"The Many Lives, Deaths, and Myths of Black Caesar, a Pirate Lost to History"

• In Event: Gendered Waterways of the Afro-Iberian Atlantic World

Description for Program

Where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Gulf of Mexico lies an oval-shaped landmass known as Black Caesar’s Rock. Scholars, guidebooks, and folklorists alike attribute the origins of the rocky island’s name (in what is now the Florida Keys) to an African pirate known as Black Caesar. The details about his life are scant and often conflicting, with some placing him at the center of key moments and figures within the Golden Age of Piracy in the early eighteenth century, and others identifying him as a revolutionary who set out for a life of marauding at sea after helping lead Saint-Domingue to freedom from slavery and French colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. In general, these accounts cohere around the story of a man who lurked in the shadows of mangrove forests near the island that would soon bear his name in order to stage surprise attacks on passing ships making their way along trade routes in the Spanish Caribbean. At times, legend has it, he pillaged their cargoes for gold and jewelry, other times he freed the African captives on board slaving vessels. My paper posits that the centuries of storytelling surrounding Black Caesar - which encompass details about his physical form, his penchant for fine jewels and luxury, even his sexual exploits - offer tremendous insight into ideas about Black masculinity, freedom, and self-fashioning in the early-modern Iberian Atlantic World."

Author

• Tamara Walker, Barnard College, Columbia University