[6] Early newspaper reports stated that he was born in the West Indies,[2][1][7][5][8] though modern historians believe Madagascar was his place of birth.
Caesar took to the bush a fortnight later,[6][4] reportedly with rations, an iron pot, ammunition, and a musket[13][4] stolen from a marine named Abraham Hand.
[14] At this time, British administrator David Collins, the colony's Judge-Advocate,[15] called Caesar "an incorrigibly stubborn black.
On the night of 6 June he tried to steal food from the house of Zachariah Clark,[14] the colony's assistant commissary for stores,[16][17][18] and was caught by convict 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.
[20]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".
[21] Caesar was sent to Garden Island, one of the harshest penal colonies in New South Wales, where worked in fetters[4] and be provided with vegetables.
[6][4] On 22 December 1789 he escaped in a stolen canoe, taking a musket,[6][4] a week's provisions, an iron pot, and some ammunition.
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.
[6][4] He was unable to sustain himself after losing his musket, and he began to steal food from both local Aboriginal peoples and the British settlements.
[6] Governor Arthur Phillip pardoned Caesar for previous infractions[23][6] and sent him in the Supply to Norfolk Island in March 1790[6] to assist Doctor Considen.
[24] Caesar was working with a party at Botany Bay in late 1795 that came under attack by a group of warriors led by Pemulwuy.
[7][23][6] 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.
[28]Ex-highwayman[23] John Wimbow and another man tracked Caesar down[29][30] at Liberty Plains (present-day Strathfield).
[6][23] 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.
[32] Caesar appears as a character in Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker,[33] as well as in Timberlake Wertenbaker's stage adaptation Our Country's Good.