The Legend of Black Caesar, The Warrior Chief Turned Pirate King!
West Africa is characterized by a migration history spanning more than 150,000 years. Climate changes but also political circumstances were responsible for several early population movements that shaped the West African mitochondrial landscape.
During the ”golden age” of piracy in the late 1600s and early 1700s, a pirate ship was one of the few places a black man could attain power and money in the western hemisphere. Some of these black pirates were escaped slaves in the from the coastal areas of the Americas. Others joined pirate crews when their slave ships or plantations were raided; it was often an easy choice between perpetual slavery and freedom through lawlessness. It is estimated that up to one-third of the 10,000 pirates during the golden age of piracy were former slaves. While many were still mistreated and forced to do the lowest tasks aboard ship, some captains established revolutionary equality among their men, regardless of race.
On these ships, black pirates could vote, bear arms, and receive an equal share of the booty. Back on the mainland, however, justice for black and white pirates was not equal. White pirates were usually hanged, but black pirates were considered property and often returned to their owners or otherwise resold into slavery—a fate worse than death for some. One of the most famous black pirates was Black Caesar, who raided ships in the Florida Keys for almost a decade before joining Blackbeard aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge. Like many pirates, his life is shrouded in legend, but he was apparently a very large and very cunning man. Many accounts state that he was an African chieftain who had fought, killed and evaded capture by slavers several times before succumbing to a cruel deception.
At the time he was a Chief he was known as Kente, this is most likely a mistranslation of the term Oyokoman Kente,a cloth known to denote nobility a variation of the more frequently found Oyokoman design,Kente is a name that refers to the woven colored cloth of matrilineage of the Asante king, the Asantehene (King) they can trace their roots to the original Royal Houses of the Akan people of Ancient Kemet.The Akan people share mitochondrial haplogroups with both Sudanese and Egyptians. Akan's have ancient Kemetan-Nubian royal family names/surnames such as Ankrah and Akenten. The design is still regarded as a symbol of social prestige, nobility, and cultural sophistication. He was most likely a military leader from a great family in the Oyo Kingdom (renamed by the Colonizers as Nigeria) in the early XVIII's century.
The Oyo Empire was a Yoruba empire in West Africa. It was located in present-day southern Benin and western Nigeria. Black Caesar, as an African tribal warrior and chieftain was widely known for his "huge size, immense strength, bravery and keen intelligence," he evaded capture from many different slave traders. Caesar was finally captured when he and twenty of his warriors were lured onto a ship by a slave trader they had received weapons from in the past. Giving him a gold watch, the trader promised to show him and his warriors weapons to fight his enemies, which were "too heavy and too numerous to bring on shore" if they came aboard his ship.
He enticed them to stay with food and wine to celebrate a successful trade, lulling them with musical instruments, silk scarves and jewels, however he had his men raise anchor and slowly sail from the coast. When Caesar discovered what was happening, he and his men attempted to charge and kill their captors but were driven back by the well-armed sailors who had pistols. Although it took a considerable length of time for him and his warriors to accept their captivity, he was eventually befriended by a sailor who was the only man Black Caesar would accept food and water from fearing he might be poisoned.
As they neared the Florida coast, a hurricane provided the confusion the two men needed as the ship began to sink; the sailor snuck below decks and freed Caesar. Recognizing the ship's imminent destruction they joined forces for an armed escape, and according to legend they then forced the captain and crew into a corner, most likely at gunpoint, and boarded one of the longboats with ammunition and other supplies. The wind and waves pushed them to shore where they waited out the storm, apparently the only survivors of the doomed ship.
They soon began using the lifeboat to lure passing ships which stopped to give assistance. While posing as shipwrecked sailors, they would sail out to the vessel offering to take them aboard. Once they were close to the vessel, they brought out their guns and demanded supplies and ammunition, threatening to sink the ship if they were refused. He and the sailor continued this ploy for a number of years and amassed a sizable amount of treasure which was buried on Elliott Key. However, he and the sailor had a falling out over a young slave woman the mate had brought back from one of the ships they had looted. The men began fighting over her, as the mate would most likely have killed her after abusing her, Caesar killed him in a duel and took the woman for his own.
Black Caesar and the now deceased mate had allegedly buried their bounty on Elliott Key. With this booty Black Caesar was eventually able to hire on more crew and began attacking ships on the open sea.He and his crew were often able to avoid capture by running into Caesar Creek and other inlets between Elliot and Old Rhodes Key and onto the mangrove islands. In a feat of ingenious engineering Black Ceasar had his crew use a metal ring embedded in a rock, they ran a strong rope through the ring, heeling the boat over (This is the term for when a sailboat leans over in the water, pushed by the wind so it would appear in the distance to be a land mass or rock, and thus Black Caesar’s crew hid their boat in the water until the patrol ship or other danger went away.
They could also lower the mast and sink the ship in shallow water, later cutting the rope or pumping out the water to raise the boat and continue raiding. It is thought that he and his men buried more than 26 bars of silver on the island, although this treasure has ever been recovered from the island. It is also said that he kept a harem of kidnapped women in the Florida Keys. Black Caesar apparently had at least 100 women he seized from passing ships;these women were most likely slaves and could be considered women he rescued from slavery. Historically, women were only found on slave ships and not allowed to remain on ships once they had set sail. Old-fashioned sailor superstitions thought that women on merchant and military vessels were bad luck and could spell disaster at sea.
Most pirates targeted the slave ships for the gold, food, and other goods onboard and did not engage in the slave trade as 40 percent of the pirates in the Caribbean were escaped slaves,in fact the enslaved were offered the choice of freedom as a pirate or remaining with the slaver’s ship. Black Caesar built a prison camp in which he kept male prisoners who had value as a captive to be ransomed either nobles or slavers he kept in stone huts hoping to get a bounty from them. When leaving the island to go on raids, he left little provisions for these former slavers now prisoners and many, it is said, eventually starved to death.
A few children he had supposedly sired from captive women reportedly lived in the wilderness, subsisting on berries and shellfish, and formed their own language and customs. This society of lost children may have inspired the book Peter Pan and gave rise to native superstition that the island was haunted. In the early 1700s Black Caesar joined Blackbeard's crew as his Comrade in arms and lieutenant and he was there fighting beside him at Blackbeard's death at the hands of Lieutenant Robert Maynard. Black Caesar attempted to set off the powder magazine of the ship as per Blackbeard's last request. However, Caesar was attacked by one of the captives who tackled him as he prepared to light a trail of gunpowder leading to the magazine. He struggled with the man below decks but was overwhelmed by Maynard's sailors who were eventually able to restrain him. Taken prisoner by Virginian colonial authorities, he was convicted of piracy and hanged in Williamsburg, Virginia.
(Scientifically supported DNA connection between Akan of Nigeria and Ghana and Ancient Kemet and Akan The overwhelming majority (98.4%) belonged to the three Africa-specific haplogroups L1–L3. The occurrence of L1–L3 branches in West Africa are documented by Salas et al., Veeramah et al. and González et al. with which our data are in general accordance. However, within L1 (26% of all sequences in our sample set) our results indicate a dominance of L1b lineages (54%) in Ghanaians, whereas the L1c cluster constituted the majority in . Recent findings of Veeramah et al. display levels of L1 lineages in Ghana, in total 16%, but with similar ratios between L1b (50%) and L1c (32%) as compared to our dataset.)
A similar observation accounts for L3e and L3f subclusters, which were most frequent (66.2%) among Ghanaian L3 lineages in our study which is also in accordance with observations of Veeramah et al. whereas L3b and L3d were the dominant L3 haplogroups in . Of L3e1 haplotypes in their Ghanaian samples while being present in neighboring regions we detected at least (2%) of L3e1 haplotypes in our data. Haplogroup distribution of the West African population of Mauritania showed significantly higher proportions of non L lineages. Approximately 55% of their sequences had Euroasiatic provenance. With eight (4.2%) observations reflecting the low diversity within the L1 haplotypes in the Akan population. The random match probability (disregarding length variants at positions 16193, 309 and 573) was 1.3%. Hence, the power of discrimination by CR was calculated as 98.7%.
Following this defeat, Black Caesar was captured with the surviving crew by Virginia colonial authorities and was hanged in Williamsburg in 1718.
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