Author Casement Roger

ight Dragoons, was the son of a bankrupt Belfast shipping merchant (Hugh Casement) who later moved to Australia. Captain Casement served in the 1842 Afghan campaign. Casement's mother Anne Jephson of Dublin (whose origins are obscure) had him rebaptised secretly as a Roman Catholic when he was three in Rhyl .She died in Worthing when her son was nine. According to an 1892 letter, Casement believed that she was descended from the Jephson family of Mallow, County Cork.[3] However the Jephson family's historian provides no evidence of this.[4] By the time he was thirteen, his father was also dead, having ended his days in Ballymena dependent on the charity of relatives. Roger was afterwards raised by Protestant paternal relatives in Ulster, the Youngs of Galgorm Castle in Ballymena and the Casements of Magherintemple, and was educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena later Ballymena Academy. He left school at 16 and took up a clerical job with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping company headed by Sir Alfred Lewis Jones, later an enemy on the Congo issue.[5] In 1903, Roger Casement, then the British Consul at Boma, was commissioned by the British government to investigate the human rights situation in the Congo Free State. A long, detailed eyewitness report exposing abuses, the Casement Report, was delivered in 1904. The Congo Free State had been in the possession of King Leopold II of Belgium since 1885, when it was granted to him by the Berlin Conference. Leopold had exploited the territory's natural resources (mostly rubber) as a private entrepreneur, not as King of the Belgians. Casement's report would be instrumental in Leopold finally relinquishing his personal holdings in Africa. When the report was made public, the Congo Reform Association, founded by E.D. Morel, with Casement's support, demanded action. Other European nations followed suit, as did the United States, and the British Parliament demanded a meeting of the 14 signatory powers to review the 1885 Berlin Agreement. The Belgian Parliament, pushed by socialist leader Emile Vandervelde and other critics of the king's Congolese policy, forced Léopold to set up an independent commission of inquiry, and in 1905, despite his efforts, it confirmed the essentials of Casement's report. On 15 November, 1908, the parliament of Belgium took over the Congo Free State from Leopold and organised its administration as the Belgian Congo. In 1906, Casement was sent to Brazil, first as consul in Pará, then transferred to Santos, and lastly promoted to consul-general in Rio de Janeiro. When he was attached as a consular representative to a commission investigating murderous rubber slavery by the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company, effectively controlled by the archetypal rubber baron Julio César Arana and his brother, Casement had the occasion to do work among the Putumayo Indians of Peru similar to that which he had done in the Congo. Public outrage in Britain over the abuses against the Putumayo had been sparked in 1909 by articles in the British magazine Truth. Casement paid two visits to the region, first in 1910 and then a follow-up in 1911. In a report to the British foreign secretary, dated 17 March, 1911, Casement detailed the rubber company's use of stocks to punish the Indians: Men, women, and children were confined in them for days, weeks, and often months. ... Whole families ... were imprisoned--fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents. After his return to Britain, he repeated his extra-consular campaigning work by organising Anti-Slavery Society and mission interventions in the region, which was disputed between Peru and Colombia. Some of the men exposed as killers in his report were charged by Peru, while others fled. Conditions in the area undoubtedly improved as a result, but the contemporary switch to farmed rubber in other parts of the world was a godsend to the Indians as well. Arana himself was never prosecuted. He instead went on to have a successful political career, becoming a senator and dying in Lima, Peru in 1952 at age eighty-eight. Casement wrote extensively (as always) in those two years including several of his notorious diaries, the one for 1911 being unusually discursive. They and the 1903 diary were kept by him in London with other papers of the period, presumably so they could be consulted in his continuing work as 'Congo Casement' and the saviour of the Putumayo Indians. In 1911, Casement was knighted by George V as Knight Bachelor for his efforts on behalf of the Amazonian Indians, having been reluctantly appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1905 for his Congo work. Casement retired from the consular service in the summer of 1913[6]. In November that year, he helped form the Irish Volunteers with Eoin MacNeill, later the organisation's chief of staff. They co-wrote the Volunteers' manifesto. In July 1914, Casement journeyed to the U.S. to promote and raise money for the Volunteers. Through his friendship with men such as Bulmer Hobson, who was a member of the Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), Casement established connections with exiled Irish nationalists, particularly in Clan na Gael.[7] Elements of the Clan did not trust him completely, as he was not a member of the IRB and held views considered by many to be too moderate, although others such as John Quinn regarded him as extreme. John Devoy, who was initially hostile to Casement for his part in conceding control of the Irish Volunteers to Redmond, in June was won over, while the more extreme Clan leader Joseph McGarrity became and remained devoted to Casement.[8] The Howth gun-running in late July 1914 which he had helped to organise and finance further enhanced Casement's reputation. In September 1914, after the First World War had broken out, Casement attempted to secure German aid for Irish independence in New York negotiations with the German Ambassador to the US, eventually sailing for Germany via Norway in October. He viewed himself as an ambassador of the Irish nation. While the journey was his idea, Clan na Gael financed the expedition. In Christiania (Oslo), his companion Adler Christensen was taken to the British legation and, according to him, offered a reward if Casement was "knocked on the head."[9] The British minister, in contrast, advised London that Christensen had approached them, and also said that he “implied that their relations were of an unnatural nature and that consequently he had great power over this man.”[10] It was this episode that first provided London with the intimation that Casement was homosexual.[11] In November 1914, Casement negotiated a declaration by Germany which stated, "The Imperial Government formally declares that under no circumstances would Germany invade Ireland with a view to its conquest or the overthrow of any native institutions in that country. Should the fortune of this great war, that was not of Germany’s seeking ever bring in its course German troops to the shores of Ireland, they would land there not as an army of invaders to pillage and destroy but as the forces of a Government that is inspired by goodwill towards a country and people for whom Germany desires only national prosperity and national freedom”. He negotiated in Berlin with Arthur Zimmermann, then Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, and with the Imperial Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Most of his time in Germany, however, was spent in an attempt to recruit an "Irish Brigade" consisting of Irish prisoners-of-war in the prison camp of Limburg an der Lahn, who would be trained to fight against Britain.[12] During the war, Casement is also known to have been involved in the Hindu–German Conspiracy, recommending Joseph McGarrity to Franz von Papen as an intermediary for the plot. The Indian nationalists may also have followed Casement's strategy in attempting to recruit from amongst Indian prisoners of war.[13] However, both efforts proved unsuccessful. The Irish plan failed, as all Irishmen fighting in the British army did so voluntarily, while recruits to Casement's brigade were liable to the death penalty if Britain won. It was largely abandoned after much time and money were wasted. The Germans, who were sceptical of Casement, but nonetheless aware of the military advantage they could gain from an uprising in Ireland, only in April 1916 offered the Irish 20,000 rifles, 10 machine guns and accompanying ammunition, a fraction of the quantity of weaponry Casement had hoped for, and no German officers.[15] Casement did not learn about the Easter Rising until after the plan was fully developed. The IRB purposely kept him in the dark and even tried to replace him. Casement may never have learned that it was not the Volunteers who were planning the rising, but IRB members such as Patrick Pearse and Tom Clarke who were pulling the strings behind the scenes.