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Memories of Roger Casement by BULMER HOBSON
MY friendship with Roger Casement began in the summer of 1904, when we were both guests in a charming old house at Cushendun in the Glens of Antrim. He had recently become famous for his exposure of the brutal treatment of the native populations in the Congo. When various European Powers parcelled out of exploitation the vast, rich and defenceless lands of Africa, the Congo fell to the lot of Belgium.
In many areas the defenceless native people of the Congo — men, women and even quite small children — were ordered to bring in, every month, a specified quota of raw rubber from the forest.
The quota was so heavy that they had no time to do anything else. If they brought the full quota, they were paid with trinkets and trifles, when they were paid at all.
If they did not bring in the full quota they were brutally flogged, tortured and often muttlated; persistent defaulters would have a hand or a foot cut off.
If they ran away they were hunted with dogs and guns, and when caught were frequently murdered.
This taught the native peoples of the Congo they could not trifle with white civilisation.
Presently news of these events began to leak out and an agitation blew up in England led by public spirited men like E. D. Morell, and they raised such a row that the Government was driven to take action.
The British Government was to a degree implicated because they had helped Belgium to acquire the Congo.
British Consul
CASEMENT was a Consul in the employment of what was then the United Kingdom of Gt. Britain and Ireland, and the Foreign Office asked him to investigate and report on conditions in the Congo.
He had been in Africa for many years and had explored large areas then almost unknown to Europeans.
He was a very unusual explorer. He was not prospecting for minerals or oil or interested in exploiting either the land or the people.
He did not want to found colonies or annex territories to enlarge the Empire. He just wanted to see those vast unknown lands and to study the ways of life of strange and unknown peoples.
He did not organise expeditions with equipment that needed long trains of bearers and armed guards.
Instead he went off alone, often for months at a time, his only companions two builders and his only weapon a walking stick.
A fearless man
HE was quite fearless and when he wandered among some remote people, who perhaps had never seen a white man, he did not need arms.
His commanding appearance, his quiet self-confidence and his complete and unaffected friendliness were protection enough.
When Casement was asked to report on conditions in the Congo, he could have gone officially as a British Consul and the Belgian authorities would have tided things up and shown him room and he would have seen nothing that they did not wish him to see.
Instead he went in alone and unannounced and saw everything before the Belgian authorities realised what was happening.
The evidence he collected of brutal ill treatment of the native peoples could not be questioned and the effect of his Report was shattering.
On the way back to England, in Brussels, the King of the Belgians tried to bribe him to water it down.
Casement's name became known everywhere, and the whole rotten regime in the Congo was wiped out and that horrible form of exploitation ended for ever.
Admired Parnell
IT was not of these things that Casement and I talked as we wandered about Glenn Dulls in
ST 9/4/50
Based on a Radio
Eireann' broadcast
Roger Casement
I dream of one who is dead.
As the forms of green trees float and fall in the water,
The dreams float and fall in my mind.
I dream of him wandering in a far land,
I dream of him bringing hope to the hopeless,
I dream of him bringing light to the blind.
I dream of him hearing the voice,
The bitter cry of Kathleen in Houlighaun
On the salt Atlantic wind.
I dream of the hatred of men,
Their lies against him who knew
nothing of lying,
Nor was their fear in his mind.
I dream of our hopes and fears,
The long bitter struggle of the broken-hearted,
With hearts that were poisoned and hard.
I dream of the peace in his soul,
And the early morning hush on the grave of a hero
In the desolate prison yard.
I dream of the death that he died,
For the sake of God and Kathleen in Houlighaun,
Yea, for Love and the Voice on the Wind.
I dream of one who is dead,
Above dreams that float and fall in the water
A new star shines in my mind.
Printed in "Prison Letters of Countess Marklevicz," ed. by Esther Roper; publ. by Longman, Green & Co.
governing body and it was he who raised the money to purchase the guns which we landed at Howth and Kilcool in July and August 1914.
I have a vivid memory of a morning in June, 1914, when Erskine Childers and I went to his room in Buswell's Hotel in Molesworth Street, Dublin, and settled all the details for the landing at Howth.
The next time I met Childers was on the pier at Howth when his yacht was being unloaded by the Irish Volunteers.
Masaryk
IN the meantime Casement had gone to America with the intention of getting into touch with Count Bernstoff in Washington.
Then the war came, a year earlier than we had expected it. I never saw Casement again.
He went to Germany after the war had started just as Wolfe Tone had gone to France in 1708.
He wanted to get Irish Freedom out of the quarrels of the European Powers.
The Creech leader, Masaryk, came to London with exactly the same intent for his country. In London, Casement was denounced as a traitor and Masaryk was halled as a great patrol.
Casement got an undertaking from the German Government that if the course of the war enabled them to do so they would help to establish an independent Ireland. Masaryk got the same promise in London.
Masaryk appealed to the victors, Casement to the vanquished. That was the precise difference between them — but Masaryk became the first President of Czechoslovakia, while Casement was hanged in Pentonville.
Smear campaign
NOT content with hanging him, when Casement was in their hands and could no longer reply and prove the falsehood of the statements, they dug up Armando Normand's indecent diary from the Putamayo and pretending it was Casement's own diary, droulated photographs of selected passages to the press in various parts of the world.
It is doubtful if Vienna could have touched that depth of infany.
The moment the story reached Dublin, Colonel Maurice Moure wrote to the papers. He said that no one who had ever known Casement could possibly believe a word of it. His was the first voice I remember, and he spoke for us all.
In over fifty years I have met many of the well-known figures of our time. I have known no one who was more single minded, more unselfishly devoted to the causes he believed in.
I have known no one who was so stirred at the thought of injustice and wrong whether it was in Africa, America or Ireland.
I have not met his equal for courtesy or kindness or generosity, and I do not mean only with money but in his judgments of other people. I do not expect ever to meet his like again.