After a short stay at Magherintemple House Casement
was sent to the Ballymena
Academy, a Church of Ireland Diocesan Free School, one of the three
Diocesan Free Schools remaining in the country. In 1878 attendance at the school consisted of six boarders and five day
pupils. Casement was one of the boarders. He was an average student
except for languages and ancient history, subjects in which he
excelled.
Away from school
Casement split his time between his paternal relatives
in Magherintemple House and his maternal relatives in Liverpool. He
enjoyed staying with his Liverpool relatives, namely his aunt and uncle, Grace
and Edward Bannister, who treated and cared for him and his sister
as members of their own family. His two brothers generally stayed
at the Casement family estate.
When Casement reached the age of fifteen he left school and
emigrated
to Liverpool where his uncle, Edward Bannister, found him work as an
apprentice at the Elder Dempster Shipping Company whose ships plied the trading routes between Britain and
West Africa. During the four years he spent there he diligently
applied himself to his duties and made it his business to learn all
he could about the maritime trading business, particularly as it
applied to Africa. He spent the last year of his employment as a purser on
board one of the company’s ships that
made four round trips from Liverpool to West Africa.
In 1884 Casement set sail for the Congo to help its inhabitants
adapt European values and customs that would, as he was led to
believe, free them from slavery,
paganism and barbarity. As he later would learn his youthful
exuberance and his embrace of imperialism as a force for good was
ill conceived, counterproductive and supportive of colonial
exploitation.
After arriving in Africa he took up employment with the African
International Association (AIA), an organization controlled by King
Leopold II of Belgium, supposedly to further his humanitarian
projects in the area of Central Africa. Unbeknownst to the other
entities and individuals involved, including Casement, Leopold real
purpose was to take control of
the Congo Free State, which he did in 1885.
He considered the Congo Free State his personal fiefdom and treated
its inhabitants as indentured slaves.
During his employment with the AIA, Casement served as a member of
the management team that oversaw the construction of a railroad
designed to bypass the rapids in the lower Congo River in order to facilitate
trade and transportation to the Upper Congo. When the AIA
became a totally Belgium enterprise Casement severed his ties with
the organization. He remained in the Congo for some time afterwards
working as a
surveyor for a railroad company, as an explorer and as an assistant
in a Baptist missionary station. Between 1889-1890 he spent time in the United States
on a lecture tour with fellow explorer
and sculptor Herbart Ward.
In 1890 Casement relocated to the British controlled
Niger Coast Protectorate (the present day western and eastern
regions of Nigeria) where he was employed by the Colonial Office as
a surveyor. He also held other posts including that of the acting
director-generalship of customs. In all, he spent three years in the
Protectorate
before being appointed consul by the Foreign Office to the port
of Lorenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa (the present-day Maputo
Province in Mozambique). His duties there included the protection
of British subjects and the promotion of British interests. He was
also responsible for reporting on the evolving political situation in the
diamond and gold rich bordering Boer Republics established after the
First Boer War in 1883. Although the British lost that war they,
nonetheless, continued to engage in an overt campaign of
intimidation comprised of military raids and industrial unrest that
ultimately led up to a full blown military invasion of the Republics
in 1899. The ensuing “Second Boer War” ended in 1903 in a British
victory and the annexation of the Republics.
From 1898 through 1904 he served as consul to
the Portuguese Colony of Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, the Cape
Colony, the Congo State, and the French
Congo Colony. In 1903
during his service in the Congo State he was ordered to investigate
reports of atrocities carried out by King Leopold II agents. His
investigation, which took him to remote areas of the Upper Congo,
brought him face-to-face with the unimaginable atrocities, including
forced labor, mutilation, murder and depopulation, carried out by
Leopold’s agents against the indigenous rubber gatherers. For Casement
the inhumanity of the situation was
a life changing revelation that exposed the true nature of
colonialism.
In February
of 1904 Casement's submitted a very detailed and factual
report to the Foreign Office. Despite the fact that the government
watered down the report before been published it, nonetheless, forced the
Belgium government to take direct control of the Colony from
Leopold and institute some reforms.
After completing
the Congo
assignment
he returned to England where he took a leave of absence. By then he
had soured on colonialism having witnessed the ill treatment of the
indigenous peoples of the
African colonies as well as the ill treatment of the Boers by the British
conquerors. It was a time
of reflection for Casement.
For the following two years he spent a considerable amount of time
traveling around Ireland. He joined the Gaelic League and studied Gaelic, a
language he found difficult to master. His involvement with the
League brought him in contact with many of the leading Irish
nationalists and republican of that time. He viewed Arthur
Griffith’s Sinn Fein party’s program, authored by Griffith, as a
possible solution to ending Ireland’s forced union with England.
The program called for 1) Irish MPs to withdraw from the parliament
in London and 2) engage in a campaign of passive resistance similar
to that followed in Hungary that led to the Austro-Hungarian
Compromise of 1867 and the creation of a dual monarchy.
The following response by Casement to a request for a donation from
his alma mater, Ballymena Academy, is a indication of how far he had veered from his earlier
imperial beliefs:
‘1 am already committed by promise to
aid several educational movements in Ireland of a distinctively
national character which must have the first claim on my sympathy
and support.... I was taught nothing about Ireland in Ballymena
School, I don’t think the word was ever mentioned in a single class
of the school and all I know of my country I learnt outside the
school....As an Irishman, I wish to see this state of things changed
and Irish education to be primarily what that of every healthy
people is-- designed to build up a country from within, by training
its youth to know, love and respect their own land before all other
lands.”
In 1906 Casement returned to the Foreign Service. He was sent to
Brazil where he served as consul in the Brazilian provinces of Pará
and Santos and lastly as consul-general in Rio de Janeiro. While in
Rio de Janeiro he was commissioned by the Foreign Office to
investigate the reported abuse of British workers by the Peruvian
Amazon Company (PAC), which was registered in Britain, managed and
owned by a British board of directors and stockholders.
What Casement found was not what was alleged by the Foreign Office.
After having traveled to the Maynas Province in the Amazon Basin of
Peru where the rubber was harvested he witnessed the degrading and
inhumane treatment inflicted by PAC managers and overseers upon the
indigenous people who harvested the rubber. The savagery Casement
witnessed was similar to what he witnessed in the Congo; starvation, severe physical abuse, rape of women
and girls, branding and casual murder.
The resultant report prepared by Casement, (i.e. the Putumayo
Atrocities) which was published as a parliamentary paper in 1911
garnered him international recognition as a humanitarian.
By the time Casement retired from the British consular service in
the summer of 1913 he was a committed Irish nationalist who had
soured on the British Empire. He viewed England’s ongoing occupation
of Ireland as an unjust enterprise perpetrated to rob Ireland of its
natural resources and as a convenient source of manpower to fight
its imperial wars. He also believed that England had, over the
centuries, engaged in cultural genocide to cement its
control over the island of Ireland and its people.
Casement was a
founding member of Irish Volunteers a military organization
formed
in 1913
to counter the Ulster
Volunteers,
a
unionist militia founded in 1912 to block Home Rule for Ireland.
He worked with Eoin MacNeill, who became the
organization’s Chief of Staff, in authoring the Volunteer’s
manifesto. He also came to know many of the leaders of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Citizen Army and Cumann na mBan
some of whom would be executed for their role in the 1916 Easter
Rising.
In July of 1914 he journeyed to the United States to promote and
raise funds for the Volunteers. Though his friendship with Bulmer
Hobson, a member of the Irish Volunteers and the IRB, he was
able to connect with
John Devoy,
Joseph McGarrity
and other members
of Clan na Gael in the United States. Casement role in helping to organize and fund the
Howth gun running affair helped him overcome
Clan na Gael initial hostility
towards him, particularly, for his role in ceding control of the Irish
Volunteers to John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary
Party.
In the months that followed Casement worked closely with Devoy and
other Clan members to raise funds and procure arms for a Rising in
Ireland. After the outbreak of WWII in August 1914, Devoy made
contact with a German diplomat, Count Bernstorff, to discuss a deal
wherein the Germans would supply the IRB with guns and ammunition to
support a revolt in Ireland; a revolt that would help Germany by diverting
British troops from the war in Europe. In furtherance of that
proposal Casement departed for Germany in November of 1914 to work
on a deal with
the Germans.
One of his first tasks in Germany was to create an Irish Brigade
made up of Irish-born prisoners-of-war captured in the early months
of the war. That effort failed because many of the prisoners he
approached were from the ranks of the Irish Volunteers whom John
Redmond’s had cajoled into believing they were loyal British
subjects who owed allegiance to the King, therefore, were duty bound
to fight for the British Empire. Other prisoners were wary knowing
what happened to an earlier generation of Irish-born
soldiers in the British army who joined the Fenians. When exposed
they were either shot on sight or spent the rest of their lives
being abused in prison.
In April 1916 Casement procured from the German government a
consignment of 20,000 rifles, 10 machine guns and ammunition, a
fraction of what he believed was necessary to launch a successful
Rising. The guns and ammunition were loaded aboard the SS Libau,
masquerading as the SS Aud, an existing Norwegian vessel. The Aud
set sail from the Baltic port of Lübeck on 9 April 1916, under the
Command of Karl Spindler. The vessel, which was bound for the
south-west coast of Ireland arrived off the Kerry coast on April 20
1916. Unable to communicate with volunteers on shore, Captain
Spindler was left with no option but to abort the mission and return
to Lubeck.
The reason why contact with the shore failed was
that three of the six volunteers enroute to Kerry to handle
communications were drowned when their car took a wrong turn and ran
into the River Laune. The three volunteers who drowned were Con
Keating, Donal Sheehan and Charlie Monaghan.
Shortly after starting the return journey, the ship was intercepted
by the British Navy and escorted back to Cobh Harbor. Before
reaching Cobh the captain scuttled the ship with preset explosives
rather than have it fall into enemy hands.
In the meantime
Casement had been put ashore off a German U-Boat on Banna
Strand in Kerry on April 21, hoping to rendezvous with the Aud. He was
subsequently arrested, taken to England, charged with treason and
sentenced to death. Despite appeals for clemency Roger Casement was
hanged in Pentonville prison in London on the 3rd. of August, 1916.
His body was disposed of, coffinless, in a quicklime pit.
The quicklime, they said, would consume the flesh
and leave the white bones—the skeleton—intact,
which could then be moved easily.
His remains were returned to Ireland in 1965 and now rest in
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
Contributor:
Tomás Ó Coısdealbha
Roger Casement, the youngest of four children, was born to Roger
Casement and Anne Casement (née Jephson) on Sept.1, 1864 in Sandycove, Co. Dublin.
