ROGER CASEMENT by Inglis, Brian

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. New York, Hard bound in dust jacket, US first Edition. VG/VG condition ( very minor corner bump) 448 pages. Illus. bibliog., index.----------------------------------Some part of every country's history is a haunted house, inhabited by ghosts who point accusing fingers and will not go away. Roger Casement is a ghost in England's haunted house.Casement three times achieved an international reputation, and the third time he died for it. Born near Dublin and brought up a Protestant, he first worked for Henry M. Stanley in the newly created Congo Free State, and in 1904 rocked the world with a report that showed how the Congo, far from being the model colony the Belgians claimed, was a ruthless and cruel commercial enterprise run solely for the profit of King Leopold III. Seven years later, Casement, by then an honored civil servant, filed another, more horrifying, report after a visit to the Upper Amazon. This blistering account of the maltreatment of native workers by the Peruvian Amazon Company, a British-based firm, caused a sensation in England.--------------------------------------------------Yet all along Casement had been vitally interested in his birthplace, and by 1913 most of his time and interest were devoted to Ireland. The following year, after war had broken out, he made a fatal choice: he went to Germany and secured a treaty giving, for the first time, formal recognition to Ireland's right of independent nationhood. Upon his return to Ireland in a U-boat in 1916, he was captured by the British, sentenced to death for treason, and hanged.