One Bold Deed of Open Treason: The Berlin Diary of Roger Casement 1914–1916 by Angus Mitchell (review)

Abstract

One Bold Deed of Open Treason: The Berlin Diary of Roger Casement 1914–1916, Angus Mitchell (ed.), (Sallins Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2016), 280 pages. Roger Casement’s ancestors moved from the Isle of Man to Antrim in the early years of the eighteenth century and, later on, different branches held lands in Antrim and Wicklow. He himself is usually categorised as AngloIrish , which suggests money and privilege, but in his own family money was always scarce. The plaque commemorating his birth can still be seen in Sandycove, a suburb of Dublin, where he was born in 1864. Both his parents died by the time he was thirteen and the four orphaned children were taken in by their uncle, John, who lived near Ballycastle, Co. Antrim. Roger attended school in Ballymena where, of all places, he learned to love the Irish language. After a brief sojourn in Liverpool, where his cousins lived, he got a job with the International African Association, an organisation established by King Leopold to implement his interests in Africa. There he became one of the pioneer officers of what became the Congo Free State. In 1892 he was spotted by the British Foreign Office. Having been recruited as a customs officer, for three years he helped to establish British authority in the Niger Delta region. In view of his later unstinting praise of German ‘civilisation’, it is interesting to note that, in one of his first reports, he condemned the German authorities for their severe retaliation against insurgents in Cameroon. His career followed an upward curve and, after service in Mozambique and South Africa, he became British Consul in the Congo (1899–1902) and soon grew aware of the atrocities carried out there by Leopold’s Force Publique. He helped to found the Congo Reform Association, which had as its aims the restoration of land rights to the people of the Congo and the implementation of humane administration. Its report infuriated Leopold, who spent a fortune in England and America in an effort to silence Casement. Plans to extend the association’s remit were overtaken by events when the First World War broke out. He was next sent to South America to investigate alleged atrocities in the rubber plantations and, in 1909, he was made Consul General. In 1910 stories of a brutal regime of slavery inflicted on the indigenous people of the Putumayo District emerged and Casement was sent with a five-man commission to investigate the allegations. His journal maps a litany of Studies • volume 107 • number 425 123 Spring 2018: Book Reviews abuses: mass killings, torture, sexual violation, floggings and acts of public humiliation. He presented his case to the US President, William Howard Taft, who was able to put pressure on the Peruvian government and a mutually agreeable way forward was found. So famous did Casement’s ‘Blue Book’, as his report was known, become that the Pope issued an encyclical advocating protection of the indigenous people of Putumayo. For such services to the crown, Casement was knighted in 1911. The reader may well be puzzled as to how such a loyal servant could become an Irish revolutionary in the space of just a few years. There was, in fact, quite an overlap among his concerns. Always an Irish language enthusiast and intellectual, he had joined Arthur Griffith’s separatist movement, Sinn Féin, in 1904 and his travels, which were very extensive, had made him completely disillusioned with imperialism. He longed for the political and cultural separation of England and Ireland and, abandoning the methods chosen by O’Connell and Parnell, soon embraced violence as the only way to achieve his purpose. The mention of diaries in relation to Casement usually brings to mind the famous so-called ‘Black Diaries’ which (forged or not), ‘outed’ him as a homosexual and were used by the British authorities to blacken his name in ‘Catholic’ Ireland, allowing them to hang him with as little fuss as possible. The diaries in this book describe the period 1914–16, when he visited Germany in an attempt to raise an Irish regiment from among Irish prisoners of war and commit Germany to support an Irish rebellion. He...