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This article
examines the evidence provided by Roger Casement’s accounts of
his voyage to the Putumayo in the Amazon rain forest in 1910
in order to reveal the Odyssean complexity of his personality,
and to suggest that, in a metaphorical sense at least, this
journey represented the beginnings of an Irish homecoming for
Casement, just as the wanderings of Homer’s hero led him to
the recovery of his house and kingdom in Ithaca.
The hanging of Roger Casement as a traitor at Pentonville
prison,
London, on
3 August 1916 placed him amongst the most prominent martyrs to
the Irish nationalist cause. Yet just five years previously he
had received a knighthood from the British government for his
investigations into the methods of white rubber traders in the
Peruvian jungle. The dichotomy in his character represented by
these two moments has been charted as a life-long series of
ambivalences and paradoxes in Roger Sawyer’s biography
Casement: The Flawed Hero (1984), and was judged to be of
paramount significance by the prosecution in his trial for
treason. A compulsive journal-writer, Casement was to find his
diaries used at the time of his trial to sully his reputation
and to ensure that he was denied the chance of a reprieve.
To this day, opinion continues to be divided between those
who believe that his ‘Black’ diaries are a genuine, albeit
clandestine, account of his homosexual activities, written at
a time when such activities were a prisonable offence, and
those who claim that they were the calumnious work of the
British Secret Service.
[1] The controversy which began at
time of the trial was not settled by the publication of
extracts from the diaries in 1959, and it was shown to be
still very much alive in 1997. In that year Angus Mitchell
published The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement,
introducing the text of the ‘White’ diary for 1910 with a
lengthy commentary in which he sets forth the arguments
justifying his conviction that the ‘Black’ diary is a
forgery. In the very same year Roger Sawyer published
Roger Casement’s Diaries – 1910: The Black and the White,
referring to much the same evidence as that utilised by Angus
Mitchell in order to draw the opposite conclusion and attest
to his certainty that the diary is genuine.
On the basis that Roger Sawyer’s line of argument is the more
convincing, this article works from the premise that the
‘Black’ diary is genuine and, as such, reflects aspects of
Casement’s complex personality. It is my intention, therefore,
to examine the text of both the diaries covering the period of
Casement’s 1910 journey to the
Putumayo in
order to demonstrate that the months spent in the South
American rain forest represent a crucial stage in the process
of Casement’s recognition of his Irishness and may therefore
be seen as a form of homecoming. Some 3,000 years previously,
one of the very first works of European literature was also
concerned with a homecoming. In The Odyssey, Homer
depicts his eponymous hero as a man of exceptional courage,
eloquence, endurance, resourcefulness and wisdom. Yet he also
shows him to be a wily master of disguise and deceit, prepared
to be lashed as a beggar in order to enter Troy unseen,
[2]
able, with Athena’s aid, to approach the palace of King Alcinoös unnoticed by the citizens of Scheria,
[3] and, of
course, capable of concealing his identity from his own wife
Penelope and her suitors when he returns to Ithaca. According
to Virgil’s Aeneid, it was Ulysses who gave the order
for the Trojan Horse to be built, which has provided an
abiding metaphor for undercover action, so much so that it has
even been incorporated into the nomenclature of computing as a
term for a programme designed to breach the security of a
computer system while ostensibly performing an innocuous
function. It therefore seems appropriate to describe
Casement’s voyage to the Putumayo as an odyssey, for it
combines the elements of the heroic, the homecoming and the
duplicitous in equal measure.
There is much in Roger Casement’s background that serves to
explain the ambivalence that characterised his life. Born on
1
September 1864 in Kingstown
(present-day Dún Laoghaire), his parents embodied the schism
that continues to bedevil Ireland in present times. His father
was descended from an
Ulster
family of landed gentry of that particularly Puritanical
strain known as ‘Black Protestants,’ while his mother’s maiden
name was Jephson, from a well-established Roman Catholic
family. In the course of genealogical research that he himself
undertook, Casement was to discover that the Jephsons were, in
fact, descended from a Protestant family, two of whose members
had been charged with treason at the time of King James II’s
Catholic parliament in 1688 and had lost their estates,
although not their lives, for having joined forces with the
Prince of Orange. Despite the fact that Casement’s mother died
when he was only nine years old, and was therefore to affect
his life more through her absence than her presence, she took
one action which, by its very subterfuge, made a significant
contribution to her son’s ambivalence. Whilst on holiday
without her husband in Rhyl in North Wales, in a ceremony of
the utmost secrecy, she had her three-year-old son baptised as
a Catholic. Casement affirmed himself to be Protestant
throughout his life but he was to return to the church of the
majority of his countrymen shortly before his execution, being
received into the Catholic church in articulo mortis
and receiving his first Catholic Holy Communion shortly before
he was hanged. As Roger Sawyer points out, ‘in a remarkable
number of ways Casement was Ireland in microcosm.’
[4] He
argues that, ‘particularly when seen in terms of familial,
religious and political influences, and even, though less
obviously, on a physical level, throughout much of his life
there appears an interesting parallel between his own divided
loyalties and those of his nation.’
[5] Indeed, Casement’s
life can be interpreted as the progressive resolution of his
divided loyalties, so that his last-minute ‘conversion’ to the
Catholic church may be seen as all of a piece with the
magnificent speech he had made on the final day of his trial
just over a month previously, in which he had spoken
eloquently of his loyalty to Ireland and of the ineligibility
of the English court to try him.
Following
in a family tradition Roger Casement was a compulsive
traveller. In 1883 he became ship’s purser on the SS Bonny,
which traded with West Africa and, by the time he was twenty,
when he went out to work in the Congo, he had already made
three trips to the African continent. Roger Sawyer suggests
that his work ‘was to lead to a life-long belief in the virtue
of travel as a means to improving relations between peoples.’
[6] After eight years of varied activities in Africa he
obtained his first official British Government position, in
the Survey Department in the Oil Rivers Protectorate, later to
become Nigeria. Three years later, in 1895, he obtained his
first consular posting, to Lorenzo Marques in Portuguese East
Africa, and was to remain in Foreign Office service until his
resignation at the end of June 1913. During his eighteen years
of consular service, Roger Casement went on to serve the
British Government in Portuguese West Africa, South Africa,
the Congo State, Portugal and Brazil – where he occupied
consular positions in Santos, Pará (present-day Belém), and
finally rose to the post of Consul-General in the then
capital, Rio de Janeiro. Although he was periodically
frustrated by the limitations imposed by the Foreign Office
upon the Consular Service, always seen as a poor relation of
the Diplomatic Service, Casement suffered no conflict of
loyalty provoked by his Irish nationality and his duty to his
British employer. For the most part, his Irish identity
manifested itself in such matters as adherence to an early
form of ‘buy-Irish’ campaigns when equipping himself for his
many expeditions, with the result that he was able to offer
Irish whiskey to ailing indigenous people in the middle of the
Amazon jungle, [7] as well as trying somewhat ineffectually to
protect himself from a tropical storm with ‘a Dublin “brolley”’(umbrella).
[8] It was as a result of his experience and competence,
particularly as demonstrated in his investigation of the
enslavement and torture of native rubber-gatherers in the
Congo in 1903, that he was called upon, in 1910, to accompany
the commission investigating the alleged atrocities of the
British-owned Peruvian Amazon Company, which collected rubber
in the region of the River Putumayo. |
