John Caesar

John Caesar
Born	c. 1763 Madagascar
Died	15 February 1796(1796-02-15) (aged 32–33) Liberty Plains, Colony of New South Wales, Australia
Cause of death	Gunshot wound
Other names	Black Caesar
Occupation	Servant
Children	Mary Anne Fisher Power
Conviction(s)	Theft (1786) Theft (1789)
Criminal penalty	Transportation – 7 years Transportation – life

John Caesar (c. 1763 – 15 February 1796), nicknamed "Black Caesar", was an 18th-century convict and one of the first people of African descent to arrive in Australia. He is considered to be the first Australian bushranger.

Born in Madagascar, he was enslaved in the United States in the late 1770s. Caesar later moved to south England where he was tried in 1786 for stealing £12. His sentence was transportation to New South Wales for seven years. In January 1788 he arrived in Botany Bay on the First Fleet convict ship Alexander. 15 months later Caesar was tried for stealing food and sentenced to transportation for life. He escaped into the bush but was caught two months later.

Caesar made another escape in 1789; he subsequently surrendered and returned to the colony. He escaped again in 1794 but was quickly recaptured. He seriously wounded Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy in late 1795. In December, Caesar made his fourth and final escape from custody. Governor John Hunter offered a lavish reward for his capture. In February 1796, Caesar was shot and killed by ex-highwayman John Wimbow. Caesar left a daughter, Mary Anne Fisher Power, whom he had fathered with English-born convict Anne Power.

Early life

He was born circa 1763. Early newspaper reports stated that he was born in the West Indies, though modern historians believe Madagascar was his place of birth. His birth name is unknown. The name Caesar was common amongst slaves, and it is likely he was given the name during his enslavement in Virginia or South Carolina in the late 1770s. Malagasy people were particularly prized in those areas.

John Caesar had moved to England by 1786. He may have fled to British lines seeking emancipation. It is also possible that his slave owner was a loyalist who returned to England following the American Revolutionary War. In the Book of Negroes, a 1783 record of Black Loyalists departing North America, two young men aged fourteen and eighteen named Caesar are recorded travelling to Spithead, England. Historian Cassandra Pybus believes that the fourteen-year-old, described as a "stout fellow", was John Caesar. By 1786 he was a servant living in the parish of St Paul, Deptford.

Transportation to Australia

In early 1786, Caesar was charged with stealing £12 from a residence. Later that same year, on 13 March, he was tried at Maidstone, Kent for stealing another £12 from another residence. His sentence was transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales for seven years, and he was sent to the hulk Ceres. Caesar embarked on 6 January 1787 on the convict transport ship Alexander of the First Fleet. He was one of twelve black convicts. In May 1787, his age was estimated as 23, and his occupation was listed as servant or labourer.

Alexander arrived in Botany Bay with the First Fleet on 19 January 1788. Caesar became known as "Black Caesar" and gained a reputation in the colony as a conscientious and hard worker.

Convict life

Convicts were persistently malnourished due to insufficient food provisions. Caesar, being six feet tall and muscular, was constantly besieged by hunger and took to stealing food. On 29 April 1789 he was tried for theft and sentenced to a second term of transportation, this time for life. Caesar took to the bush a fortnight later, reportedly with some provisions, an iron pot, and a musket stolen from a marine named Abraham Hand. However, unable to sustain himself owing to the shortage of game, he began to steal food on the outskirts of the settlement. British administrator David Collins, the colony's Judge-Advocate, called him "an incorrigibly stubborn black."

On 26 May he helped himself to a brickmaking gang's rations on Brickfield Hill and was nearly caught. On the night of 6 June he tried to steal food from the house of Zachariah Clark, the colony's assistant commissary for stores, and was caught by a convict named William Saltmarsh.

In June 1789, Collins wrote:

This man was always reputed the hardest living convict in the colony; his frame was muscular and well calculated for hard labour; but in his intellects he did not very widely differ from a brute; his appetite was ravenous, for he would in any one day devour the full rations for two days. To gratify this appetite he was compelled to steal from others, and all his thefts were directed to that purpose.

Caesar was described by Collins after his first recapture as a "wretch" who was "so indifferent about meeting death, that he declared while in confinement, that if he should be hanged, he would create a laugh before he was turned off, by playing off some trick upon the executioner".

Governor Arthur Phillip however, took advantage of Caesar's potential as a labourer and had him sent to Garden Island, where he would work in fetters and be provided with vegetables. There he showed good behaviour and as a result was eventually allowed to work without iron belts.

Caesar was allowed to work without chains. On 22 December 1789 he escaped in a stolen canoe, taking a gun. According to Collins:

Caesar the black, whose situation on Garden Island had been some time back rendered more eligible, by being permitted to work without irons, found means to make his escape, with a mind insensible alike to kindness and to punishment, taking with him a canoe which lay there for the convenience of the other people employed on the island, together with a week's provisions belonging to them; and in a visit which he made them a few nights after in his canoe, he took off an iron pot, a musket, and some ammunition.

Caesar robbed settlers' gardens, and stole from local Aboriginals, who speared him on 30 January 1790. On 31 January 1790 Caesar handed himself in to camp. Governor Phillip pardoned him and sent Caesar in the Supply to Norfolk Island in March 1790 to assist Doctor Considen. According to his biography, "By 1 July 1791 he was supporting himself on a lot at Queenborough and was issued with a hog. In January next year he was given one acre (0.4 ha) and ordered to work three days a week."

Caesar fathered a child with English-born convict Anne Power. Anne was similarly tried at Maidstone a year after Caesar, and had arrived in 1790 on the Lady Juliana. Their daughter Mary Anne Fisher Power was born on 4 March 1792. Caesar left them both on Norfolk Island when he returned to Port Jackson on the Kitty in 1793. Caesar escaped briefly again in July 1794 but was captured shortly afterwards.

Pemulwuy

Caesar gained some notoriety during his lifetime for his part in seriously wounding the Aboriginal (Bidjigal) warrior Pemulwuy. Caesar was working with a party at Botany Bay in late 1795 that came under attack by a group of warriors led by Pemulwuy. Caesar wounded him by cracking his skull.

During his many skirmishes with European settlers, Pemulwuy is rumored to have been wounded up to seven times, with Caesar being one of the many men to almost end his leadership of the Aboriginal resistance to the European colonisation of Australia.

Final escape and death

Caesar escaped from custody in December 1795 and led a gang of absconders in the Port Jackson area. Settlers were warned against supplying him with ammunition. On 29 January 1796 Governor John Hunter offered a lavish reward of five gallons of rum for his capture. According to Collins:

Notwithstanding the reward that had been offered for apprehending black Caesar, he remained at large, and scarcely a morning arrived without a complaint being made to the magistrates of a loss of property supposed to have been occasioned by this man. In fact, every theft that was committed was ascribed to him; a cask of pork was stolen from the millhouse, the upper part of which was accessible, and, the sentinels who had the charge of that building being tried and acquitted, the theft was fixed upon Caesar, or some of the vagabonds who were in the woods, the number of whom at this time amounted to six or eight.

Ex-highwayman John Wimbow and another man tracked Caesar down at Liberty Plains (present-day Strathfield). A 1936 article in The World's News stated that Wimbow's companion was agriculturalist James Ruse (incorrectly called John Ruse). According to Collins,

"[Wimbow and Ruse], allured by the reward, had been for some days in quest of [Caesar]. Finding his haunt, they concealed themselves all night at the edge of a brush which they perceived him enter at dusk. In the morning he came out, when, looking round him and seeing his danger, he presented his musket; but before he could pull the trigger Wimbow fired and shot him."

Caesar was taken to the hut of Thomas Rose where a few hours later he died of his wounds on 15 February 1796. Collins wrote, "Thus ended a man, who certainly, during his life, could never have been estimated at more than one remove above the brute, and who had given more trouble than any other convict in the settlement." Another report called Caesar "a notorious offender".

Anne Power died on 25 March 1796 on Norfolk Island. Both Caesar and Anne were survived by their daughter Mary Anne, who was baptised in 1806. Mary Anne left Norfolk Island for Van Diemen's Land in 1814.

In popular culture

Caesar's death was illustrated by Percy Lindsay for Truth in 1934.

Caesar appears as a character in Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker, as well as in Timberlake Wertenbaker's stage adaptation Our Country's Good.

Mohamed Osman portrayed Caesar in the SBS docudrama Our African Roots.

See also

• List of convicts transported to Australia
• African Australians

References

Sources

• Cheek, Kimberly (31 January 2018). "Caesar, John ( Black Caesar )" (PDF). Oxford African American Studies Center. pp. 1–2. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.73395. Retrieved 16 November 2024.
• Chingaipe, Santilla (30 October 2024). Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-76110-724-5.
• Collins, David; King, Philip Gidley; Bass, George (1798). An account of the English colony in New South Wales. London: T. Cadell Jr and W. Davies.

External links

• The first bushranger
• University of Wollongong First Fleet educational website
• JOHN CAESAR (alias Black Caesar)