Everyone knows something about Sir Roger Casement. Whether it is his emergence from a U-Boat in Tralee Bay just before the Easter Rising in 1916, his execution at Pentonville, his exposure of the genocidal brutality of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo or the vicious campaign by the British establishment to destroy his reputation by smears before they hanged him; everyone knows something about him and most of us have an opinion.
This book concentrates on one aspect of Sir Roger’s life that has not been so thoroughly chronicled – his humanitarian work in the Putumayo region of the upper Amazon and the truly satanic figure of Julio Caesar Arana. It is not an easy book to read, for all that it is very well written and manages to cover one of the most horrific incidents of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is hard to read because it is almost beyond the capacity of the mind to accept the reality of the decades of horror for which Arana and his family were responsible.
This is a book that has much to say of the interminable border wars between Peru and Colombia. It tells of the history of the demand for rubber that led to the deaths of more than 30,000 of the Huitoto and other indigenous peoples of the Putumayo and it tells of what hell a man may make of paradise when he operates without sanction or conscience.
After Casement’s triumph in the Congo, where he forced Leopold to surrender a personal empire the size of Europe to his own government, he became an official of the Foreign Office and held consular rank. Although ever more moved by the situation in his own homeland of Ireland he was the man to react to the stories of horrors beyond imagination that began to emerge from visitors, particularly the engineers Walter Hardenberg and Walter Perkins. The stories that reached London told of a vast rain forest reached only by river in which the Arana family held absolute sway and under whose lash the indigenous peoples were forced to tap wild rubber trees and carry bales heavier than themselves to the riverside collection points where the material could be shipped on to – principally – Great Britain.
Arana and his brother Lizardo held more than the power of life and death over this tragic people. They mutilated and tortured for amusement – one example tells of a Huitoto man tied to a stake while pistoleros gambled on who could first shoot off his penis – and they raped, flogged and burned the majority of an entire people. Above all, they gave these people no hope at all of any possible betterment in their lives. From childhood they harvested the rubber until they died of exhaustion or torture. Unable to cultivate their own food, they became wholly dependent on those who would drive them to death and near extinction.
Jordan Goodman manages to maintain a clinical detachment but the volume and the variety of the horrors must have made him sleepless and the effect on Sir Roger Casement was dramatic. He agreed to gather evidence for a Parliamentary enquiry and worked with the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society to expose the sadistic dictator of the Putumayo who gave his name to the scars left by constant lashing on the skin – the mark of Arana.
There are heroes in this book. Casement, obviously, but also diligent and humanitarian MPs and consular officials who were determined to end this horror. Sir Edward Grey comes out well and the British Empire did seek to apply standards of civilisation and decency by negotiation and example.
And, of course, there are the villains. Arana looked like the devil and acted in a way that only a soul-less being could contemplate. He also presented himself in London to defend himself against charges when they were finally laid and became a politician of some standing in Peru.
The extent of the blood on his hands is beyond calculation but he played the misunderstood capitalist bringing the benefits of modernity to a godless and backward race until he finally died as recently as 1952.
Just as the brutal colonial Dutch employed platoons of Japanese executioners as there were just too many heads to cut off unaided, the Arana family employed Barbadians as enforcers and overseers. The fact that Barbados was part of the British Empire allowed the Foreign Office to intervene and – ultimately – to damn the dictators by public exposure and condemnation.
Goodman wryly points out that colonial rubber plantations in India and Malaya actually ended the economic rationale for the vast slaughterhouse that men made of the Putumayo but Sir Roger’s personal commitment and health destroying energy cannot be underestimated.
He was stripped of his knighthood on the night before his execution but he wore the jewel with more distinction and justification than did many others. This book tells of the horror of Arana but also of the nobility of spirit of a great humanitarian; Sir Roger Casement.
Coolly written, without emotion, it tells a terrible tale but should be read by anyone who knows only of the more often chronicled aspects of Sir Roger’s life. It should also be read as a belated tribute to the people of the Putumayo who lost their way of life and their very wish to live when they had the misfortune to come into contact with the civilised European they took to be the Devil.
