. . . for 10 days. which is a bit longer than our other brief encounters but they were very busy men and did not spend much time together – and some of the time Casement was away escorting ‘a large lot of ivory’. The Dublin-born Casement (his family were Protestant, but his mother secretly baptised him as a Roman Catholic at the age of three) began working for colonial enterprises in the Congo in 1884, beginning with the Belgian King Leopold’s International Association, and by 1890 was operating a trading station at the port of Matadi. The Polish-born Conrad became a British national in 1886, the year he gained his master’s certificate. By 1890 he was an experienced seaman, and had been shipwrecked in Sumatra. Conrad was tough – he also survived shooting himself in the chest aged 21, in a failed suicide attempt.
Conrad and Casement liked each other. Conrad wrote in his diary: ‘Made the acquaintance of Mr Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances and now it becomes a positive piece of luck. Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic’ In the next few words, Conrad speaks of avoiding whites ‘as much as possible’, but this is no reflection on Casement: Conrad knew the dangers of false observation and later wrote to Casement cautioning him against accepting false tales of limb amputation as normal punishment among the ‘natives’). Casement described Conrad to a friend as ‘a charming man . . .subtle, kind and sympathetic’.
The year they met was also the year that Conrad served as mate on Congo steamer, a voyage that resulted years later in Heart of Darkness (1899) – and in the nightmare river trip in the Vietnam movie based on that novel, Apocalypse Now ( 1979).
What Happened Next
The two men later corresponded and briefly met once more, in 1903, when Casement had a ‘delightful day’ at Conrad’s home near Hythe. By then Conrad was one of Britain’s leading writers, while Casement was a career diplomat. Casement’s damning report into the horrors of Belgian administration in the Congo was published the following year in 1904 (Conrad had earlier, in the letter quoted above, advised Casement to reject any attempt at blaming atrocities on Congo customs) As quite a few Irish people of his class and caste did, Casement embraced the armed struggle of Irish Republicanism, and was executed by the British for treason in 1916. He had tried to recruit Irish POWs in Germany to fight the British; only a very few signed up, and a chastened Casement returned to Ireland, convinced the Rebellion would fail. He landed by German submarine, and was soon captured,
Conrad strongly disapproved of what he regarded as Casement’s treachery, but also wrote:’ I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. . .A creature of sheer temperament – a truly tragic personality’. Casement’s so-called ‘Black Diaries’, in which he described in some detail his homosexual activities, were long dismissed as a forgery in Ireland but are now widely acknowledged to be genuine.