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Sir Roger David Casement CMG (Irish: Ruairí Mac Easmainn) (1 September, 1864 – 3 August, 1916) was an Irish patriot, poet, revolutionary and nationalist by inclination. He was a British diplomat by profession and is famous for his activities against abuses of the colonial system in Africa and Peru, but more well known for his dealings with Germany prior to Ireland's Easter Rising in 1916. Casement was born in Dublin to a Protestant father, Captain Roger Casement of the 3rd Dragoon Guards who became a bankrupt Belfast shipping merchant, and a Roman Catholic mother. The latter, Anne Jephson, from Mallow, County Cork, had him baptized secretly as a Roman Catholic, and died when he was nine. By the time he was thirteen, his father was also dead, having ended his days dependent of the charity of relatives and Roger was afterwards raised by Protestant paternal relatives in Ulster. He lived in childhood at Doyle's Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove, County Dublin•. Casement in Africa Casement went to Africa for the first time in 1883, at the age of only nineteen, working in Congo Free State for several companies and for King Léopold II of Belgium's Association Internationale Africaine. While in Congo, he also met the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley during the latter's Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, and became acquainted with the young Joseph Conrad, who was a sailor but had not yet published his novella Heart of Darkness about the Congo. In 1892, Roger Casement left Congo to join the Colonial Office in Nigeria. In 1895 he became consul at Lourenço Marques (now Maputo). By 1900, he was back in Congo, at Matadi, and founded the first British consular post in that country. In his dispatches to the Foreign Office he denounced the mistreatment of indigenous people and the catastrophic consequences of the forced labour system. In 1903, after the British House of Commons, pressed by humanitarian activists, passed a resolution about Congo, Casement was charged to make an inquiry into the situation in the country. The result of his enquiry was his famous Congo Report. The Report, issued in 1904 after a struggle to prevent the British government from keeping it secret, provoked a huge scandal. A short time before the issuing of the report, Casement met the journalist E. D. Morel, who led the anti-Congolese campaign by members of the British Press. It was the beginning of a profound relationship of friendship, admiration and collaboration on the Congo issue. Casement, who could not openly participate in the campaign due to his diplomatic status, persuaded Morel to found the Congo Reform Association. His consular work in exposing Belgian exploitation in the Congo was the principal reason for his being knighted in 1911. He had previously been appointed CMG in 1905. The Putumayo In 1906 Casement was sent to Santos, Brazil. He had the occasion to do work similar to that which he had done in Congo among the Putumayo Indians of Peru. Irish revolutionary
Capture Casement left Germany in a submarine, the U-19, shortly after the Aud sailed. Believing that the Germans were toying with him from the start, and purposely providing inadequate aid that would doom a rising to failure, he decided he had to reach Ireland before the shipment of arms, and convince Eoin MacNeill (who he believed was still in control) to cancel the rising. In the early hours of 21 April 1916, two days before the rising was scheduled to begin, Casement was put ashore at Banna Strand in County Kerry. Too weak to travel (he was ill), he was discovered and subsequently arrested on charges of treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown. Following a highly publicized trial, he was stripped of his knighthood. To the authorities' embarrassment it had been found difficult to find a law to prosecute Casement under since his activities against the crown had been carried out in Germany and the Treason Act seemed to imply that activities carried out away from British soil were not within its purview. However closer reading of the medieval document allowed for a more flexible interpretation leading to the accusation that Casement was "hanged by a comma" as the court followed the letter of the unpunctuated document rather than its obvious sense. After an unsuccessful appeal against the death sentence, he was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916, at the age of 51. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church a few minutes before he was hanged, unaware that his mother had already had him baptized as a child. So he was baptized twice, but never had First Communion or confirmation. Among the people who pleaded for clemency for him were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who became acquainted with Casement through the work of the Congo Reform Association, and George Bernard Shaw. Edmund Dene Morel couldn't visit him in jail, being under attack for his pacifist position. On the other hand, Joseph Conrad could not forgive Casement for his treachery toward Britain. The Black Diaries and Casements sexuality Prior to his execution, pages of a diary which the Crown claimed belonged to Casement were circulated to those urging the commuting of his death sentence. These pages, supplied to King George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and others in Britain, Ireland and the United States, suggested that Casement had engaged in homosexual activity, which was a crime in most countries at the time. The effect of what became known as the "Black Diary" killed off much support for Casement's case. The Diaries were 'de-classified' at the end of the 1990s and may now be inspected at the British National Archives in Kew. Most Irish people believed that the diaries were forgeries, much as Charles Stewart Parnell had been the target of the Pigott forgeries implicating him in the Phoenix Park Murders. However, a recent study comparing his "White Diaries" (ordinary diaries of the time) with the "Black Diaries", which allegedly date from the same time-span, judged, on the basis of detailed handwriting analysis, that the Black Diaries were genuine and had been written by Casement. This study remains controversial, as it consists only of comparative handwriting analysis, and does not constitute a full forensic analysis of the diaries. There have been many cases where competent forgers have produced documents which passed a simple handwriting comparison. It should be noted that the British did not go to the trouble of producing similar smears against anyone else involved in the Easter Rising, even though it is thought that Patrick Pearse may have been homosexual too. Equally there was no public clamour for mercy in the case of any of the other 1916 leaders condemned to death. The case for forgery of the Black Diaries has always been predicated on the fact that Casement was a uniquely admired and respected public figure in Britain among the 1916 leaders. It has also been claimed that the Black Diaries describe an extremely active homosexual sex life which is unlikely to be genuine, but it has been argued that this does not refute the authenticity of the diaries, as they may have been sexual fantasies. Whilst there are some minor inconsistencies between the Diaries and external records of Casement's life, overall they do appear overwhelmingly congruent with his known movements. State funeral and burial in Glasnevin Cemetery As was the custom at the time, Casement's body was buried in quicklime in the yard at Pentonville Prison where he was hanged. In 1965, Casement's body was repatriated and, after a state funeral, was buried with full military honours in the Republican Plot in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. The President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, who in his mid-eighties was the last surviving leader of the Easter Rising, defied the advice of his doctors to attend the ceremony, along with an estimated 30,000 Irish citizens. Casement's last wish, to be buried at Murlough Bay on the North Antrim coast has yet to be fulfilled. Are the remains in Glasnevin really Casements? In the 1990s, doubts were cast as to whether the skeleton buried in Glasnevin actually was Casement's. It was suggested that when his prison grave was opened, it was impossible to distinguish his bones from those of other prisoners, and as result a skeleton was assembled from the bones found and arbitrarily described as Casement's. In some people's opinion, the identity of the skeleton in Glasnevin Cemetery remains unknown until it is examined using DNA evidence from other descendants of the Casement family. DNA profiling was not available in the 1960s. Trivia Footnotes Bibliography | |||||||||
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