BOOK: Angus Mitchell, "The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement"

[Note: I read this book, and wrote this post, in 2006, but for various reasons never got around to posting it. I'm posting it now, more or less unchanged but with a few additions clearly marked in brackets; I also replaced dead links with their archived versions.]

The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Edited and with an introduction by Angus Mitchell. London: Anaconda Editions, 1997. 1901990001. 534 pp.

Roger Casement was an Irishman who spent most of his career in the British diplomatic service and is chiefly remembered for his humanitarian work in the Congo and Putumayo regions, for his support of the Irish struggle for independence from Britain, and for the scandal that arose when his ‘black diaries’, revealing his homosexual activities, began to circulate around the time when he was being tried for treason due to his involvement in the Easter Rising. For more information, see his Wikipedia page, or the series of posts I wrote in March and April [2023 note: i.e. of 2006] (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) after reading the 1959 book Black Diaries

The Putumayo is a river in South America, a tributary of the Amazon. At the turn of the century, the area through which it flows was a kind of no-man's-land; it belonged in principle to Peru (and partly to Colombia), which however did not exercise any real control over it. Instead, the area was under the control of gangs of ‘enterpreneurs’ who were lured there by the abundance of wild rubber trees in its rainforests. They forced the native Indian inhabitants of the area to gather the rubber for them, and in their greed for profit they instituted a system of exploitation that was not much different from slavery. At some point, these exploiters formed a corporation, the Peruvian Amazon Company, whose stock began to be traded on the London Stock Exchange. (However, in practice, everything was still under the control of the Peruvians: “The London shareholders and Boards are merely the cloak of respectability, and the guarantee for cash. Arana and his gang in Iquitos are the real Peruvian-Amazon Company.” P. 131. And: “the English Company is only English in name”, p. 323.) This increased the odds that the British public and various charitable organizations such as the ASAPS (Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society) would eventually take an interest in the conditions in the Putumayo, as indeed they did when news of the atrocities there finally began to emerge (e.g. due to the reports by W. E. Hardenburg, an American engineer who had been harassed by the agents of the Peruvian Amazon Company during his travels in the region; p. 442). This was probably part of the reason why Edward Grey, the foreign minister, decided in 1910 to send Casement to visit the area and report on the conditions there. Casement was a good choice because he was already stationed in South America (as the British consul in Rio de Janeiro) and because he already had experience with missions of this sort (see his similar journey to the Congo in 1903). The other reason for sending him, a reason more easily justified from the formal point of view, was that the Company had also employed a number of British subjects, black men from Barbados, and allegations appeared that these men were being mistreated, underpaid, forced to participate in criminal acts such as torturing the Indians (p. 201), and that on some occasions the Barbadoans themselves were being tortured (pp. 193, 345, 347, 354, 461). A company that was, at least in theory, British could hardly refuse the British government to send a consul to investigate reports that British subjects were being abused in the area under the Company's control. (Casement did a good job of helping the Barbadoans, who were being swindled in every which way by the Company. He got the Company to at least partly rectify its accounts with the Barbadoans, offer them compensation for some of the abuse they had gone through, and in the end the Barbadoans all quit their jobs with the Company and went, with Casement's help, to Brazil, where they would be safely out of reach of the Company's efforts to retaliate, e.g. by having them prosecuted by the Peruvian authorities for the crimes they had committed under orders of their Company employers.)

The 1959 Black Diaries contain the report that Casement wrote for Grey after returning from his 1910 journey to the Putumayo, as well as Casement's black diary from that period. (See my post from April.) Both are relatively brief, just a few dozen pages long. However, Casement also kept a much more extensive diary during his journey; this actually formed the basis for the shorter report he later wrote for Grey. This longer diary has been preserved in manuscript form and was eventually edited by Angus Mitchell and published in 1997 as The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement.

Before I started reading this book, I was worried that it might turn out to be boring, but in fact it was very interesting. It allows you to follow the progress of Casement's journey quite closely day after day, and there are many details here that are missing in the much shorter report for Grey. The editor, Mitchell, also provides lots of interesting background material in his footnotes. All in all, this is an excellent book for anyone interested in learning more about Casement's Putumayo mission.

The editor's introduction and notes

In the introductory chapter, Mitchell argues against the authenticity of the black diaries (p. 42). One of the main arguments, which seems reasonable enough, is that there are many discrepancies in various details between the black diaries from the time of his Amazon travels on the one hand, and the various other diaries, reports, letters, etc. from the same period on the other hand. He points out several of these discrepancies in footnotes sprinkled throughout the book. (Another interesting note is on p. 144, where Casement mentions in the journal that “my celibacy makes me frugal of human life, but I'd shoot or exterminate these infamous scoundrels” — but if the black diaries are authentic, he was anything but celibate.*)

[*2023 note: but on second thought, this seems misguided; celibate properly means ‘not married’ rather than ‘not sexually active’. In face the OED (1st ed., 1893) only shows it in the former sense. (It is no wonder, of course, that these two senses eventually got conflated in the days when people weren't supposed to have sex outside of marriage, and that many now use the word in the latter sense.) Mitchell writes (p. 144, n. 131): “It has been suggested that Casement might be using the word in the same sense as ‘bachelor’ — but given the context of the word's usage this seems untenable.” I don't quite see what context he is referring to; it seems perfectly reasonable to me to observe that (1) the word only meant ‘unmarried’ in Casement's time, not ‘sexually inactive’ at all; and (2) Casement's context here is that he is saying he won't get married, hence won't bring any new lives into the world and hence he is also loath to take lives, but he'd still gladly take the lives of “these infamous scoundrels”.]

Another argument against the authenticity of the diaries is this: Casement had a great deal of writing to do during his journey anyway (pp. 44, 279): the journal published in this book, plus statements of the Barbados men; why would he keep, in addition to all that, yet another diary, the black diary, containing much information that overlaps with the journal, and why would he record in that diary all those homosexual thoughts and actions when he was surrounded all the time by people from the Peruvian Amazon Company who would jump at the opportunity to use this diary to ruin him if it should somehow fall into their hands (pp. 44–5)? Besides, he was plagued during much of the journey by an eye infection which “forced him to be as economic with his writing as possible” (p. 44). Other interesting notes on the authenticity of the black diaries are on pp. 178, 207, 222, 267, 279, 287, 344, 363, 438.

Here are some of the other Mitchell's notes that I found particularly interesting: the beginnings of exploitation in the Putumayo region (pp. 145–6, 356; cf. the 1959 Black Diaries p. 230); Casement and foreign languages (“Casement was not a gifted linguist [. . .] it seems that he did not speak Portuguese well. His Castilian was worse [. . .] [He was good at French and] he had limited comprehension of Gaelic and German”, p. 152; and p. 68 mentions his plans to attend a summer school to improve his spoken Gaelic).

There's an interesting note on the origin of the name ‘Bula Matadi’ (or ‘Matari’ as it seems to be in some versions), but I found it slightly confusing: “Bula Matadi (deriving from the name of the prophet Francisco Bullamatare) was a settlement within the Domaine [de la Couronne, an area of the Congo that was under Leopold's direct control rather than given to some concessionary company] and means — ‘Breaker of Stones’ — this was the nickname originally given to Henry Morton Stanley, the man who first explored and eventually claimed the interior of central Africa for Leopold II. Stanley was proud of this African tribal naming. Twenty years later, however, the phrase had come to signify ‘abusive white administration’ and instead of ‘breaker of stones’ its meaning was ‘breaker of men.’ ” (Mitchell's note on p. 182.) I found no mention of a Francisco Bullamatare on the web,* so I'm not quite sure what to make of that part of the note; and anyway, the note now simultaneously claims that ‘Bula Matadi’ is derived from the prophet's name and from the phrase ‘breaker of stones’ — which one is it then?

[*2023 note: there are some mentions of him on the web now. Apparently he was a relative of Alvaro I (a 16h-century Congolese king who, despite his Portuguese name, was a native African ruler). Francisco Bullamatari “terrorised his fellow Africans while fomenting an anti-Christian movement” (link, archived link). So I guess perhaps the name does mean ‘breaker of stones’, was first applied to Francisco B. in the sixteenth century and then also to Stanley in the nineteenth.]

In a note on p. 183, Mitchell says: “As with any genocide, exact figures are hard to pin down but recent estimates suggest that around three million Africans died under Leopold II's regime in the Congo Free State”. From Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost I remember a much higher figure, around ten million (p. 233 there); I wonder whence the discrepancy.

Mitchell met one of the descendants of Julio Cesar Arana, the founder of the Peruvian Amazon Company, in 1994. “Even today the Arana family remains a powerful force in Rioja where they own the main hotel and an ice-cream parlour.” How unspeakably sad — after all the atrocities set in motion by that old scoundrel Julio C. Arana, after his years of lording it over thousands of poor helpless Indians, what is the final result? An ice-cream parlour in some obscure Amazonian backwater that no sane person has ever even heard of! Ah, if only people thought of the long-term consequences of some proposed course of action — how delightfully few things would ever get done.

“A wooden Palmatoria [piece of wood with holes in it, used, as the name suggests, to beat people on the palms of the hands] is still used in Brazil to discipline miscreants at school.” (Mitchell's note on p. 259.)

There's an interesting note on the Amazon rubber boom of 1850–1920 on p. 322. “The mass production of the Model T Ford in 1906 turned rubber into a raw material more valuable than gold and the Putumayo atrocities were a direct consequence of the spiralling market demand.” See the invisible hand of the market in operation, you lovers of capitalism! Incidentally, the perpetrators probably also knew that they had to hurry while the going was good, as in a few years rubber from plantations would flood the market and cause the prices to drop.

“Conan Doyle had become acquainted with Casement as a result of his interest in the Congo Reform movement” (see Doyle's book, The Crime of the Congo*). In The Lost World, “The character of Lord John Roxton is based loosely upon Casement and there are a number of references to Roxton hunting Peruvian slavers in the Putumayo. See The Lost World chapter VI” (p. 378).

[*2023 note: originally that link went to the e-text of Doyle's book on boondocksnet.com, one of those wonderful websites that were more common on the early web than today. Maintained by Prof. Jim Zwick, that website contained a wealth of information about imperialism and colonialism of the late 19th and early 20th century — a plethora of old books, pamphlets, photographs and the like. It disappeared relatively soon; I vaguely remember that it may have been due to the death of the proprietor in 2008. Soon the domain was taken over by some shitty commercial website that was obviously just trying to take advantage of its former good reputation with the search engines. Currently the domain seems to be parked. Worst of all, due to its strict robots.txt settings, none of it seems to have been preseved on archive.org. Let this note be a belated in memoriam to one of the pearls of the early days of the internet, good old days which are now gone, never to return.]

Curiously feudal conditions in early 20th-century Brazil: “The Néri family dominated the Brazilian state of Amazonas during the rubber boom just as the Arana family did in Iquitos and Loreto [. . .] [Governor] Bittencourt started to [. . .] collude with the Lemos family who governed the neighbouring state of Pará and were the Néri's arch rivals. In 1910 the Néris sought federal support to oust Bittencourt from office and an army officer and naval gunboat were duly despatched to deal with the situation.” (P. 395.)

The editor's note on p. 397 cites a few sentences from one of Joseph Conrad's letters, referring to Casement: “There is a touch of the conquistador in him too; for I've seen him start off into an unspeakable wilderness swinging a crookhandled stick for all weapons, with two bulldogs [. . .] and a Loanda boy carrying a bundle for all company. A few months afterwards [. . .] I saw him come out again, a little leaner, a little browner, with his stick, dogs and Loanda boy, and quietly serene as though he had been for a stroll in a park.” This sounded familiar, and I now find that a few phrases from this letter are also quoted on the dust jacket of the 1959 Black Diaries.

An interesting footnote on the Madeira-Mamoré railway, built in the early 20th century to improve access to the rubber-rich areas of northern Bolivia: “possibly the most ambitious railway construction folly ever undertaken. [. . .] Despite the loss of thousands of lives in the construction of the railway it was finished in 1912 at the moment when the bottom fell out of the Amazon rubber market.” (P. 448.) Such is the fate of capitalism and its market cycles — the biggest follies are bound to happen just before the market crashes. If it kept on growing they wouldn't seem to be follies.

Incidentally, on the subject of the Madeira-Mamoré railway, Percy Fawcett (Exploration Fawcett, ch. 8, p. 89) refers to it as “that backwoods system running from ‘nowhere’ to ‘nowhere’, whose white officials received salaries so high that in ten years they could retire—if they lived so long!”

An official Peruvian investigation of the Putumayo atrocities started in late 1910, led by a judge named Dr. Valcárcel. (Incidentally, I don't understand Spanish but this surname sounds vaguely prison-like — not a very auspicious name for a judge.) It led to this bizarre publication: “a book that records Peru's official side of the whole saga: El proceso del Putumayo; sus secretos inauditos (Lima 1915). The book was dedicated to Peru's President Guillermo Billinghurst (1912–14) and to the A.S.A.P.S. [Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society] in London in a limited edition of a thousand copies. It borrowed heavily from Casement's Blue Book and the Paredes report.” (P. 458.)

There's an interesting footnote on the beginnings of cinema in Iquitos on p. 475. “Pará, Manaos and Iquitos were among the first cities in South America to enjoy silent pictures.”

An excellent quote from Edward Grey on p. 489: “It is not hard to tell the truth; the difficulty is to get it believed.”

“The African writer Chinua Achebe has said that ‘Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray’ ” (Mitchell's introduction, p. 9).

The Commission

Partly in response to the news about atrocities in the Putumayo, the Peruvian Amazon Company decided to send a commission consisting of five Englishmen into the region (p. 60). Casement travelled together with them and often mentions them and their work in his journal. Eventually the commission agreed with Casement that the Company's regime is completely unacceptable and is no better than slavery, but it's remarkable how long it took them to accept this point of view. “They [. . .] had seen, said Fox, only three rubber trees. They seemed quite surprised. I said to Barnes I was surprised at his surprise. I wondered he had not already grasped that this story of Indian labourers was a lie. There were no labourers — there was no industry on the Putumayo. It was simply a wild forest inhabited by wild Indians, who were hunted like wild animals and made to bring in rubber by hook or by crook, and murdered and flogged if they didn't. That was the system.” (P. 149.) See also pp. 151, 157, 179–81, 198 (“I mean to rub these highly instructive backsides well in their faces until they admit that it is the lash behind and not the ‘advance’ in front that collects each fabrico of rubber”), 282.

“The latter [Bell, one of the commissioners] still clings to some extent to some of the ‘commercial’ side of the argument, and the duty to ‘make the Indian work’ (for his own good, of course — it is always for his good a man is enslaved. This is not Bell, but me.)” (P. 178.)

In a way it's really very fortunate that the company had employed all those Barbadoans: most of them were willing to confide in Casement and tell him of the crimes committed both by themselves and by the other company employees and chiefs. Their statements were pretty much the only direct first-hand evidence against the company and its system (p. 169); the Indians were too afraid to speak out (p. 171). Without Casement's presence and his efforts to interview as many of the Barbadoans as possible, it seems likely that the commission would not have formed the opinion that there was anything amiss in the Putumayo. See e.g. p. 169, 244 (“Gielgud last year, who passed through with the pleasing impression that this was a garden of Eden”), 330.

The Commission had to make considerable efforts to keep their discussions secret from the company employees and chiefs (who would of course respond with intrigues of their own if they learned that the commission was about to introduce reforms). See pp. 162 (“The one preoccupation now of even ourselves — this Commission and myself — is to see that nothing of the truth shall leak out”), 153, 172.

Comparisons with the Congo

In many ways, the treatment of natives in the Putumayo was even worse than in the European colonies in Africa at the time (p. 88). The chances that the property rights of the natives would be recognized (p. 79), or that the legal and judicial system would occasionally take an interest in their well-being (p. 183) were greater in the African colonies in than in the utter lawlessness of the Putumayo region. “To pay them [the Indians] has not entered any head but mine, and yet even on the Congo there would have been payment (of a sort) as well as food.” (P. 208.) “The condition of things is the most disgraceful, the most lawless, the most inhuman, I believe that exists in the world to-day. It far exceeds in depravity and demoralisation the Congo regime at its worst.” (Pp. 294–5. He adds that the only good thing about this system is that at most a few thousand Indians are affected by it, as opposed to the millions of people in the Congo.) “The present system is not merely slavery but extermination. A slave was well-cared and well-fed, so as to be strong for his master's work. These poor Indian serfs had no master who fed them or cared for them, they were simply here to be driven by lash and gunfire to collect rubber.” (P. 143.) (The company often neglected to provide them with food, and instead expected them to provide for themselves in whatever way they could at the same time as gathering rubber or carrying loads for the company.) The company's regime was also ecologically unsustainable: “That the forest was gradually giving out its stock of rubber seemed almost apparent to me, as we found these ‘sections’ [into which the company divided its territory] were continually changing their locality.” (P. 150.)

Another interesting comparison with conditions in Africa appears on p. 245, where Casement says that the Indians were much more timid and poorly equipped than the Africans: “Were these poor savage beings like the Africans, this paltry handful of filibusterers and pirates — for the whole gang numbers only about 150 — would have been swept away, after the first few murders. [. . .] their childish weapons, blow pipes and toy spear, [. . .] are a poor substitute for the African battle spear and axe. The African never feared blood; he liked its flow. These child-like beings, even in their wars, took life secretly and silently with as little flow of blood as possible.” (P. 245. For more along these lines, see p. 311.)

Another standard practice was to require the Indians to act as carriers, of rubber or any other goods that needed to be transported; they were usually not paid, and often weren't even provided with food. “It is the first time (except from Porto Peruano to this) that I have travelled with a caravan of unpaid men; all the years in Africa, bad as I have seen them, I never knew this.” (P. 252.) See also pp. 267–71, where he describes his efforts to help a few absolutely exhausted rubber-carriers. Even children were forced to carry heavy loads: “a little boy whose name he gave as Kaimeni, weighed 29½ himself and was actually carrying 30½ kilos of rubber!” (P. 340.) On p. 341 he mentions a grown-up's load weighing 63½ kilos “— and not by any means the biggest load I have seen”. On p. 348 a boy weighing 25 kilos carries a load of 29½ kilos.

“The Congo crime was an effort on the part of a European ruler to put back the clock; the Putumayo crime shows that on one of the Continents occupied for four hundred years by two European races, the clock was stopped four centuries ago.” (P. 498. Casement goes on to argue why the situation in the Putumayo is more hopeless than in the Congo: in the latter, there existed the machinery of administration, treaty rights that could be invoked, and behind Leopold there was “a progressive and vigorous European people” who would not let the atrocities continue indefinitely once they became known. But as far as I remember from Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, although matters improved somewhat after Congo went out of Leopold's hands and into Belgian control, much exploitation and abuse remained (pp. 272–3, 278–9 there); these things were only really ended after the declining profitability of the rubber business removed the economic incentive that had been their ultimate cause all the time.

Atrocities

Another area in which the Amazon Journal provides more detail than the report for Grey that is included in the 1959 Black Diaries are the grisly atrocities perpetrated upon the Indians by the company agents and employees. In addition to the instance of testicle smashing by the Barbadoan Joshua Dyall, acting under Armando Normand's orders (Black Diaries p. 247; Amazon Journal pp. 124, 376) there is another instance by the Peruvian agent Fonseca: “Fonseca arrived just after Chase had made his final declaration before me about this awful wretch killing a man in the cepo [i.e. stocks] at Ultimo Retiro by smashing his testicles and private parts with a thick stick, — a poor young Indian who had simply run away from working rubber.” (P. 360.)

There are also several instance of the burning of Indians: Black Diaries p. 256 mentions Normand's pouring of kerosene on people and burning them; the Amazon Journal mentions “Jiménez [. . .] setting fire to the Chief Tiracahuaca and his wife with kerosene [. . .] July 1908” (p. 219, but there seem to be some doubts about this accusation) and also his “burning alive the old Boras woman and the young Boras man in June 1908” (p. 255; perhaps the same thing is mentioned on p. 177). Another instance of Jiménez burning two people alive is on p. 370; it's probably identical to one of the above-mentioned two instances. And then there's the “burning alive of twenty-four Ocaina caciques on 2 November 1903, an event which had effectively instigated the P. A. Co.'s rule of terror on the Putumayo” (editor's note, p. 351).

There is also Normand “dashing children's brains out against tree stumps and burning them alive [. . .] the dogs tearing the bodies of the dead to pieces and bringing up an arm or leg to the house to gnaw.” (P. 255.)

There were also instances of raping prisoners in the stocks (p. 143). Now I see that something of this sort was already mentioned in the report for Grey, but I apparently forgot to mention it in my post back in April: “Sometimes the most abominable offences were committed upon Indians while held by the legs or leg in this defenceless position” (Black Diaries p. 278; but he goes on to cite Fonseca as the perpetrator and Chase as the witness, so this probably refers to the above-mentioned incident described on p. 360 of the Amazon Journal).

There are instances of two Indians being “shot for mere sport” (pp. 240, 234): One Rodriguez, “every morning when he got up he visited the prisoners in the cepo. To these poor Indians he administered sundry cuts with a whip, laughing all the time. This he did for morning sport. [. . .] a big black dog that was there jumped on the man or woman flogged and worried them. Bishop's statement was that the dook ‘took bits out of them.’ ” (P. 275.)

Alas, the details of one particularly grisly incident seem to have been lost to posterity. “Alejandro Vasquez, one of the most infamous of the ruffians referred to in the Hardenburg document [. . .] is charged by Collantes with revolting murders.” (P. 423.) The editor adds in a note on the same page: “See Hardenburg, op. cit., p. 262–63. The description of Vasquez's murder of three Indian women with sticks of wood was so disgusting that it was edited out of Collantes's statement.” Casement refers to “the dreadful series of murders perpetrated by Vasuqez” again on p. 255, but doesn't mention any details.

Occasionally the Indians tried to escape from the territory under the Company's control, but the Company employees didn't hesitate to organize expeditions that pursued them for days, even across the border and deep into Colombian territory if necessary. After such fugitives were captured and brought back: “The flogging administered to these ‘workers’ of the Company on arrival at Normand's house, kills this man. He is put into the cepo alongside the five others, all with bleeding backs and limbs, and there he dies within three days of receiving these lashes. His flesh, according to Lane, stinking and rotten — his wife and child alongside him, pinned like wicked animals with their feet in ironwood holds. God! what a state of things! And the human beast that did this is telling the Commission across the partition that he has not flogged for three years;” (p. 259). The enormity of Normand's hypocrisy truly defies comprehension; see p. 286 for more examples.

The Company chiefs and employees were also in the habit of expropriating Indian girls and women as domestic servants and concubines (p. 139). Some of them kept a whole entourage of wives, almost a ‘harem’ (pp. 161, 285, 321, 349).

Under the Company's regime, the Indian population was decreasing quickly. “Normand, Aguero, Fonseca, Montt, Jiménez, the two Rodriguez brothers and Martinengui, have between them, murdered several thousand of these unhappy beings. [. . .] Normand is again and again charged by the Barbados men with killing many hundreds. Leavine today said ‘over 500’, that he had seen 20 Indians killed in five days in Matanzas alone, and the dead bodies eaten by the dogs and stinking round the house, so that he could not eat his food.” (P. 424.) “Bruce yesterday actually said that, under the present system, the Indians would not last more than six years. I had said 10 years, and he said, ‘No, indeed not 6. When I came here the Company had 10,000 Indians, and it has nothing like that now.’ ” (P. 407.) But on p. 424 a very similar statement is attributed to Barnes, a member of the commission: “Barnes said the Indians of the Company numbered 10,000 when he came, and there were ‘nothing like it now’, and he has been here only two or three years at outside.”

Swindling

The Company was not only exploiting the Indians but also its own lower-level employees. For example, the company had promised these employees to provide them with food and medicine, but these provisions were so inadequate that they had to buy extra food, which they of course could not get anywhere but from the company's stores, at the company's absurdly inflated prices (pp. 209, 368). Casement, whom the company charged somewhat more reasonable prices (probably in an effort to gain his goodwill) for the things he bought from its stores, found that the Barbadoans were paying three times as much for the same things (p. 399). There was even cheating about the exchange rate: the contracts with the Barbadoans defined their wages in pounds, but they were paid in Peruvian sols, at an exchange rate of £1 = 10 sols instead of the correct 10½ (p. 352). At the same time, the chiefs of the stations earned hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds per year (pp. 227, 353, 365).

The Company could get supplies more cheaply by importing them directly from Europe, but instead it went through middlemen in Iquitos — middlemen who were, of course, connected to the Company chiefs, also from Iquitos (p. 454). The losers in this arrangement were the Company employees who had to pay higher prices for the supplies, and the shareholders in Britain for whom there was not much profit left after the swindlers in Peru had taken their share (p. 351). “How, on earth, anything is left over for the English shareholders after all these Peruvian parasites have had their thwack at the rubber, beats me.” (P. 443.) “[E]laborate swindling of everyone — Indians and shareholders” (p. 444).

Several illustrative examples with concrete numbers are mentioned on p. 444. “The fabrico at Occidente yielded about 12 tons brought in by 400 ‘workers’. They would get, perhaps, £30 to £25 [sic] worth of pots and pans, powder, fish hooks, a hammock or two, and other trash — if so much — for some £3,000 worth of rubber. [. . .] I reckon that if the total income be, say, £80,000 from rubber sold in London, at least £65,000 of that sum stops here to enrich this handful of thieves and murderers.” (P. 444.) “[T]he English Shareholders are being magnificently robbed. They have put up some £130,000 in cash, and Arana himself has 700,000 shares to exploit. In return they are the accomplices of a gang of thieves, who don't own a yard of land and exist on piracy and murder. Enough — I am sick of the whole thing” (p. 445).

Naively, one might imagine that the best measure for ending the abuse would be to dissolve the Company, but in fact that would be the worst thing that could happen to the Indians: “In place of a powerful British Company, able to insist on change, there would be left these desperadoes up country, who would ‘form themselves into companies’ — they would not go, they would unite, and make 20 companies of freebooters and robbers, where today only one existed.” (P. 131.)

Casement's Irishness

Casement's later involvement in the Irish revolutionary struggle was partly influenced by his experiences in the Congo and Putumayo journeys; and vice versa, the fact that he was an Irishman made him more sensitive to the plight of the oppressed inhabitants of the colonies. “Both in the Congo and Amazon, Casement had uncovered the horrors committed by the ‘White Man's civilization’. It turned him first into a virulent anti-imperialist and gradually into a full-blown revolutionary.” (P. 51. See also pp. 43, 184, 280.)

Casement dated his conversion to anti-imperialism to the time of his Congo investigation: “when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold — I found also myself — the incorrigible Irishman. [. . .] I realised then that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race — of a people once hunted themselves, whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men and whose estimate of life was not of something eternally to be appraised at its ‘market’ price.” (Letter to Alice Green, p. 280.)

Law and disorder

The law was clearly on the side of the Indians, but that wasn't of any use to them: “As to the laws — all these South American republics have excellent laws on paper — and no sense of equity in the man behind the paper. The laws are beautiful and simple books — a fool could turn the leaves and apply them — an honest fool would make an ideal judge./ But these people are not honest and are not fools, and to obtain justice in Peru or Brazil, or in any other of these Latin States of the New World one must bribe and lie, cheat and corrupt, terrify and threaten so that your justice won leaves the soil rank with misdeeds.” (P. 112.) An example from p. 301: David Cazes, a British trader in Iquitos, being in a dispute with the house of Arana, “the Supreme Court at Lima gave a decision in his favour and the Iquitos court has quashed it!”. “Tizon himself admitted to me only a few days ago [. . .] that in Peru ‘they had plenty of law and little justice’.” (P. 301.) “As Tizon said to me: ‘Peru has many inhabitants, but very few citizens’.” (P.nbsp;295.) And anyway, the Peruvian authorities had no presence in the Putumayo; the company could do whatever it wanted to (pp. 129, 158). “The true criminal is the government of Peru, far off, uncaring. Arana has been free to erect the individual acts of lawless squatters, Colombians and Peruvians, into a system of robbery under arms. The Government of Peru has stood by passive” (p. 278). “The position is really a hopeless one, because there is no good in the bulk of the people — only a very small handful have any morality or sense of truth or equity, quite a tiny group I should think. The Indians and Cholos [mestizos] are merely the servile class, the intermediate middle and upper classes, all rogues and blackquards in the main.” (P. 462.)

After returning from the Putumayo, Casement spoke to the Prefect in Iquitos, the head of the Peruvian administration there. The Prefect told him that the Peruvian government had only allowed him and the Company's commissioners to enter the Putumayo because it was sure that the claims of atrocities published by Hardenburg were all false. Otherwise they “would themselves have acted — the Government would have sent this Commission of Justice long ago!” (Pp. 461–2.) Casement rightly saw this for the gross hypocrisy it was. It may well be true that they would not have allowed Casement and the Company's Commission to act, but neither would the Peruvians have done anything by themselves.

Indians were treated like slaves not only in the areas of wilderness under the Company's control, but even in areas where the Peruvian administration was perfectly well established: “Reigada admits that there are plenty of Huitoto [the Indian tribe to which most of the victims of the Peruvian Amazon Company belonged] women and boys who have been sold in Iquitos, that there is always a market for them. I asked how it could be, since they could always claim their freedom, and he only laughed.” (P. 420.) “David Brown says there are heaps of Huitoto slaves here in Iquitos — any number, and they are sold.” (P. 477.)

Sardonic humour

Flogging was so widespread that the vast majority of Indians bore scars of it on their posterior parts (“90% of the Indians bore flogging marks, or, at any rate, had been flogged”, p. 151). “Some of the men were deeply graved with the trade marks of Arana Bros. across their bare buttocks, and the upper thighs” (p. 142). (The Arana brothers were founders of the company, which still largely remained under their control at the time.)

On the occasion of meeting Armando Normand (one of the most notorious of the Company's section chiefs) and his entourage: “Soon a couple of rifle shots announced the Paladine's approach. O'Donnell [another section chief] replied with a revolver volley. These knights of the road all salute each other.”

“Caoutchouc was first called ‘india rubber’ because it came from the Indies, and the earliest European use of it was to rub out or erase. It is now called India rubber because it rubs out or erases the Indians.” (P. 85.)

“Rubber clearly drops from the trees and exudes by its own force, conveys itself down the sodden forest tracks to the river steamer and finally ships itself to Europe and no one is amazed at the prodigy.” (P. 505. Here he is commenting on the fact that the British investors into the Peruvian Amazon Company clearly weren't very interested in how these ever larger quantities of rubber were being produced, and how come that labor formed such a small part of the company's expenses. I am reminded of the similar detail that set E. D. Morel on the path that eventually led to his great campaign against Leopold's rule in Congo: he observed ships in Antwerp, coming from the Congo loaded with ivory and rubber but then returning there not with trade goods but with guns, ammunition, and soldiers (King Leopold's Ghost pp. 1–2).

Miscellaneous

Apparently Britain had quite a strong presence and influence in many parts of South America, including the Amazon (pp. 47–8). “Britain was almost single-handedly responsible for arming both the Peruvian army and navy in the sixty-five years before the outbreak of the First World War” (p. 427). See also the editor's note on p. 465: “After Peru's humiliating defeat by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879–83) the Peruvian Corporation, a London-registered company, was set up in 1885 to lead the initiative to regenerate and reconstruct Peru. The Corporation assumed the responsibility of the republic's external debt of about £50 million and in return acquired most of the country's assets”.

Casement's observation on Brazil: “All are equally citizens of a great democratic federation modelled on a French precept (Liberty, Fraternity, Equality) rather than on the American definition of it (‘Blacks excluded’). In Brazil colour even counts for caste — Indian blood is prized, and I think rightly prized.” (P. 67.)

On the speed of communications: “if it becomes necessary to telegraph to you I gather this can be done via Lima (partly by Marconigram on the Upper Ucayali) at the cost of about a day and a half from Iquitos to London.” (P. 75.)

“Brazilian pay and money are among the absurdities of this earth.” (P. 90.) Casement mentions a ship's pilot that received £66 per month (p. 89; and £70 on p. 479 — “Nice pay for Mestizo Indian youths who can scarcely read or write”). For comparison, I remember the leading character in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying receiving £2 a week for his job in a bookstore; this was enough for him to rent a room in London and live rather modestly but without “real physical hardship” (ch. 3; and this was in the 1930s, so a 1910 pound would correspond to more than one 1930 pound due to inflation in the intervening years). Another datapoint: “in the 1890s this sum [£3 or £3.50] would have represented the income of a well-off middle-class household” (Ian Small's note in the Oxford 2005 edition of Wilde's De Profundis, p. 223; on p. 207 of the same book we learn that Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's friend and lover, had an allowance of £350 a year from his father — less than half as much as the pay of a Brazilian ship's pilot!). On p. 428 Casement complains about the prices of firewood in Brazil: “Here with the bigest world of firewood in existence, a forest literally without bounds, and dry wood for the mere felling of it at their doors, they asked us yesterday MR$ 2 per 1,000 faggots, roughly 1½ tons of firing. [. . .] almost exactly £6, or £4 a ton, rather more than coal is at Iquitos!”

The ‘n-word’, now so notorious, was apparently quite an ordinary word a hundred years ago: “A burly young ruffian — looks 26 or so, sturdy, with that far-off touch of the nigger you see in some of these Peruvian lower-grade men” (p. 188).

“As a matter of fact here is no offensive odour from these Indians' skins. They have the most wonderfully clean bodies considering their conditions, and when nude one can stand in the midst of a crowd of them in the hottest hour of the day without perceiving the slightest smell. Their skins are extraordinarily dry. I have not yet seen one perspire, although carrying a heavy load through the forest on an atrocious road.” (P. 238.) He suggests it may be because they get so little food: “They have nothing to exude at the pores, they are chips of this old forest, dried vegetable products rather than flesh and blood.” (Ibid.)

Casement was commendably skeptical about claims of cannibalism among the Indians: “The Indian, who is stout enough to resist enslavement, is always in the wrong, and therefore a ‘cannibal’./ I have assured Gielgud that some of the nicest people I know on the Congo were cannibals.” (P. 243. See also pp. 311, 337.)

“Every time he appeared in sight it was ‘Hiti, Hiti.’ — ‘Get on, get on’ and a volley of Bolas and Andokes I could not understand.” (P. 274. See also p. 278.) Oh, boy. In the hands of a good crank this little factoid could be the foundation of a splendid new pseudoscientific theory of the relationship between Slovenian and the languages of the Amazon Indians. It is even more absurd than the Venetic theory, and should therefore be even more successful :)

“Macedo says if it does not rain on 2nd November it will not rain for six weeks. A local St Swithin evidently.” (P. 344.) Mitchell adds in a footnote, after explaining the life and legend of of St Swithin: “if it rains on St Swithin's day, there will be rain for forty days.” Here in Slovenia the same thing is sometimes said about St Medardus. Apparently rules of this sort are known all over the world, but applied to different saints as needed by the local climate.

On the river Igara-Paraná (a tributary of the Putumayo) at the station of Ultimo Retiro: “The quantity of water now flowing over the fall is far greater than any river in Great Britain or in Ireland brings to the sea and yet there is only about one map of S. America even records its name as a tiny dot on the expanse of water that marks the Amazon.” (P. 370.)

At the time of Casement's travels in South America, a revolution had taken place in Portugal, sweeping away its monarchy and replacing it with a republic. To my surprise, Casement was strongly opposed to this: “A handful of educated rogues will rob 6,000,000 peasants more cleverly and to a bigger tune than any one-man show on earth. [. . .] She will now lose not only her revenues [. . .] but her African colonies. These have only been saved to her by the friendship of England. [. . .] The influence of the Portuguese crown secured European friendship — everyone ‘liked’ the Braganza monarchy. It was old, it was illustrious [. . .] All this friendly feeling will be dissipated to-day. No one will feel the slightest reverence or kindliness for a Portuguese republic run by a gang of half assassins, half card-sharpers.” (P. 395.) Regrettably undemocratic feelings! And anyway, Casement was badly wrong here — Portugal managed to hang on to her colonies into the 1970s, longer than most other colonial powers. He pours more bile on the Portuguese republic on p. 480, and reveals yet more undemocratic tendencies: “Portugal is less fit to be a republic than Ireland — an Egyptian republic would beat a Portuguese one [. . .] Leading Portuguese are not only robbers but also faineants — the poor people are simple, kind and brave — and as ignorant as the Egyptian fellaheen. An Irish republic, but better still an Irish state not a republic, if the Protestant and upper classes could be induced to join, would be a fine thing — but with the tenant farmer, the County Councillor and the Dublin Corporation in charge — ahem!”

An interesting animal is mentioned on p. 410, which Casement kept as a pet for a while: a chiviclis, which the editor's footnote explains as a “small rodent-like animal with a reddish-brown fur that looks a little like a cross between a guinea pig and a squirrel.” This sounds quite cute, but unfortunately I can't find any more information about it — Google does not find any mentions of ‘chiviclis’ on the web whatsoever. Unfortunately the editor doesn't mention the scientific name of that species. [2023 note: even now all occurrences of ‘chiviclis’ in Google seem to be connected to Casement's diary. A note in Roger Sawyer's Roger Casement's Diaries: 1910: The Black and the White (2010) says: “The word chiviclis has proved untraceable. It is probably a local Amerindian name for the chinchilla, a cavy-like rodent found in Peru.” (‘Cavy’ is a synonym for the guinea pig.)]

A better-known Amazonian mammal is the capybara, which is here spelt ‘capivara’. The editor's note on p. 426 says “the name means ‘master of the grasses’. [. . .] Casement possibly introduced the first pair to the Dublin zoo.”

“Thence on to the mouth of the Igara-paraná; I fancy there are no Indians, but heaps of rubber trees. But the trees without an Indian population to enslave are worthless to these hammock warriors. Tizon confessed to me three days ago that he was sure there was much more rubber in the land down towards the Putumayo, and on along its banks, but ‘no Indians’.” (Pp. 411–2). (‘Hammock warriors’ refers to the fact that the Company employees, even the lower-level ones, for the most part did absolutely no work by themselves, and whatever time they didn't spend brutalizing the Indians they spent lying in their hammocks.)

On the origin of the word ‘Putumayo’: “Lt Maw, in 1827, knew nothing of it as applied to the river, but heard it as a place and as a tribe of Indians. It is probably Quichua, and was doubtless first applied to the Indians of the upper waters, as mayo is the word for water or river in Quichua, I believe.” (P. 416.)

Casement notes that the natural conditions in that part of the Amazon could be great for agriculture if the settlers weren't all lured by the prospect of easy gain through exploiting the rubber (and the Indians): “These people might live in absolute clover, if they would only work. They do nothing but rubber. ‘The rubber pays for all’, just as in the South it is ‘coffee pays for all’. There everything needed is bought with money from coffee — here it is pretty much the same, except that even the things needed cannot be bought, so that the money goes in absurd tomfoolery and waste.” (P. 430.) This partly accounts for some of the ridiculous prices in Brazil that have already been mentioned above. “So this senseless rush for money goes on — and when they get it they have no notion of spending it, or making happy homes or pleasant lives. Iquitos is a pigsty and yet it gives the Peruvian government £300,000 a year in Customs dues, and not £2,000 are spent on any public need.” (P. 487.)

Among the examples of how the inhabitants of the rubber areas waste their money, he mentions “ladies from Poland” (p. 431). The editor adds in a footnote: “The reference is to the large number of Polish prostitutes in Manaos during the rubber boom. In March 1997 Manaos was once again denounced in the Brazilian press as a centre for child prostitution and child sex tourism.” (P. 431.)

There's a curious paragraph in praise of drink on pp. 453–4. “I told Reigada that the people who were not afraid to get drunk had conquered the world! — the English, Irish, Scotch, Teutons, and Northerners generally, while the sober races had failed! [. . .] When English gentlemen went to bed on their servants' backs, a drunken English cabinet had smashed France and conquered the world!” Now, don't get me wrong — I support, as a matter of principle, any form of hedonism whatsoever, including drinking, and I despise all who don't drink (including especially myself). But Casement's “homily on the virtues of drink v. sobriety” (as he calls it) is patently ridiculous. The Irish and the Scotch, to begin with, haven't conquered anything; they merely had the good fortune to be conquered by the English and were thereafter able to participate to some extent in England's own expansionist efforts. (The Scottish attempts at colonization were marked failures, especially the one in Panama.) Secondly, Casement doesn't prove that the drunken nations' successes are due to drink rather than some other factor (the drunken English cabinet, for example, probably benefited from the fact that the industrial revolution started in England a few decades sooner than elsewhere). Thirdly, I doubt that there really exist any genuinely “sober races” — perhaps in the muslim countries, but I'm doubtful even about them. Everywhere else, people, or at least the men, are taken to drinking. If you take any successful conquering nation, its members are bound to be fond of alcohol, just as they are bound to have two hands and two feet each.

The Company even interfered with Casement's efforts to have his films developed in Iquitos (p. 474).

The company's stations were often given fanciful names: “Found Mr Normand away at the other Station, where he lives, La China, named capriciously like Indostan, or Abisinia” (p. 254). A station named Urania is also mentioned once or twice, but I can't find the page numbers now. By the time Casement visited the Putumayo, Urania had already been abandoned, and it does not appear in the index of this book.

I did notice one small discrepancy between the Amazon Journal and Casement's report for Grey. At some point Casement and the commissioners spoke to a group of Indians and it turned out that all of them had been flogged, except for one of them, who was just a boy. This anecdote is mentioned here on p. 151, where the boy is “about 5 or 6 years” old; in the report for Gray (Black Diaries p. 248), all the other details match, but the boy is 12 years old.

Righteous indignation

The journal has a pleasant, readable style; as one would expect from a diary, it is direct and immediate, and usually relatively unadorned. But every now and then, Casement has a bout of righteous indignation and his style positively soars, leading to some of the most beautiful passages in the book. “Lizardo Arana tells me in Iquitos [. . .] he feels sure the result of my journey to the Putumayo will be more capital for the Company! Yes, more capital punishment if I had my way. I swear to God, I'd hang every one of the band of wretches with my own hands if I had the power, and do it with the greatest pleasure.” (P. 144.) “What is wanted here is a Hanging Commission with a gallows — not a Commission of botanists and commercial experts.” (P. 274.)

On pp. 179–81 there's a great rant against the Company's claims that its relationship with the Indians was commercial: the Company claimed that Indians obtain from it various articles of clothing as a form of advance payment, which they then work off in the next month or two by collecting rubber for the company. But in fact the Indians were not permitted to refuse the items, and their value was perhaps practically negligible compared to that of the rubber they had to bring in exchange. (For items that cost 3 or 4 shillings, the Company got £15 worth of rubber, p. 180, and £15 = 300 s.! See also the figures on p. 246, where the ratio is 40 to 1.) “Let me [. . .] ask [. . .] whether they wish, man by man, to take the cap and pants, or whatever the things are you give them, for a further supply of rubber, or whether they would prefer to be free of this obligation? It's a very simple test. If they are ‘free’ they have an absolute right to refuse your 3/- or 4/- worth of stuff, or whatever the goods may be. But do you ask them? You know you don't. You compel them without question asked or put, to take these things. [. . .] And then [. . .] you follow them up and intrude upon all their home life, and force them to bring you in rubber at a rate of exchange you prescribe mind, and if they don't satisfy you you flog them, as well nigh every male stern in the district can testify, and you challenge my condemnation of this thing, and say I argue from assumption.” (P. 180.)

“I said that it was all very well for Tizon to say I was his guest, or the Company's guest, I was really the wretched Indians' guest. They paid for all. [. . .] all came from their emaciated and half-starved, and well flagellated bodies. There is no getting away from it, we simply are the guests of a pirate stronghold, where Winchesters and stocks and whipping thongs, to say nothing of the appalling crimes in the background, take the place of trade goods, and a slavery without limit the place of commercial dealings.” (Pp. 161–2.)

“Alas! poor Peruvian, poor South American Indian! The world thinks the slave trade was killed a century ago! The worst form of slave trade and of slavery [. . .] has been in full swing here for 300 years until the dwindling remnant of a population once numbering millions, is now perishing at the doors of an English Company, under the lash, the chains, the bullet, the machete to give its shareholders a dividend.” (Pp. 248–9.)

See also the quote from pp. 294–5 above.

“The rubber at Atenas is done up in quite thin chorizos [bales] like the long sausages of a butcher's shop. It is the ‘true Putumayo sausage’ I am told. As a matter of fact it is. It is the entrails of a people.” (Pp. 320–1.)

The items given to the Indians as payment were also usually of a very poor quality. On buying some of them from a Company store, Casement comments: “I got some things in the store to-day, the greatest trash imaginable.” (P. 328).

A concise opinion of the Company: “all the scoundrels in Peru are at home here” (p. 332).

“Of course, there is no business about the whole concern, it is simply slaving on a big scale and the worst in the world. [. . .] it must always be borne in mind that the Indian is no party to the contract. He is compelled by brutal and wholly uncontrolled force” (p. 334). This is followed by undoubtedly one of the finest passages in the whole book, several paragraphs (pp. 334–5) seething with rage and giving an excellent summary of the Company's system in the Putumayo and its utter moral bankruptcy.

On hearing the news that Dr. Crippen, a man who had murdered his wife, was finally caught by the police, a case that had attracted much attention in the newspapers: “what a farce it seems — a whole world shaken by the pursuit of a man who killed his wife — and here are lots and lots of gentlemen I meet daily at dinner who not only kill their wives, but burn other people's wives alive — or cut their arms and legs off and pull the babies from their breasts to throw in the river or leave to starve in the forest — or dash their brains out against trees. Why should civilisation stand aghast at the crime of a Crippen and turn wearily away when the poor Indians of the Putumayo, or the Bantu of the Congo, turn bloodstained, appalling hands and terrified eyes to those who alone can aid?” (P. 373.)

“A forest Indian's village is far finer and more truly civilised than anything in Iquitos I have seen.” (P. 481.)

But perhaps the best example of this splendid, soaring style of indignation is Casement's concluding essay that he wrote during his return voyage from South America. It is in fact my favourite part of the book, and a very fitting conclusion to the whole sad story (pp. 497–506). The difference in style is immediately noticeable: most of the rest of the book is a diary, this essay (and a few other passages) is a composition, with sentences carefully constructed rather than thrown one after another just as they happened to appear in the writer's mind. Consider this passage about the colonization of Latin America: “Great sovereigns, dwelling in tranquil cities beautified with palaces and temples among the most enduring memorials of human architectural achievement, ruled over vast agglomerations of obedient subjects. The handfuls of white pirates who overthrew their rule and destroyed these ancient states and thrones did not come with wife and child and plough to inhabit and cultivate a new soil. From the first the problem to them was one of government, not of colonisation; differing in detail but primarily the same as that of the English in India or the Dutch in Java.” (P. 501.)

He contrasts the colonization of North and South America: “The Portuguese ‘colonist’ wanted slaves, the vice of exploitation was in the Mediterranean blood. Neither Spaniard nor Portuguese went to the New World to colonise as the men and women of northern Europe went to the New England lands and the valley of the Mississippi to dwell. The one went to found a people, the other to find a people.” (P. 500.) But I find it difficult to conclude from this alone that the Northern approach is preferable. In the end, hasn't more of the Indian culture and way of life survived in Latin America rather than in North America where it is squeezed into a handful of tiny reservations? And if, as a result of the Mediterranean blood, Latin America is not as industrialized and developed as North America, isn't that a great boon for its natural environment? In a really thoroughly developed country such as the U.S., every square inch of land that isn't part of a national park has long since been put to some economically productive use, ecology be damned.

“The avarice of that Carthaginian blood, so widely blended with the earlier Iberian, — a graft productive of the indifference to suffering and the callousness of pain which distinguish the Spanish from all other European peoples — pushed new Pizarros and new Orellanas further afield in search of an ever retreating El Dorado.” (P. 502.) This is another great rant, but I can't help feeling sorry for the poor Carthaginians — they just founded a handful of colonies on the coast of Spain, and they still get used as scapegoats more than 2300 years later... Why not blame the Celts, Romans, Visigoths, or Moors, all of whom probably contributed a lot more into the formation of Spain, both ethnically and culturally, than the Carthaginians? As for the latter, they are probably my favourite underdogs of the ancient Mediterranean. Everybody loves to hate them and think of them as some kind of monsters — a cruel, scheming, calculating, mercantile people taken to burning their children at the altars of their gods, crucifying their unsuccessful generals, and, horror of horrors, wearing rings in their noses. Sure, all of that is probably true, but try to see these things in a bit of perspective. You want a cruel, scheming people, greedy beyond any and all reasonable bounds? How about Rome, who unlike Carthage wasn't content to trade with people and establish the occasional colony here and there, but went relentlessly and mercilessly for annexation of territory after territory, allowing themselves to be stopped by nothing but their own incapacity to govern the massive empire they had agglomerated? Or take burning children at the altars — OK, so maybe the Carthaginians kept such old customs a couple of centuries longer than most of their Mediterranean neighbours (or, more likely if you ask me, they re-established them in their last years, when the dire prospect of imminent and utter defeat not unsurprisingly seemed to call for ever more drastic measures), but if you go just a bit farther back in time, you find practically everybody doing human sacrifice; and anyway, what is the Etruscan and Roman habit of gladiatorial combat following the funerals of important people, but human sacrifice in a different form? And as for crucifying a defeated general, not that I approve of that, but why is that so much worse than decimating whole legions? Or worse than crucifying people who are not defeated generals, but e.g. common criminals, or maybe prophets of slightly crazy new religions? And remember, by the way, that the Carthaginians didn't really have the option of taking it out on their soldiers — these were mostly mercenaries. Decimate those, and how will you get them to sign up the next time you need them? No wonder they preferred to go for the generals instead. Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that the Carthaginians weren't really all that bad — they weren't really significantly worse than many of their contemporaries in their part of the world. They just suffer from bad press, hardly surprising since we mostly know them from the writings of their enemies, the Greeks and Romans (I suspect that Flaubert's Salammbo may also have something to do with it, but I haven't yet read it so I'll withhold my opinion for now). And, ultimately, how can you help admiring them? Their history is one of the greatest tragic stories of the ancient Mediterranean; defeated in war after bloody, exhausting war, they picked themselves up again and again, until finally an exasperated Rome could think of no better solution than to demolish their city utterly and sow salt over the site. Has Rome ever had another rival like that? The Punic wars show imperialism in all its dark, nasty brutality — it is not like an elegant clash of arms between two gallant opponents, but more like a joyless life-or-death struggle in which you end up holding your hand over the other person's mouth and nose until you are sure you can no longer feel their pulse.

“But the crime is not alone that of Spaniard and Peruvian. [. . .] Has our modern commercialism, our latter-day company promoting — whose motto would seem to be that a Director may pocket the proceeds without perceiving the process — no part in this enterprise of horror and shame? The Aranas [. . .] found English men and English finance prepared without question to accept their Putumayo ‘estates’ and their numerous native ‘labourers’ at a glance, a glance at the annually increasing output of rubbber. [. . .] How it was produced, out of what a hell of human suffering no one knew, no one asked, no one suspected. Can it be no one cared?” (P. 504—5.) This is a great example of why globalization is so bad — nobody cares very much about what sort of horrors are going on in some distant part of the word. That's why we can all profit from their suffering without losing any of our sleep in the process. If you were constrained to buy things produced by the factory in your own town, or grown by the farmer living in the next village, you would find it harder to be so callous and indifferent to the conditions they work in.

The Monroe doctrine

There are a few curious rants against the Monroe doctrine, i.e. the principle of U.S. foreign policy that opposed any intervention of European powers in the American continent(s). “If the only great power in America cannot do her duty, in a matter so vitally concerning America's honour, then the Greater Powers of the World must step in. [. . .] This blight in the forests of Peru and Bolivia would end to-morrow were it not for the Monroe Doctrine.” (Pp. 313–4. See also pp. 488 and 499.) This seems to me somewhat naive — it's true that the atrocities in the Putumayo were great, but I doubt that the European powers, whose hands were all dripping with blood of the victims of their own imperialism and colonial exploitation, would be in so much of a hurry to intervene in South America, in matters that didn't really concern them directly. Mitchell adds an interesting footnote on p. 313, saying that Teddy Roosevelt had extended the Monroe doctrine with the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’: “if a Latin American republic failed to respect its obligations to the Doctrine, the U.S. could intervene in order to prevent European intervention. The Corollary was denounced by several Latin American govenments as an expression of Yankee Imperialism.”

“If only the Monroe doctrine could be challenged by Germany, and successfully challenged, there would come for the hunted Indians and gentle beings of this Continent who have had 400 years of ‘Latin Civilisation’ to brood on.” (P. 373.) This enthusiasm about Germany, which also appears in a few other passages later in the book, is quite a mystery to me. Surely Germany is the last country you'd look to if you were interested in better treatment of natives. Latecomers to the scramble for colonies, they always acted as if they had a premonition that their time to play at imperialism would be over so soon — by the first world war — and as if they were in a hurry to squeeze into that relatively brief period and into their relatively few colonial possessions all the abuse and horrors that other great powers had been able to perpetrate at their leisure in their much greater colonial empires and over a period several decades longer than the one Germans had at their disposal. Here's the Kaiser, sending his troops to help supress the Boxer rebellion: “Should you encounter the enemy, [. . .] Prisoners will not be taken! Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, [. . .] may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.” (Speech in Bremerhaven, July 27, 1900.) And here's the notorious Vernichtungsbefehl issued by General von Trotha, leader of the campaign against the Hereros of Namibia: “Within the German borders, every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot.” And here's what Carl Peters, chief promoter of German imperial ambitions in East Africa, thought about its natives: “This ‘useless rabble,’ said he, should either be made to work for the whites by a system of forced labor [. . .] or be wiped out.” (From Sprague de Camp's Citadels of Mystery.) Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply that the other imperialist powers were innocent, and that the Germans were really that much worse (I'd say they were a bit worse, but it was just a difference in degree, not in kind), but nevertheless — given the well-documented track record of German colonialism, surely they are the very last power to whom you would look for help for the poor downtrodden Amazon Indians. I've no idea why Casement was so optimistic about Germany, unless he was by then so strongly pro-Irish and anti-British that he was enthusiastic about Germany simply because it was becoming the main rival and enemy of Britain. Anyway, seeing this enthusiasm makes me feel a little less surprised about the willingness of Casement and his fellow Irish leaders to try enlisting German support for their planned rising against Britain in 1916.

There are more examples of Casement's pro-German enthusiasm on pp. 433–4. “This mighty river, and far beyond its shore of this great continent, awaits the hand of civilization. Four hundred years of the Spaniard at its sources, and 300 years of the Portuguese at its mouth have turned it first into a hell, and then into a desert. No sight could be pleasanter than the flag of Teutonic civilization advancing into this wilderness. The Americans have got their part of America, and it will take them all their time to civilize themselves. Germany, with her 70,000,000 of virile men has much to do for mankind besides giving us music and military shows. Let loose her pent up energies in this Continent, and God help the rats who have gnawed at it so long.” The editor says that “Casement's support for Teutonic civilization as opposed to Latin or British colonization was a preference born of his increasing disillusionment with the British empire and his closer association with the movement for Irish independence. But in the times he lived he was not alone in holding such an opinion. [. . .] Nevertheless, Casement's view of German civilization was overly romantic.” (Pp. 434–5.)

Casement made only one exception in his criticism of Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America: “Casement sympathized greatly with the Jesuit cause and considered their missions as the only example of successful colonization in the Americas.” (P. 433.) The Indians in the missions were under the Jesuits' control but they were at least protected from being enslaved by the white settlers. However, the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil in the mid-18th century (editor's notes, p. 433). Casement also mentions approvingly an Augustinian mission in Peru (p. 446).

The publisher

I tried to find more information about the publisher, Anaconda Editions. The book says they have a home page at http://www.anaconda.win-uk.net/, but this seems to be defunct now. The web archive has copies of most of their pages from 1999–2002 (including the complete text of the introduction from this book, as well as of the 1910 black diary), and it seems that Casement's Amazon Journal was the only thing they published. Their pages seem to have remained completely unchanged over the period that's available in the archive; the last copy of their home page, from August 2002, still says “Announcing the publication of: ‘The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement’ ” — five years after the book was published — and announces their ambitious plans: “Anaconda Editions intends to publish books related to Latin America. These will include established classics and new titles, works in English and translations, covering the subcontinent from El Paso to Patagonia.” An alternative URL, equally defunct now, seems to have been http://www.pcug.co.uk/~anaconda/home.html (cited by this interesting article from March 2002). According to this credit report page, Anaconda Editions seems to have existed as a company into 2004, perhaps 2005. On ABE, I can find only two books with this imprint: apart from the Casement diaries, there's a 2005 dual-language book of poems by a Peruvian poet, Moises C. Florian. [2023 note: there are now several more books by the same publisher on ABE, the latest from 2020. The credit report page mentioned above is a dead link now (and not available in archive.org), but a similar page now suggests that the company is still active.]

The other publisher mentioned on p. 508, Lilliput Press, still exists, but doesn't seem to have any information about this book on their web site now. [2023 note: Lilliput Press still exists and currently has The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement in their online shop for the stiff price of 50 EUR. Meanwhile the book's namesake, amazon.com, is selling it for $20.49 and says the list price is $25. According to my logs, I paid the princely sum of £1.05 for my copy on eBay in 2005 (plus £4.95 for shipping). Ah, those were the days.]

The plan mentioned on p. 508 of this book, that “[t]he web-sites will also serve as a forum for debate on the subject and will include reviews and articles relevant to Casement and his humanitarian investigations” seems to have largely come to nothing.

I guess this is another melancholy lesson on the impermanence of the web (and especially the early web, and 1997 or thereabouts still counts as fairly early in my opinion) as a medium. After less than ten years, a few desolate ruins left in the web archive are all that remains of their web site, but the printed book is still here with us and is likely to endure for decades, perhaps centuries, at least in a few libraries. Publishers go out of business, web sites disappear, but the humble printed volume can sit quietly on its shelf indefinitely.

Conclusion

This is a splendid book, big and full of interesting things. Casement's Amazon journal, due to its immediacy and its chronological organization, was more pleasant to read than his much shorter and more tightened-up report to Grey (as published e.g. in the 1959 Black Diaries), and certainly a lot more than the ridiculously terse and largely pointless black diary from the same period. Mitchell, the editor, did a wonderful job and provided lots of interesting notes. If I understand correctly, the opinion in the more recent years seems to have leant away from his belief that the black diaries are a forgery, and in favour of their being authentic, but I can't really comment on that now — I hope I'll eventually read some of the more recent books on this subject. Even if Mitchell was wrong about the diaries being a forgery, his arguments are interesting and worth reading, and most of his notes and comments in this book deal with other subjects anyway and are therefore interesting regardless of the diaries controversy. The Putumayo atrocities are now just a little-known historical footnote, but they deserve to be better known. When we think of colonialism in the 19th and early 20th century, we usually think of Africa and Asia; but for South America, we are apt to forget that it wasn't all over in the 16th century.

ToRead:

• Angus Mitchell (ed.): Sir Roger Casement's Heart of Darkness: the 1911 Documents. Dublin: The Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2003. (ISBN: 1874280983). The back flap here in Amazon Journal refers to it as a “companion volume”, intended to contain documents about Casement's second voyage up the Amazon in 1911. Apparently it's quite a hefty volume — xlviii + 816 pages according to the publisher's website. It's a pity that Mitchell had to find a different publisher for this second book — most of the books published by the IMC seem to be quite expensive, and this one costs €75. [2023 note: I am pleasantly surprised to see that the book is still available for the same price as in 2006.]
   
• W. E. Hardenburg: The Putumayo, the Devil's Paradise. T. Fisher Unwin, 1912. Unfortunately this book seems to be scarce and expensive. Currently I saw none on ABE, and only one on Bookfinder, priced £248 :-( [2023 note: I ended up buying it for £45 on ebay in 2008. In any case, scans of it are also available on archive.org, and an e-text on Project Gutenberg from 2014. I would have bought much fewer books in the 'aughts if I had known that the Internet Archive would emerge as such a fine resource for scanned old books.]
   
• Richard Collier: The River that God Forgot (1968). Fiction, based on Hardenburg's account (pp. 60, 510).
   
• Vicki Baum: The Weeping Wood (Michael Joseph 1945). Fiction, also about rubber (p. 511).
   
• H. S. Dickey: The Misadventures of a Tropical Medico (1929). “Casement's 1911 Amazon voyage has been rather briefly passed over by biographers as little more than a sexual odyssey — an officially sanctioned cruise along the harbour-fronts of Amazonia. But the evidence of an American Doctor, Herbert Spencer Dickey, who travelled with Casement during much of his 1911 Amazon trip, directly contradicts this view.” (P. 35.)
   
• Thomas Whiffen: The North-West Amazons. Notes of some months spent among Cannibal Tribes (Constable, 1915). “Though the book contained much of anthropological interest it avoided any mention of atrocities or of Whiffen's close and rather shady dealings with Arana involving both extortion and blackmail.” (P. 73.)
   
• Henry Lister Maw: Journal of a Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic crossing the Andes in the northern provinces of Peru, and descending the river Marañon or Amazon (John Murray, 1829). Maw travelled through the Amazon region in 1828 and was “shocked by the lot of the ‘civilized’ Indians he encountered in their state of slavery and degradation” (Mitchell's note, p. 202). But of course, this book is much too expensive for me. Currently there are two copies on ABE, for $874 and $960. [2023 note: I now see four copies costing from $500 to $750 (to say nothing of the fact that a dollar is worth rather less than in 2006); but more importantly, a good scan is now also available on archive.org.]
   
• Robin Furneaux: The Amazon: The Story of a Great River (1968). Is cited in a note on p. 225 as saying that “ ‘In his journey up the Amazon he [Casement] left a long trail of male conquests behind him, white, black and brown from Pará to Andokes.’ ” I'm not quite sure what sources he based this on; I don't remember anything of that sort from the 1910 black diary (as published in the 1959 book by Singleton-Gates and Girodias), where whatever ‘conquests’ there are are largely in the more ‘civilized’ coastal parts of Brazil, not in the wilderness up the Amazon.
   
• Tony Morrison: Lizzie: A Victorian Lady's Amazon Adventure (1985). Mentioned in the editor's note on p. 245 in relation to an early Irish-Peruvian rubber baron, Carlos Fitzcarraldo (Fitzgerald).
   
• Barbara Weinstein: The Amazon Rubber Boom (1850–1920) (1983). Mentioned on pp. 322, 508.
   
• Herbert Ward: Five Years with the Cannibals (London, 1890) and A Voice from the Congo (London, 1910). Ward was a friend of Casement's from his days in the Congo (p. 333).
   
• John Hemming: Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (1978) and Amazon Frontiers — The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (1987). Mentioned on p. 509. [2023 note: together with his Die If You Must (2004), these books constitute a “three-volume, 2100-page history of Brazilian Indians and five centuries of exploration” (link).]
   
• John Yungjohann: White Gold: The Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon 1906–16 (Synergetic Press 1989). This is mentioned on p. 509 among a number of other books about South America written by British travellers during the Edwardian age.
   
• Rafael Karsten: The Civilization of the South American Indians — with special reference to magic and religion (Kegan Paul 1926). Mentioned on p. 510.
   
• “The Putumayo atrocities have been fictionalized in José Eustasio Rivera, La vorágine (1924, translated as The Vortex), considered the most important work of Colombian literature” until Marquez' Hundred Years of Solitude (p. 510).
   
• Sydney Paternoster: Lords of the Devil's Paradise (1913). This is not mentioned in the text, but cited in the text of one of the plates. Unfortunately I can't find this publication on ABE or Bookfinder. [2023 note: I see one copy for $125 on ABE now; at any rate, scans are also avilable on hathitrust.org.] According to this web page, Paternoster worked for the Truth magazine (the one that first published Hardenburg's articles).

[2023 note: I'm taking the opportunity to add a few more interesting items to the list:

• Jeffrey Dudgeon: Roger Casement: The Black Diaries, with a study of his background, sexuality, and Irish political life. 3rd, expanded edition (2019). I mentioned the first (2002) edition of this book in my post about the 1959 Olympia Press edition of the black diaries; but apparently Dudgeon has expanded the book by more than a hundred pages in subsequent editions. Unfortunately I already bought a copy of the first (2002) edition back in 2007, so I'm not going to buy another one of the third edition. At any rate, his book contains a diary by Casement that is not included in the 1959 edition and is apparently even more explicit than the ones in the 1959 edition. See also two reviews from telegraph.co.uk: one (archived), two (archived).
   
• Roger Sawyer: Roger Casement's Diaries: 1910: the Black and the White (1997). According to the preface of Sawyer's book, the 1910 black diary in it seems to be the same one as in the 1959 edition, but there it apparently “contained many serious errors of transcriptions” and was “riddled with misstatements and extraordinary mistakes”.
   
• Angus Mitchell: Roger Casement (2013). A short biography of Casement by the editor of the present volume. It seems to be part of 16 Lives, a series of biographies of important Irish figures.
   
• Angus Mitchell (ed.): One Bold Deed of Open Treason: The Berlin Diary of Roger Casement 1914–1916 (2016). Casement's diary from the time he spent in Germany trying to get support for what would eventually become the Easter Rising of 1916.
   
• Séamus Ó Síocháin and Michael O'Sullivan (eds.): The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement's Congo Report and 1903 Diary (2003).
   
• An interesting Guardian article from 2016 (the centennary of Casement's death) about Casement and particularly about Dudgeon's and Mitchell's books (notably they disagree about whether the black diaries are genuine or a forgery).]