Black Sails

[anansi]

Now as many of you many or may not know I am a big fan of swords and sandals movies and stories from fiction to non fiction, and will consume everything there-in, from Romans to Vikings love Norse epics, currently Iam very much into Vikings the series and Black sails on Starz ch.
I am aching for Hollywood to produce a decent period piece on the Maroons who were concurrent with the Pirates of the Caribbean and just as colorful ,mountain bandits like three fingered Jack.
At sea were the pirates romanticized in literature,songs (hoo hoo and a bottle of rum) ..and off course the movies maybe in the future someone will romanticize Somali pirate lol, but until quite recently Black folks and women kind were virtually invisible and while as a history buff I knew of their existence they were not reflected in pop-culture.
Now I gave you Black Caesar the pirate who first served under Black Beard and then became capt in his own right after yee unpleasant demise..harrrrrrgh !!!!

Black Caesar, according to traditional accounts, was a prominent African tribal war chieftain. Widely known for his "huge size, immense strength, 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. Showing him a watch, the trader promised to show him and his warriors more objects which were "too heavy and too numerous to bring on shore" if they came aboard his ship. He enticed them to stay with food, musical instruments, silk scarves and jewels, however he had his men raise anchor and slowly sail away. When Caesar discovered what was happening, he and his men attempted to charge their captors but were driven back by the well-armed sailors using swords and 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.

As they neared the coast of Florida, the sudden appearance of a hurricane threatened to destroy the ship on the Florida Reefs. Recognizing the ship's imminent destruction, the sailor snuck below decks and freed Caesar. The two 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 woman the mate had brought back from one of the ships they had looted. Fighting over her, Caesar killed his longtime friend in a duel and took the woman for his own.

He began taking on more pirates over time and soon was able to attack 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. Using a metal ring embedded in a rock, they ran a strong rope through the ring, heel the boat over, and hide their boat in the water until the patrol ship or some other danger went away. They might 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 26 bars of silver on the island, although no treasure has ever been recovered from the island.

He apparently had a harem on his island, having at least 100 women seized from passing ships, as well as a prison camp which he kept prisoners in stone huts hoping to ransom them. When leaving the island to go on raids, he left no provisions for these prisoners and many eventually starved to death. A few children reportedly escaped captivity, subsisting on berries and shellfish, and formed their own language and customs. This society of lost children give rise to native superstition that the island is haunted.

[anansi]

Another Caesar of the Blackie type was Henri Caesar a Haitian pirate

Henri Caesar, also known as Black Caesar, (fl. 1791-1830) was allegedly a 19th-century Haitian revolutionary and pirate. Efforts to find historical evidence of his existence have been unsuccessful. According to works of fiction, he was a participant in the Haitian Revolution under Dutty Boukman and Toussaint Louverture as well as active in piracy for nearly a 30-year period during the early 19th century.

Remember what I said above about the Maroons? well Boukman was a Jamaican Maroon who went to Haiti and organized fellow Blacks against the planter-class who were mostly white but had a fair number of multi racial and Blacks among it's ranks,he kept things hot until the better organized Toussaint took over after his capture and execution by burning.
Escaped slaves would take to piracy because their social system was extremely liberal ,egalitarian and democratic they shared the hardships and the rewards equally under the brotherhood.

Henri Caesar was allegedly born to a slave family kept by a French plantation owner known as Arnaut. He worked as a houseboy on the estate and, as a young man, worked in the lumberyard. He was apparently mistreated by the supervisor and later killed the man during the slave insurrection, torturing him with a saw. Joining the rebel forces led by Dutty Boukman and Toussaint Louverture, he remained with the revolution until its independence from France in 1804, when he left to try his luck at sea. Based in Port-de-Paix, he captured a Spanish ship in 1805 and soon began attacking small villages and lone vessels near Cuba and the Bahamas. Adopting the name Black Caesar, he was very successful during his piratical career before his disappearance in 1830. Although his fate is unrecorded, he most likely fled the area after President Andrew Jackson ordered an expedition against pirates active on the Florida coast after its purchase by the United States in 1828. There is one story of his capture in west Florida and, taken to Key West, was tied to a tree and burned to death. The widow of a preacher, whose eyes had been burned out under torture from Black Caesar, had been used to light the fire.

He is supposed to have buried between $2 and $6 million at several locations 8 throughout the Caribbean including Pine Island, White Horse Key, Marco Island, Elliot Key and Sanibel Island, although none has ever been recovered. He is said to have been associated with another pirate, Jose Gaspar or Gasparilla, however his existence is doubted among historians.
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[anansi]

Three fingered Jack,while a scalawaging Land lubber was lorde of the roads and highway in Jamaica.

Three-Fingered Jack


‘Three-fingered Jack’ was the popular name of a man who escaped Jamaican slavery some time before 1780, became a leader of a group of maroons, and was captured and killed. His story can be traced in the Jamaican Royal Gazette. It was introduced to the British public through a section of a book by Dr Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise on Sugar, published in 1799, which describes Jack’s use of ‘obi’ to maintain his power. Moseley’s account of Three-Fingered Jack inspired the very successful stage pantomime Obi, or Three Finger’d Jack, which first played at the London Haymarket Theatre in 1800. Two novels based on the story were published that same year, and the story was then told and retold through further pantomimes, theatrical productions, chap books, juvenile literature, novels and other cultural productions. Jack’s use of obeah formed a significant element in most of these retellings.
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Yes that's his mummified three fingered hand.

He met his demise through hand to hand combat with cutlasses at the hands of armed slaves

Sam and Quashie.

[anansi]

Black Pirates.

During the ‘ Golden Age of Piracy' Some estimate that nearly 5,000 pirates hunted prey between 1715 and 1726. Of that number, about twenty-five to thirty percent came from the cimarrons, black slaves who ran from their Spanish masters. Other blacks joined after pirates attacked slave ships. For example, when Sam Bellamy and his fellow pirates seized a “Guinea Ship,” twenty-five blacks went on the account. Stede Bonnet’s crew also included former slaves and freemen, and of the eighty sea rovers who followed John Lewis were numbered at least forty blacks from English colonies. Francis Sprigg’s cook was black and entrusted with dividing the spoils equally for the crew.


Not all black pirates were known by name. For example, thirty men escaped enslavement on Saint Thomas and went on the account in August 1699. A mulatto amongst Stede Bonnet’s crew had a confrontation with a white sailor who refused to sign the articles of agreement. After cursing the man, the black pirate wondered “why I did not go to the pump and work among the rest, and told me that was my Business and that I should be used as a Negroe.” (Kinkor, 199) Captain Bonnet overheard the exchange and concurred with the pirate – a man was either a sea rover or a slave, regardless of his color or status.

In his article “Black Men under the Black Flag,” maritime historian Ken Kinkor includes a chart listing various pirate captains and how many blacks were members of their crews. It can be said that the crews of some of the most successful pirates, including Samuel Bellamy and Blackbeard, were largely made up of ex-slaves.

Samuel Bellamy (1717) – more than 27 out of 180 men
Edward England (1718) – less than 50 out of 180 men
Edward Lowther (1724) – 9 out of 23 men
Blackbeard (1717) – 60 out of 100; (1718) – 5 out 14
Oliver La Bouche (1719) – 32 out of 64 men
These five pirate crews are but a small sampling of those listed, and they indicate these men were active members of the crew. Sometimes, they were the most fearsome and most trusted of the pirates, the men who boarded prizes first. They did not, however, always receive the same punishment as other pirates when captured. Whereas their comrades often went to the gallows, black pirates were often returned to the men who owned them, or they were sold into slavery. This was the fate of John Julian, a Miskito Indian, after he survived the wrecking of The Whydah Galley. Rather than try him for piracy, he became the property of John Quincy of Braintree
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[anansi]

Hendrick Quintor, a free black man of Dutch and African descent, "went on the account" when the Spanish brigantine he was aboard was captured by French pirates in the early 1700s. He was one of 30 seamen of African descent on board the Whydah, along with about 20 more black pirates on the other ships in “Black” Sam Bellamy's flotilla. Quintor, perhaps the son of a sailor, spent most of his life at sea. After joining the pirates of the Whydah, Quintor earned a reputation as one of the toughest pirates on the ship.
Quintor was not aboard the Whydah when she sank in 1717. But he didn’t survive long after. He was captured in 1717, found guilty of piracy, and was sentenced to death by hanging. The town square was packed near the gallows where Quintor and five other pirates met their death. To the audience, it was entertainment.

A mulatto born in Amsterdam in 1692, Quintor served proudly aboard the Whydah, a pirate shipwreck site discovered in 1984 by underwater explorer Barry Clifford and his team. Clifford continues to direct the ongoing excavation of the wreck in a project that has been described by state and federal regulatory agencies as “a model for private archaeology”. The National Geographic Real Pirates website said “commissioned in London in 1715, the Whydah was originally built to carry slaves from Africa to the New World. Cramped compartments in the ship's hold were constructed to house human cargo on their journey to Caribbean sugar plantations. As a slave ship, the Whydah's state-of-the art design included a sleek silhouette that made the ship unusually fast and maneuverable. An arsenal of weapons provided defense against attacks by African and European warships—or pirates.”

Whydah pirates in court.
Whydah pirates in court. (Credit: Gregory Manchess; Courtesy of National Geographic)
The Whydah left on her maiden voyage in early 1716, traveling out the English Channel and into the Atlantic, where she then turned south toward Africa. Like other slave ships, she worked her way around the West African coast from modern Gambia and Senegal to Nigeria and Benin, picking up captives along the way. Eventually she landed in Ouidah (Wee-dah)—the slave port from which the Whydah had taken her name.
On the evening of April 26, 1717, a dense fog rolled in. An arctic gale from Canada was colliding with a warm front moving northward from the Caribbean. Their confluence produced one of the worst storms ever to strike Cape Cod. The nor-easter hit the Whydah full force. The ship ran hard aground on a sandbar. The mainmast and other rigging snapped like twigs, and the Whydah rolled over. Although the beach was just 500 feet away, the bitter ocean temperatures were cold enough to kill the strongest swimmer within minutes.

Of the 146 men aboard the Whydah that night, only two survived. Somehow Thomas Davis, the carpenter, and John Julian, the Miskito pilot, managed to swim to shore and scale the steep sand cliffs. Young John King—the boy who threatened to kill himself if he couldn't to join the pirate crew—did not survive. He died pinned to the seabed by a cannon, his leg bone, shoe, and stocking, later discovered by Barry Clifford's Whydah Expedition.
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[zarahan]

Great find Anansi- black Caesar! Cat looks like "shaft" a baaaaddddd mutha...

[anansi]

Apr 12, 2015 19:52:17 GMT -5 zarahan said:

Great find Anansi- black Caesar! Cat looks like "shaft" a baaaaddddd mutha...

Hush your mouth..