Not a Man of His Own Time: Roger Casement and Transnational Activism

Bolfarine, Mariana

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-66206-0_3

Not a Man of His Own Time: Roger Casement and Transnational Activism

Mariana Bolfarine⁵

Chapter
First Online: 29 November 2017

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to explore the emergence of the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement as a transnational activist. I argue that Casement should be considered a ‘rooted cosmopolitan,’ a concept first advanced by Sidney Tarrow. As Tarrow explains, “the special characteristics of these activists is not their cognitive cosmopolitanism, but their relational links to other societies, to other countries, and to international institutions.” Casement’s transatlantic actions and movements across three continents—Europe, Africa, and the Americas—nurtured his awareness of colonial violence and his capacity to bring injustice to attention. It also led him to engage in the cause of freeing his own people, the Irish, from British domination. A close study of Casement’s life and political activism sheds light on earlier generations of transnational struggle, long before the Internet age.

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Notes

1.
I here refer to the title of Séamas O’Síocháin’s biography, Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary, Dublin : Lilliput Press, 2008, that traces precisely his transformations from a loyal British Consul to defender of the underdog in the Congo and in Amazonia, and finally to a fierce Irish nationalist.
2.
These atrocities refer to the ill treatment and mutilations inflicted upon the Congolese natives for not collecting the rubber quotas during the reign of the absolutist monarch, Leopold II .
3.
The Putumayo is a disputed frontier between Colombia, Peru , and Brazil located in the Amazon region.
4.
Casement’s reluctance to receive this honour is clear in the following excerpt of a letter to his friend Alice Stopford Green: “Your congrats have been the best, for you alone have seen there was an Irish side to it all. What you say is true – although few would believe it, can possibly believe, that I have not worked for this – for a distinction and honour – or whatever they call it, instead of, in reality, deeply desiring not to get it.” See: O’Síocháin: Roger Casement, p. 309.
5.
Casement’s disillusionment with the British Empire is made clear in passages of the Amazon Journal and in letters to friends. This can be seen in a reference to Oliver Cromwell in a letter he submitted to the Irish Independent on 20 May 1913, under the heading ‘This “Irish Putumayo,’” wherein he likens the subjugation of the Irish to that of the Putumayo Indians. Soon afterwards, in a letter to Alice Stopford Green (30 May 1913), Casement wrote about the reception of this letter, condemning British imperial practice in Ireland: “my ‘grave indiscretion’ in likening Connemara to the Putumayo has, after all, done only good. No one I find reproaches me and all were secretly glad – some openly so and at any rate widespread public attention has been called to the evil and wicked plight of those poor people – a remnant of Cromwellian civilization sitting in the embers of the hell or Connaught then decreed the doom of the Irish race.” See: Brian Inglis, Roger Casement: The Biography of a Patriot who Lived for England, Died for Ireland, New York: Harcourt Jovanovich, 1973, pp. 355–356.
6.
Angus Mitchell , 16 Lives: Roger Casement, Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2014, pp. 146, 151.
7.
For more information on Roger Casement in Germany , please refer to ‘A Last Page of my Diary: with an Introduction by Angus Mitchell,’ Field Day Review, vol. 8, 2012, p. 53.
8.
Of the 16 Rising leaders whose execution was ordered by Westminster, Casement was the only one who was hanged.
9.
William Butler Yeats, ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement ,’ in The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, London: Wordsworth Editions, 2000, p. 262.
10.
Mariana Bolfarine, Between “Angels and Demons”: Trauma in Fictional Representations of Roger Casement, São Paulo: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas: 2015, available [online]: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8147/tde-15012016-140005/ [Access Date March 21 2017].
11.
Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, Chap. 3.
12.
Ibid., p. 35.
13.
Angus Mitchell, ed., The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997.
14.
Angus Mitchell, Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness: The 1911 Documents, Dublin : Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2003.
15.
Oxford English Dictionary, 1999, cited in: Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, p. 37.
16.
Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, p. 37.
17.
Ibid., p. 38.
18.
Ibid., p. 42.
19.
Ibid., p. 43.
20.
Roger Casement and Conan Doyle met in 1910, shortly before Casement left for Peru , and they remained in correspondence. Casement has also supplied Conan Doyle with the setting of the novel The Lost World, and one of the characters, Lord Johns Roxton, was based on the then British Consul. For more information on Roger Casement and literature, please refer to the Ph.D. dissertation ‘“Between Angels and Demons:” Trauma in Fictional Representations of Roger Casement,’ University of São Paulo, 2015.
21.
Roger Casement and Joseph Conrad met in the Congo and shared a room for some weeks. Conrad has written that Casement allowed him to see the violence in the Congo, and some critics argue that it was Casement who inspired Conrad to write the renowned novella Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s words: “He [Casement] could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know. He has had many years of Africa as I had months – almost.” See: Letter to Robert Cunningham Graham, 26 December 1903, in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 3, Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 101.
22.
Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness [1902], New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1990.
23.
Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, second edition, Boston: P.R. Warren Co., 1905a.
24.
W.R. Louis 1964, cited in Inglis, Roger Casement, p. 1.
25.
National Library of Ireland MS 10464, Roger Casement to Alice Stopford Green, 20 April 1907, cited in: Angus Mitchell and Laura Izarra, eds., Roger Casement in Brazil: Rubber, the Amazon and the Atlantic World 1884–1916, São Paulo: Humanitas, 2010, p. 25.
26.
Euclides da Cunha, At the Margins of History [1909], Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006.
27.
The periodical Truth was founded by the English politician Henry Labouchère in 1877.
28.
(Cd. 6266, 1912), cited in Mitchell , The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, p. 61.
29.
Robert Burroughs , Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo, London: Routledge, 2010, p. 120.
30.
Mariana Bolfarine , ‘Review of Diário de la Amazonía,’ Estudios Irlandeses, vol. 7, 2012, pp. 153–155.
31.
Angus Mitchell , ‘“Indians, you had a life – your white destroyers only possessed things:” Indigeneity in the Anti-Colonial Activism of Revolutionary Ireland,’ ABEI Journal, vol. 12, 2010.
32.
A large woven bag, strapped to their foreheads, in which the Indians carried rubber on their backs.
33.
Mitchell , The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, p. 271.
34.
Ibid., p. 251.
35.
Mitchell , The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement.
36.
For additional information on the Putumayo pictures, historian Jordan Goodman has published the article ‘Mr. Casement Goes to Washington : The Politics of the Putumayo Photographs,’ ABEI Journal, vol. 12, 2010, pp. 25–31. The pictures have also been published in the Portuguese version of the Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, Laura Izarra and Mariana Bolfarine , eds., Diário da Amazônia de Roger Casement, São Paulo: Humanitas, 2016.
37.
Goodman, ‘Mr. Casement Goes to Washington’, p. 26.
38.
Ibid.
39.
Mitchell , Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness, p. 351.
40.
Quoted in Inglis, Roger Casement , p. 200.
41.
Ibid., p. 308.
42.
James Bryce initially supported Home Rule, but he eventually refrained from providing Ireland its autonomy. A Home Rule Bill was only produced in 1912, but was never implemented because of the imminence of World War I.
43.
Mitchell , Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness, p. 453.
44.
Mitchell , 16 Lives, p. 207.
45.
Ibid.
46.
Quoted in Mitchell , Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness, p. 715.
47.
Inglis, Roger Casement, p. 324.
48.
Mitchell, Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness, pp. 715–716.
49.
Mitchell , The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, p. 334.
50.
Ibid.
51.
Mitchell, Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness, p. 339.
52.
Ibid., p. 450.
53.
Ibid.
54.
In Mitchell , ‘“Indians, you had a life – your white destroyers only possessed things”’, p. 20, the author explains that the Connemara Relief Fund was created in June, 1913, and it was organized with the support of Alice Stopford Green and Douglas Hyde, both supporters of the movement called Irish Revival.
55.
Mitchell, 16 Lives, p. 174.
56.
Mitchell, 16 Lives, p. 183.
57.
Letter from Roberts to Casement, quoted in O’Síocháin, Roger Casement, p. 356.
58.
Dr. Herbert Spencer Dickey worked for 10 years in the northwest Amazon and is an important witness to Casement’s 1911 journey in the Putumayo. He was closely connected with the Peruvian Amazon Company until 1913, where he met Casement in Barbados during his Putumayo investigation and accompanied him to Iquitos. He wrote an insightful memoire titled Misadventures of a Tropical Medico (1929).
59.
Mitchell, The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, p. 35.
60.
Mitchell , Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness, p. 733 (bold added by author).
61.
Tarrow , The New Transnational Activism , p. 45.
62.
This is a reference to Casement’s letter to Alice Green, in which he says he was looking at the tragedy of the Congo with the eyes of another race, mentioned on page 8.

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University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Mariana Bolfarine

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Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Stefan Berger
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Sean Scalmer

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Bolfarine, M. (2018). Not a Man of His Own Time: Roger Casement and Transnational Activism. In: Berger, S., Scalmer, S. (eds) The Transnational Activist. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66206-0_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66206-0_3
Published: 29 November 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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