Book description
Séamas Ó Sìocháin has written what is the most voluminous biography
of Casement and a significant contribution to an understanding of his
life.' Frank Callinan, The Irish Times Roger Casement is among the
most written about and mythologized figures in Irish history, yet has
never, until now, been accorded such an impartial, full-scale
documentary biography. Séamas Ó Sìocháin gives us an enthralling book
equal to the expansive life of its subject. In its meticulous
scholarship it supersedes all previous work in the field. Drawing upon
an astonishing trove of official and personal sources, Ó Sìocháin
shows how what began as an ordinary career in the British consular
service became a singular crusade across three continents, against
exploitation, cruelty and injustice. Casement served in the Niger,
Mozambique, Angola and most momentously in the Congo, where he
witnessed the appalling crimes of the Belgian colonial system and
became a leading figure in the humanitarian campaign, eventually
successful, to force King Leopold II to surrender his personal control
of the colony. Casement later applied the same eye for injustice to
the depressingly similar exploitation of natives of the Putumayo, in
the upper reaches of the Amazon, where, as in the Congo, outsiders'
hunger for rubber created misery for native peoples. His growing
interest and involvement in Irish nationalism, culminating in his
attempts to aid the 1916 Rising and execution for treason, is
compellingly narrated. Ó Sìocháin analysis, which closely examines the
debate around Casement's controversial diaries, is also a model of
clarity and attention to detail. This definitive biography,
accompanied by additional maps and numerous photographs, many of them
rare and unseen, is an enduring monument to one of Ireland's most
enigmatic patriots of the past century.
