Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Now, rowing toward shore, Casement’s spirits began to lift. “I was for one brief spell happy and smiling once more,” he would tell his sister. “I was back in Ireland again.”

  A wave overturned the dingy as it neared the coastline. Casement and his companions managed to scramble back onboard, but by the time they reached the shore, Casement was too exhausted to continue.

  While the others went for help, Casement waited near the remains of a Roman fort. A police constable, noticing the dingy bobbing offshore, found Casement wandering close by and took him into custody. Casement told the authorities he was an English author out for a stroll, which did not entirely explain his brine-soaked clothing or the German train ticket in his pocket. Close questioning exposed his true identity, and Casement was taken under guard to London’s Scotland Yard.

  Branded a traitor, and awaiting a trial that would likely end in a death sentence, Roger Casement had few friends in the world.

  One of them, strangely enough, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  * * *

  Six years earlier, Conan Doyle had taken Roger Casement to see his play The Speckled Band in London. At the time, Casement was serving as His Majesty’s consul-general in Rio de Janeiro, but Conan Doyle had been more interested in the Belgian Congo, where Casement had spent more than twenty years in various consular posts. Through Casement, Conan Doyle had developed “a burning indignation” over atrocities against Congolese natives under the administration of Belgium’s King Leopold II. “We live in the presence of the greatest crime which has ever been committed in the history of the world,” Conan Doyle wrote at the time, “and yet we who not only could stop it but who are bound by our sworn oath to stop it do nothing.”

  For most Britons, the problems of the Congo seemed as remote and impenetrable as the territory itself. Vast and difficult to navigate, the region had remained largely unexplored until late in the nineteenth century. Henry Stanley—of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame—set out from Zanzibar in 1874 to trace the Congo River from its source down to the Atlantic. The three-year journey, which found Stanley in constant peril from tropical fevers, cannibals, and crocodiles, created a sensation in Europe. As the territory opened up to European trade, Leopold II commissioned Stanley to undertake further explorations and to establish administrative centers throughout the Congo. Roger Casement went out to take part in 1884, at the age of twenty.

  The following year, after Belgium’s territorial claims were recognized at the Conference of Berlin, King Leopold established the Congo Free State under his personal rule. The Berlin conference had put forward the aims of enforcing free trade, suppressing slavery, and insuring the rights and religious freedoms of the Congolese natives. Under Leopold’s reign, exactly the opposite came to pass. He exploited the region ruthlessly, particularly its valuable rubber plantations, and his agents resorted to torture and mutilation to enforce their control. “As I write, my study table is covered with photographs of these unhappy people,” Conan Doyle would recount. “They bear the marks of the tortures they have endured. Some have their feet lopped off, some their hands.”

  Roger Casement, horrified by these conditions, issued dozens of damning reports to the British government, and even made an appearance before Leopold himself. When reforms failed to materialize, Casement enlisted an Irish journalist named Edmund Dene Morel to create a protest movement, called the Congo Reform Association. In the hope of publicizing their campaign, the two men contacted a number of prominent writers, including Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Conrad, who had drawn at least some of his inspiration for The Heart of Darkness from Casement’s experiences, respectfully declined to take action, saying that he was “only a wretched novelist.” Kipling hesitated to speak out on the grounds that Germany might then “fold her protective wings round Belgium.” Conan Doyle, in typical fashion, grabbed the rudder with both hands. As in the cases of George Edalji and Oscar Slater, the injustice of the situation aroused his crusading instincts. He met with Edmund Morel in the summer of 1909 and offered to write a book based on the journalist’s findings. “I pitched all my voluminous scribblings at his head and he set himself to master every detail of a most complicated and protracted struggle,” Morel wrote. “Then, when he had probed the whole thing to the bottom, he shut himself up in his study and worked like a demon, hardly giving himself time to shave, as he put it. He wrote the book right off in a week.”

  The Crime of the Congo appeared toward the end of 1909 and Conan Doyle would claim it as a personal record—a 45,000-word book in only eight days. Even apart from the speed of composition, The Crime of the Congo is unique among his works for its raw, intense prose, especially in its unflinching descriptions of the brutalities visited upon the Congolese natives, which drew considerable criticism at the time. Conan Doyle quoted at length from eyewitness accounts, many of which dealt with the ruthless manner in which the unwilling natives were commanded to harvest rubber plants: “It is collected by force; the soldiers drive the people into the bush; if they will not go they are shot down, their left hands being cut off and taken as trophies to the Commissary. The soldiers do not care whom they shoot down, and they most often shoot poor, helpless women and harmless children. These hands—the hands of men, women and children—are placed in rows before the Commissary, who counts them to see the soldiers have not wasted the cartridges.”

  Conan Doyle felt strongly that his hard-edged reporting and the graphic photographs that accompanied it were absolutely necessary. “There are times,” he declared, “when violence is a duty.” With his usual energy, he rounded out his crusade with a letter-writing campaign and a lecture tour, which took him from Plymouth to Edinburgh.

  Conan Doyle’s success in the Congo campaign is difficult to measure. He fulfilled his aim of calling attention to the crisis, and caught the ear of Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, but he was only the latest in a series of would-be reformers. It is reasonable to suppose that the death of King Leopold, which occurred just as The Crime of the Congo appeared, had a greater influence in bringing about the eventual reforms. Edmund Morel had no doubt over the role Conan Doyle had played, however, and offered extravagant praise for the author’s ability to marshal public support. “Yet it was not his book—excellent as it was—nor his manly eloquence on the platform, nor the influence he wielded in rallying influential men to our cause, which helped us most,” Morel wrote. “It was just the fact that he was—Conan Doyle; and that he was with us.”

  Conan Doyle, for his part, had been equally impressed with Casement and Morel. When he began writing The Lost World a short time later, he based the character of Lord John Roxton, the sportsman-adventurer, on Casement. “I was the flail of the Lord up in those parts, I may tell you,” Roxton says, describing his private war on Peruvian slave traders. As Casement had by that time taken up his post in Peru and was investigating abuses of native labor by the Peruvian Amazon Company, the provenance was not hard to trace. By the same token, it did not take a Sherlock Holmes to uncover the similarities between Edward Dunn Malone, the Irish journalist who narrated The Lost World, and Edmund Dene Morel, the Irish journalist who alerted Conan Doyle to the Congo crisis.

  Conan Doyle kept up a detailed correspondence with Casement for the next few years. Casement sent background information from Peru that found its way into The Lost World, and Conan Doyle offered warm congratulations when Casement received a knighthood in 1911. Like Conan Doyle, Casement felt some reservations about the honor, worrying that the distinction had become a political sop rather than an expression of genuine merit. Unlike Conan Doyle, however, Casement had political motivations of his own, feeling that this British honor would compromise his growing ambitions for Irish independence. Casement had long been uncomfortable with the contradiction between his status as a British diplomat and his anti-imperialist leanings, a tension that became apparent even on his consular stationery, which he had modified to include the harp of Ireland
. “But there are many in Ireland will think of me as a traitor,” Casement wrote of his knighthood, “and when I think of that country, and of them, I feel I am.”

  Conan Doyle’s own views on the subject of Irish Home Rule had shifted in the years leading up to the war, which probably owed something to Casement’s influence. He attended a public conference on the subject in 1912, where he heard persuasive arguments in favor of Irish autonomy from George Bernard Shaw and Clement Shorter, the founder of the journals Tatler and Sphere. Conan Doyle had twice stood for Parliament as a Unionist candidate, and in support of that party’s platform he was on record as an opponent of Home Rule. Now, as he modified his position, he explained his change of heart to a Belfast newspaper: “It is true that I have twice contested Parliamentary seats as a Unionist, but on each occasion I very carefully defined my own position as regards Home Rule. That position, which I made stronger in 1906 than I did in 1900, was that Home Rule could only come with time, that it would only be safe with an altered economic condition and a gentler temper among the people, and above all after the local representative institutions already given had been adequately tested.”

  In Conan Doyle’s view, these conditions had all been satisfied. Home Rule, he reasoned, was certainly preferable to civil unrest, and he firmly believed that Ireland would always remain loyal to the British Empire in times of crisis.

  In this, Conan Doyle’s opinions differed sharply from those of Roger Casement, a fact that became more apparent as the conflict with Germany approached. In 1913, when Conan Doyle published his views on “Great Britain and the Next War” in the Fortnightly Review, he sent proofs of the article to Casement. If war broke out, Conan Doyle had written, Ireland’s heritage and strategic interests would compel her to put nationalist issues aside. “The Empire is in no sense an English thing,” he stated in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal. “Scotch and Irish have combined in the building of it, and have an equal pride and interest in its immense future.”

  Casement took exactly the opposite view, believing that if war came, Ireland must seize the opportunity to gain its freedom from English rule. Accordingly, he wrote a response to Conan Doyle’s article called “Ireland, Germany and the Next World War.” He argued that if Britain should lose the coming war, it would not be in Germany’s interest to “impoverish and depress” Ireland but rather to enhance its strength and importance as a “counterpoise” to any recovery of Britain’s naval strength. A strong Ireland, he continued, would “open the seaways of the world” for Germany. Casement sent his article to the Fortnightly Review as a rebuttal to Conan Doyle’s remarks, but the editors would agree to run it only if he signed his name. At the time, Casement’s commitments to the Foreign Service prohibited him from doing so. Instead, he published the article in the Irish Review, under a pseudonym.

  Casement soon retired from the Foreign Service, citing poor health, to devote himself fully to the cause of Irish independence. When the war came, he resolved to back his beliefs with action. “I am going, Please God!, to carry this fight much further than they think in Downing Street,” he wrote, “to an arbitrament they dread very much.” Casement met with leaders of the separatist Sinn Fein movement in Dublin, and traveled to New York in an attempt to rally additional support. By October 1914, he had decided that his goals could only be accomplished in Germany. British officials now had him under surveillance, so Casement shaved off his beard and washed his face in buttermilk in the belief that it would lighten his complexion. Then, using a borrowed American passport, he boarded a Norwegian ship bound for Germany.

  In later years, there would be an attempt to paint Casement as a rogue agent, a misguided, ineffective fanatic who acted completely on his own. Initially, however, he had the backing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. “Sir Roger Casement has authority to speak for and represent the Irish Revolutionary Party,” wrote John Devoy, a leader of the movement. Moreover, within three weeks of Casement’s arrival in Berlin, the German government issued an official statement of goodwill toward Ireland, authored by Casement himself: “The Imperial Government formally declares,” it read in part, “that under no circumstances would Germany invade Ireland with a view to its conquest or the overthrow of any native institutions in that country.”

  Back in England, Conan Doyle read press reports of Casement’s activities with disbelief and horror. For him, these actions confirmed something he had long suspected—Roger Casement had gone mad. “He was a man of fine character,” Conan Doyle told the Daily Chronicle one month after Casement’s arrival in Berlin, “and that he should in the full possession of his senses act as a traitor to the country which had employed and honoured him is inconceivable to anyone who knew him.… [I]n all our discussions I have never heard him say a word which was disloyal to Great Britain. He was a sick man, however, worn by tropical hardships, and he complained often of pains in his head. Last May I had letters from him from Ireland which seemed to me so wild that I expressed fears at the time as to the state of his nerves. I have no doubt that he is not in a normal state of mind, and that this unhappy escapade at Berlin is only an evidence of it.”

  If any further proof of Casement’s mental state were needed, Conan Doyle declared, one need look no further than the German proclamation. “On the face of it,” Conan Doyle said, “would any sane man accept an assurance about Ireland which had obviously been already broken about Belgium?”

  Weighed against Conan Doyle’s other activities at this time—his efforts to enlist, his wartime writings, his volunteer service—this sympathetic view toward Casement is hard to credit. In A Visit to Three Fronts, Conan Doyle wrote of conscientious objectors as “half-mad cranks whose absurd consciences prevented them from barring the way to the devil.” In Conan Doyle’s view, Roger Casement would be something considerably worse, a man who had in effect gone to the devil on his knees. Yet he found sympathy for the traitor where he had none for the objector.

  It made a pointed contrast to his feelings for Edmund Dene Morel, Casement’s partner in the Congo Reform Association. Morel was now active in a pacifist organization called the Union of Democratic Control, whose members urged an immediate end to the hostilities. Morel published a series of pamphlets arguing against reprisals for German air raids—a tactic Conan Doyle had denounced as “a policy of murder.” Morel’s actions led to charges of treason and a six-month jail term, but Conan Doyle would do nothing to help him. His views on the war, Conan Doyle said, had “destroyed the feelings which I had for him.” (Morel later managed to work his way back into public life, and one can imagine Conan Doyle’s annoyance when Morel succeeded where he himself had twice failed—in the general election of 1922, Morel won a seat in Parliament, defeating liberal candidate Winston Churchill.)

  Roger Casement knew little of events in Britain. In Germany, his mission soon ran aground over his plan to raise an Irish brigade from among the prisoners held in German camps. A number of officials dismissed the notion as absurd, but Casement cited a precedent from the Boer War in which a force of captured Irishmen were persuaded to switch allegiances and fight against the English.

  Casement’s hopes for a recurrence would not be realized. When Irish prisoners were shuttled to a separate camp in Limburg, the commandant received a polite message from their officers declaring that they would not want any concessions that were not shared by other prisoners. In addition to being Irishmen, the message asserted, “we have the honour to be British soldiers.” When Casement went to Limburg to address the prisoners directly, he was greeted by jeers and had to fend off attackers with his umbrella. In the end, Casement managed to rally only about fifty prisoners to his cause. The failure damaged his credibility with German officials, and by April 1916 he was on his way back to Ireland without the support he had hoped to muster.

  Following his arrest in Ireland, Casement faced a series of interrogators at Scotland Yard. “I accept all the consequences,” he told them. “All I ask you is to believe I have done nothing dishonour
able, which you will one day learn.” As questioning continued on Easter Monday, however, news came from Dublin of an armed insurrection by the Irish Republican Brotherhood—the Easter Rising that Casement had hoped to postpone. German involvement was suspected at once. “Germany plotted it,” declared John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party, “Germany organised it, Germany paid for it.” Up to this point, it had been possible to regard Casement as a harmless, somewhat quixotic figure. Now, in the light of the Easter Rising, he was transformed into a modern Benedict Arnold. In the Commons that afternoon, the prime minister was asked to give assurances that Casement would be taken out and “shot forthwith.”

  Conan Doyle must have agonized over the situation. In his eyes, Casement was the most loathsome of traitors, and his crimes seemed even worse when measured against his previous service to Britain. In addition, Conan Doyle must have felt a sense of personal betrayal. He had extended his friendship to Casement, given his time and energy to the Congo campaign, and paid tribute in The Lost World. “You have done so much good in your life,” Conan Doyle wrote to Casement only four years earlier, “that no shadow should in justice come near you.” By every conceivable measure, Casement had betrayed the feelings of honor, loyalty, and truthfulness that Conan Doyle held so dear. With the public calling for Casement’s head, a less assured man might have backed away from his earlier statement of sympathy. Instead, Conan Doyle began a campaign to spare Casement’s life.

  As with George Edalji and Oscar Slater, the plight of Roger Casement stirred Conan Doyle’s passions and set him on a crusade for justice. Once launched, these crusades were not easily derailed. In this case, however, the entire weight of Conan Doyle’s reasoning rested on a fairly dubious foundation—Casement’s supposed insanity.