Black Caesar: A Pirate Alias Passed to a Bushranger and a James Brown Film

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This episode traces the name Black Caesar as an outlaw title passed between people rather than a single biography, using a disambiguation page as its map. It begins in the golden age of piracy with an African pirate known as Black Caesar, who died in 1718, and a Haitian corsair, Henri Caesar, who carried the same moniker. The hosts argue that taking the title of Rome's emperors was a deliberate taunt at the British, Spanish and French navies, and that tavern stories, broadsides and penny dreadfuls kept the name alive after its first bearer died.

The name then moved to the land. John Caesar (1764 to 1796), who arrived in Australia with the First Fleet at Botany Bay, became known as Black Caesar and is widely recognized as the first Australian bushranger, using the bush as a sanctuary from the penal colony. In the 20th century the name attached to Frank Matthews, who built a multi-state drug trafficking operation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and to the 1973 blaxploitation film Black Caesar, scored by James Brown.

The episode frames pirate ships as places where crews elected captains, voted on rules and divided plunder.
A reputation like Black Caesar's could intimidate merchant crews into surrendering before a fight.
Escaping Botany Bay meant entering a bush that European settlers barely knew how to survive in.
The hosts suggest the convict ships carried the Caribbean pirate stories to Australia along with the prisoners.
Frank Matthews, born in 1944, was known in the underworld as Black Caesar.

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