British consular official, born in Dun Laoghaire (formerly Kingstown), Co Dublin, E Ireland. He acted as consul in various parts of Africa (18951904) and Brazil (190611). In 1903 the British government ordered him to investigate conditions on the rubber plantations in Congo Free State (now Democratic Republic of Congo) and, in 1910 on the cruel treatment of workers along the Putumayo River in Peru. Knighted in 1911, ill health caused him to retire to Ireland in 1912. An ardent Irish nationalist, he tried unsuccessfully to obtain German financial help for the cause. In 1916 he was arrested on landing in Ireland from a German submarine to head the Sinn Féin rebellion. He was tried in London, found guilty of high treason, stripped of his knighthood, and hanged. His controversial Black Diaries, revealing, among other things, homosexual practices, were long suppressed by the British government, but ultimately published in 1959. In 1965 his remains were taken to Ireland and reinterred at Glasnevin, Dublin, after a state funeral.
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.
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.
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.
In 1892, Roger Casement left Congo to join the Colonial Office in Nigeria.
By 1900, he was back in Congo, at Matadi, and founded the first British consular post in that country. 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 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. Casement, who could not openly participate in the campaign due to his diplomatic status, persuaded Morel to found the Congo Reform Association.
The Putumayo
In 1906 Casement was sent to Santos, Brazil.
Irish revolutionary
Casement resigned from colonial service in 1912.
Casement drafted a "treaty" with Germany, which stated that country's support for an independent Ireland. The Germans, who were sceptical of Casement but nonetheless aware of the military advantage they could gain from an uprising in Ireland, offered the Irish 20,000 guns, 10 machine guns and accompanying ammunition, a fraction of the amount of weaponry Casement had hoped for.
Casement did not learn about the Easter Rising until after the plan was fully developed. Casement may never have learned that it was not the Volunteers who were planning the rising, but IRB members such as Patrick Pearse and Tom Clarke who were pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Capture
Casement left Germany in a submarine, the U-19, shortly after the Aud sailed.
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. 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.
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. On the other hand, Joseph Conrad could not forgive Casement for his treachery toward Britain.
The Black Diaries and Casement's sexuality
Prior to his execution, photographs of a diary which the Crown claimed belonged to Casement were circulated to those urging the commuting of his death sentence. These documents, supplied to King George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and others in Britain, Ireland and the United States, showed Casement to have been a promiscuous homosexual with a fondness for very young men, which was a crime in most countries at the time.Goldsmiths College page on Casement diaries research The effect of what became known as the "Black Diary" killed off much support for Casement's case.
Though some 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, others did not, among whom the Irish Republican leader Michael Collins who inspected them in 1921 and was satisfied that they were genuine.
In an effort to settle the issue, an independent forensic examination of the diaries, funded by the BBC and the RTE, was recently undertaken by Dr. Audrey Giles, an internationally respected figure in the field of document forensics. In comparing Casement's "White Diaries" (ordinary diaries of the time) with the "Black Diaries", which allegedly date from the same time-span, the study concluded, on the basis of detailed handwriting analysis, that the Black Diaries were genuine and had been written by Casement.BBC article on the controversy and the forensic study
This study has, however, been criticized for employing only comparative handwriting analysis.
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. 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. 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 Casement's?
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.
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