silby, his body remained in its cage, hanging on the outskirts of Hempstead village for some time. “The creaking of the iron, as it swung to and fro by the wind, would often alarm the nightly traveler,” Onderdonk wrote.

The story of Robert Silby should have ended there. But just over a century and a half later, it re-emerged in macabre fashion.

In December 1934, a group of boys was playing on an empty lot on the corner of Union Place and Main Street in Hempstead. The sleepy, rural crossroads village of pre-Revolutionary days was now a bustling, 20th century town. Hempstead in the 1930s had a population of about 12,000, and boasted such modern attractions as movie theaters, auto dealerships and Chinese restaurants, according to village historian Reine Bethany.

According to newspaper accounts of the time, the boys were likely horsing around in a topsoil lot. One of them, 9-year-old Buddy Gorman, went to reach for what he thought was a large rock, but it wouldn’t budge. With the help of some of his friends, the boys tugged and pulled — until out of the ground came a human skull encased in an iron cage.

Police were summoned. They finished digging out the manacled skull and some other skeletal remains, which were then taken to a local precinct, placed on a desk and photographed.

The discovery made the front page of the next day’s New York Times with the headline: Boys Unearth Skeleton in Torture Cage; Discovery in Hempstead Linked to Pirates.

Within two weeks, the initial speculation over the grisly find — was it the skull of an enslaved person who had escaped, a criminal or, as The Times had surmised, a pirate? — was resolved when a copy of Onderdonk’s book was produced. It was then, which local newspapers had taken to calling “Hempstead’s Man in the Iron Mask,” was identified as a British soldier killed while committing a robbery.

In 1943, a follow-up story in the Nassau Daily Review-Star reported that the skull and its cage had been sent to the American Museum of Natural History in 1935, the year after their discovery. There, they had been examined and briefly put on display. Anyone who wanted to see the skull, the newspaper reported, could make an appointment with the museum.

As to whether anyone took up the museum on that offer is not known. What is clear is that Silby’s skull has not been seen publicly since about the mid-1930s. But his “iron mask” (the gibbet) showed up a couple of decades later in what is now Eisenhower Park. Growing up in East Meadow, John Bontempi, now 71 and living in Spring Hill, Tennessee, remembers seeing an exhibit with the gibbet (but not the skull) at the Nassau County Historical Museum. “It was in a display case with some graphics depicting what the complete rig looked like,” he recalled. “I . . . found it quite gruesome.”

When the museum closed in the 1980s, much of its contents were placed in storage. Somewhere there, historian Natalie Naylor believes, is where the manacle that surrounded Silby’s skull now reposes. And it is the gibbet more than the skull itself that she thinks is historically significant. “It’s a dimension that isn’t usually mentioned,” said Naylor, professor emeritus at Hofstra University, who has studied and written about the American Revolution on Long Island. “Not that there weren’t robberies, but that there was some effort by the British to restrain or punish the perpetrators.”

As for the skull, the American Museum of Natural History confirms that it is still in its collection. “The remains are stored in an environment that ensures their conservation,” said Roberto Lebron, the museum’s senior director of communications. The gibbet had been removed and sent back to Nassau County in 1963.

In a written statement, Lebron added that the museum “is prepared to engage with relevant communities who contact us regarding the potential transfer of these remains in accordance with relevant policies, legal and regulatory standards.”

Which raises the question: What should happen with Silby’s skull?

There are no federal guidelines dictating how Silby’s remains should be handled. At least one historian believes they should not be on display. “My perspective is that human remains are human remains,” said Angela Tate, chief curator at the Museum of African American History in Boston and Nantucket, Massachusetts. “They need the dignity of burial, repatriation, restoration to their descendants or community group or whatever institution would be proper steward,” added Tate, former curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture. “They shouldn’t be in museums.”

In the case of Silby, his remains seem caught in a ghoulish limbo: Repatriation of his skull to England would be unlikely, according to Hagist, because no records exist about his background. Military burial would be inappropriate: British policy is that remains be buried near the battlefield, and Silby didn’t fall in battle but was slain while committing a crime.

Belying his proud regiment’s slogan, there was no glory in Robert Silby’s death.