Defending dignity from the Congo to Peru

THIS IS the story of the Amazon rubber trade in the early 20th century; the physical brutality that formed an integral part of the industry; and the efforts to publicise and eliminate these abuses. As bicycles became a form of mass transport in Europe and North America, and motor cars began to follow in their wake, demand for rubber boomed.

At the time, rubber was produced by tapping trees in the tropical jungles, but the indigenous populations of the Amazon and the Congo – who knew the whereabouts of the trees and how to tap them – were unwilling or unable to provide as much latex as the market needed, not least because these societies were largely self-sufficient. So rubber producers brought in migrant workers, who were often treated as semi-slaves, and they subjected the indigenous population to unspeakable tortures – beatings, rape, kidnapping women and children, amputating limbs – if they failed to produce a sufficient quota of latex.

By the early 20th century, the Amazon basin supplied 70 per cent of world rubber. The largest producer in the Peruvian jungle was Julio Cesar Arana – the man Goodman dubs “the devil”. A brutal and cunning man, he took maximum advantage of the fact that the Putamayo region – where he extracted rubber – was a disputed territory between Columbia and Peru. Arana was equally at home in London and Paris, and his family settled in Biarritz – when his wife was ill she was treated in a Swiss clinic. Keen to expand his business, in 1907 he successfully floated the Peruvian Amazon Company on the London Stock Exchange with a capital value of £1 million.

Arana’s ambition to create a modern global company left him open to international scrutiny. The abuses carried out by his company were first revealed by Walter Hardenberg – a young American railway worker who happened to wander into the area in 1907. When Hardenberg eventually left the Putamayo, he travelled to London, carrying testimonies of beatings, killings and amputations. These were reported in the magazine Truth under the heading “A British-Owned Congo”; a reference to Roger Casement and Edmund Morel’s earlier exposé of similar abuses in the Congo rubber industry.

As a result of this story, the British Foreign Office put pressure on the British directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company to investigate the conditions under which their firm operated. Although the membership of the commission was selected by the company, they agreed that the Foreign Office could add two members – one was Casement, then a British consular official who had been honoured for his investigative work in the Congo.

Casement’s report, which confirmed that physical abuse was integral to the operations of the Peruvian Amazon Company, was published in 1912 as a government paper attracting widespread attention in Britain and the USA. The debate that followed in the press, the pulpit and in Westminster put the spotlight on the company’s British directors, and a select committee of the House of Commons was established to investigate their responsibilities in respect of these abuses.

While they concluded that Arana alone was responsible for the atrocities, and that he had misled the British directors, it censured one director for knowing nothing about the company or its operations. By then the company had been liquidated and the only consequence for the British directors was some loss of reputation. Arana continued to export rubber, profiting from record prices during the 1914-18 War. The abuse of the Putamayo Indians only ended when Amazon rubber was superseded by rubber grown in plantations in Malaya.

In many respects, this is a very modern story – it concerns a company with global economic interests, recruiting migrant labourers, and with an international board of directors. The media play an important role in revealing the outrages; in addition to newspaper and magazine articles, there were photographs showing the destruction of native villages, and the marks and mutilations on victims’ bodies. Arana commissioned a film about the lives of the Putamayo Indians in an effort to refute Casement and Hardenberg’s allegations of maltreatment, but the negative was lost at sea in 1914 during an attack by a German U-boat.

Casement’s investigations in the Congo and the Putamayo were conducted in his capacity as British consul, because in both instances British subjects were employed: natives of the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in the Congo; Barbadians in the Amazon. This opened the way for reports that documented major abuses against native people for whom Britain had no legal responsibility. Once the reports were published, however, Britain’s ability (and perhaps will) to effect reform was negligible. The report of the select committee may have embarrassed the British directors, but it brought no benefits to the Putamayo Indians and it had no long-term impact on the responsibilities of directors in such circumstances.

Goodman says nothing about the Black Diaries . On Casement and Irish nationalism, he suggests that the Putamayo investigations might have intensified Casement’s identification with oppressed people. Casement referred to the offshore islands in Connemara, which were ravaged by typhus, as the “Irish Putamayo”, and he wrote about “the white Indians of Ireland”. His unhappy experience in the Putamayo strengthened his resolve to quit the consular service, leaving him free to devote his time to Irish nationalism and the Irish Volunteers.

The story of Casement’s Amazon expedition has already been told by his biographers, and volumes edited by Angus Mitchell have made Casement’s own accounts of the Amazon expedition and his correspondence with the Foreign Office available to readers. Goodman adds little that is new, and his prose style is rather banal, but this book should appeal to anyone who wants a detailed account of this phase of Casement’s life.