Jordan Goodman,Verso.

Everyone knows something about Sir Roger Casement. Whether it is his emergence from a U-Boat in Tralee Bay just before the 1916 Easter Rising, his execution at Pentonville, his exposure of the genocidal brutality of King Leopold in the Congo or even the vicious campaign by the British establishment to destroy his reputation by smears before they hanged him; everyone knows something and most 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.

This 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 20^th Century in terse and well substantiated prose.

It is hard to read because it is almost beyond the capacity of the mind to accept the reality of the decades of horror that Arana and his family were responsible for.

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, in which he forced King Leopold of the Belgians to surrender his 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 stories of a horror beyond imagination that began to emerge from visitors, particularly the engineers Walter Hardenberg and Walter Perkins, of a living hell that had been created.

The native peoples of upper Amazonia had met their first Europeans at the end of the 19^th.Century. By the middle of the 20^th.Century the few who remained turned to abortifacients in an attempt to end their very tribal existence on earth. Race suicide was far better a prospect than that which the Europeans had wrought.

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 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 – they raped, flogged and burned the majority of an entire peoples. 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 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 Putumayor who gave his name to the scars that constant lashing ripped the skin with – 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 actually did seek to apply standards of civilisation and decency by negotiation and example.

There are 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 of the charges when they were finally laid and became politician of some standing in Peru. The extent of the blood on his hands is beyond calculation but he played the misunderstood capitalist bring the benefits of modernity to a Godless and backward race until he finally dies as recently as 1952.

Just as the brutal colonial Dutch employed platoons of Japanese executioners as there were 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 harvested rubber plantations in India and Malaya actually ended the economic rationale for the vast slaughterhouse that men made of the Putumayo but Sir Roger Casement’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 Julio Caesar 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 Casement’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 met the civilised European.