History: In September, 1911, Dr Herbert Spencer Dickey of New York introduced himself to Roger Casement in a hotel bar in Bridgetown, Barbados.
Casement was returning to the Amazon and invited Dickey to accompany him. Dickey wrote of him on the journey:
Embarking on the river steamer from Parà that day in 1911, when the temperature was floating around 96° in the shade, he wore a thick and very dark brown suit of Irish homespun. How he stood it, I do not know, but then, the rest of his costume was at least as strange. His straw hat looked quite as if it had been taken from an ash can years before. He wore a heavy flannel shirt, but did recognise the tropics to the extent of wearing white canvas shoes the soles of which were rubber. The final touch was a tremendous and very knobbly walking stick - a shillalah that must have been two inches in diameter at least.
Casement proceeded to remove his shoes and socks until they reached Manaos, ignoring the protests of the captain, and annoying his fellow-passengers almost as much as did the presence of Casement's large blue- and gold-eyed Arara parrot .
This was the second of the two journeys of Casement to South America in 1911 with which this monumental volume, collated and annotated by Angus Mitchell, is concerned. It was an exhaustive and bitterly disillusioning experience, confirming Casement's worst fears that those whom he had identified, in his report of March of the same year, as responsible for the murderous exploitation and mistreatment of the Amazindian indigenes of the Putamayo tributaries of the Amazon were escaping criminal sanction with the collusion of the Peruvian authorities. The founder of the company involved, the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, which was listed on the London stock exchange, was the Peruvian rubber baron, Julio Cesar Arana. He was later, in June 1916, to write a sanctimonious and triumphalistic letter to Casement, then a prisoner in the Tower of London, awaiting trial for high treason. Arana was later elected to the Peruvian senate and died in 1952.
Sir Roger Casement's Heart of Darkness is firstly a central work on the decimation, through the rubber trade, of the Amazindians, principally the Huitotos, the Boras, the Andokes and the Ocainas. Casement patiently chronicled the enslavement ("peonage" was his preferred term) of these peoples, the systematic floggings, summary executions, and forced marches. It was estimated that due to deaths and flight the population fell from 50,000 to between 7,000 and 10,000 over a decade.
With great ethnographic sensitivity, Casement, in his March 1911 report to the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Gray, described the destruction of the Quechua language and of tribal institutions, which extended to the killing of the old on the grounds that they were a source of "bad advice".
There is an extraordinary irruption in the summer of 1911. Casement indited a vehement polemic against the British empire and its naval supremacy. Given the title 'The Keeper of the Seas', this was the first of six essays that Casement wrote that were to be published together within a month of the outbreak of the Great War. Casement's somewhat lunatic premise - that it was to its conquest of Ireland that Britain owed its global dominance - at least provided a memorably oracular conclusion:
The Empire that has grown from an island and spread with the winds and waves to the uttermost shores will fight and be fought for on the water and will be ended where it began, on an island. That island, I believe, will be Ireland and not Great Britain.
The taut relationship between Casement the international humanitarian and Casement the Irish rebel alone makes this work compelling. Casement unquestionably saw himself primarily as a nationalist. He had written to Alice Stopford Green in 1907 of his period in the Congo that "finally when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold - I found myself also - the incorrigible Irishman". In a letter in this volume, he insists to his humanitarian collaborator, E.D. Morel, that the Irish question was to him "of supreme importance and far transcends African land-ownership or human slavery even".
According to Sir William Rothenstein in a passage cited here, Yeats observed of Casement at this time: "As long as he only bothers about present conditions, it doesn't matter; but Heaven help him if he fills his head with Ireland's past wrongs."
The evolution of Casement's thinking on Ireland falls outside the limits of this book. He writes in February 1911, weary of working on his report: "I am 'full up' with atrocities and horrors at times - and it's only the thought of those poor, hunted, gentle beings up there in the forest that keeps me going."
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the terrible pressures and frustrations of his work on the Putamayo played a major role in his plunge into revolutionary nationalism three years later, more than he was ever prepared to concede: that there was a surge of extremely high-voltage current which arcs across from the Amazon, and the Congo before, to Ireland.
The Conradian title to this work proves to be extraordinarily apt. This lies not only in the riverine claustrophobia, but in the intensity of the psychological drama. The process whereby the humane impulses of an exceptionally sensitive man carry him towards rebellion is a theme of perennial fascination. In this instance, the transformation is in a transposed arena, Ireland rather than the Putamayo: the crossover phenomenon is less rare or idiosyncratic than one might think at first, and is in a broader sense possibly even representative.
There is something of Conrad also in Casement's solitariness, and in his uniqueness as a revolutionary type. The road on which Casement set out after his resignation in 1913 from the consular service was not, in Irish or any other terms, a well-trodden path. He was not a Marxist nor even a socialist. He was not a missionary or religious zealot. His excess of ardour, and monomaniacal insistence on the necessity for German military intervention in Ireland, set him apart from many of those working for an Irish rebellion. In the annals of revolution there is no-one with whom Casement is to be compared.
In his opening speech for the prosecution in the Casement trial, F.E. Smith asked what had occurred between 1911, the year of Casement's knighthood, and 1914 "to affect and corrupt the prisoner's mind". This admirable work provides much of the answer.
Frank Callanan is a lawyer and author of The Parnell Split and J.M. Healy. He is currently working on a book on James Joyce and Irish nationalism.
Sir Roger Casement's Heart of Darkness: The 1911 Documents
Introduction, commentary and footnotes by Angus Mitchell Irish Manuscripts Commission, pp816. €75