By James Aitchison

We were touring Northern Ireland, my wife and I, tracing some of my Irish ancestors to the seaside town of Ballycastle.  There, on the north-eastern tip of Ireland, we had booked a rather interesting cottage from the Irish Landmark Trust.

Woodland surrounds Magherintemple Lodge, County Antrim on three sides.  (Magherintemple is pronounced “Ma’herintemple”.)   To the other side, cows grazed contentedly on emerald-green Irish grass.  Snowdrops carpeted the garden.  The lodge, we were told, had been the gatehouse of an historic estate. 

We wandered along the drive and caught a glimpse of Magherintemple House, built in 1875, in the rather grim Scottish-Baronial style.  Not wishing to trespass, we returned to the little stone lodge and made an amazing discovery.

We were on the estate of a great Irish patriot, poet and humanitarian, a British diplomat, a knight of the realm, who was executed by the United Kingdom for treason in 1916.  And so, we began to unravel the story of Sir Roger Casement.

Born in Dublin, on 1 September 1864, Roger Casement’s Anglo-Irish family had a chequered history.  His grandfather, Hugh Casement, was a bankrupt shipping merchant who fled to Australia.  His father, Captain Roger Casement of the King’s Own Regiment of Dragoons, became a soldier of fortune.  The family moved to England, living in “genteel poverty”.

Casement’s mother died when he was nine, his father when he was thirteen.  Returning to Ireland and dependent on relatives, Casement left school at sixteen.  His first job was a clerk in a shipping company in Liverpool.

The young man’s personality was full of contradictions.  A deputy described him as “tall, ungainly, elaborately courteous, with a musical voice, and eyes that were kindly but not given to laughter”.  The author Joseph Conrad, a shrewd judge of character, wrote that his first impressions of Casement were that of a man “who thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and most sympathetic”; however, he later qualified that praise: “He was a man of no mind at all, not stupid but all emotion, sheer temperament, a truly tragic figure”.

Seeking adventure, Casement travelled to the Congo where he worked for Henry Morton Stanley, from 1884.  Stanley was the famous explorer who became a national hero when he found the missing Dr Livingstone.  However, Stanley was in the pay of the brutal King Leopold II of Belgium.  Leopold had formed the African International Association in order to run the Congo Free State as his own personal fiefdom, far from the prying eyes of the Belgium government and the world.  Stanley was, it seems, complicit in the venture.

At first Casement was a willing recruit.  He learned African languages and believed King Leopold was dedicated to bringing “moral and social progress to the continent and free its inhabitants from slavery, paganism and other barbarities”.  Soon he discovered that the Congo Free State was anything but free.

The colony was controlled by Leopold’s private army, the Force Publique.  Its reign of terror included barbaric enslavement, mutilation and torture of the Congolese people.  Worked to death, natives had a hand or arm chopped off for failing to meet quotas.

In 1903, the British government appointed Casement as a consul to report on these abuses.  Arguably, Casement was the world’s first human rights investigator; his 50,000-word Casement Report, written in a week, led to King Leopold losing his private African kingdom in 1908.  The Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo.  By that time, three million Congolese had been murdered by Leopold’s men.

Meanwhile, Casement was sent as Consul-General to Rio de Janeiro in 1906.  Soon he was again investigating human rights abuses conducted by the Peruvian Amazon Company, a British-registered rubber venture.  Casement risked his life by travelling to the heart of the Amazon Basin where the company harvested rubber using enslaved indigenous labour.  Casement’s report was scathing: “It far exceeds in depravity and demoralisation the Congo regime at its worst”.

In 1911 a grateful Britain bestowed a knighthood on the saviour of the Amazonian Indians.

After his experiences in both the Congo and Peru, Casement’s investigations into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples led him to mistrust and oppose imperialism in all its forms.  He wrote that he was on the “high road to being a regular Imperialist jingo…” but “in those lonely Congo forests, I found myself, the incorrigible Irishman.”

Despite his knighthood, Casement came to view the harsh British occupation of his native Ireland as unacceptable.  Retired from the Foreign Office and living on a generous pension, he became more involved with Irish republicanism.  With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Casement sailed for Germany in disguise.  He negotiated a declaration by Germany that it would never invade Ireland with a view to conquest.  Then he went about recruiting an Irish Brigade among Irish prisoners-of-war in order to fight the British for independence; his efforts failed dismally.

Another failure was Casement’s plan to smuggle guns into Ireland from Germany.  The Germans were keen to create a distraction but the arms ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy and scuttled by the crew.  Unaware of this defeat, Casement and two companions travelled to Ireland aboard a German submarine, the SM U-19.  Put ashore in County Kerry, Casement succumbed to a recurrence of malaria and sent his companions ahead.  A Royal Irish Constabulary sergeant discovered and arrested him.

Casement was returned to London to face charges of high treason, sabotage and espionage.  There, Casement was also accused of being a “sexual deviant” with numerous accounts of homosexual activity listed in his diaries (known as the Black Diaries, believed to be forgeries).  Scandalous rumours inflamed public opinion against him.  He was stripped of his knighthood.  Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, poet W. B. Yeats, playwright George Bernard Shaw and Quaker businessman, philanthropist and chocolate maker George Cadbury pleaded for clemency.  Even Lawrence of Arabia thought of writing a book about him.  All to no avail.

Casement was executed for treason in Pentonville Prison, London, on 3 August 1916, aged 51.

His body was buried in quick lime.  It was not until 1965 that Casement’s remains were repatriated to Ireland.  A man of many contradictions had finally returned home.