"This book, from the previously unpublished manuscript in the National Library of Ireland, is a valuable and deeply detailed edition of the diary kept by Casement during his journey into the South American rainforests. He had been sent by the British government to report on atrocities against tribal people while being forced to collect rubber in the Putumayo region in the north-west Amazon. Genocide among the Amazon Indians has continued, but external investigations of this kind have been rare. The way in which Roger Casement carried out his work is still relevant to all kinds of humanitarian and whistle-blowing activities. It is also a key text charting Casement's transition from observer to anti-imperial revolutionary and Irish independence leader, culminating in his execution by the British government in August 1916 after the Easter Rising."

"This book, from the previously unpublished manuscript in the National Library of Ireland, is a valuable and deeply detailed edition of the diary kept by Casement during his journey into the South American rainforests. He had been sent by the British government to report on atrocities against tribal people while being forced to collect rubber in the Putumayo region in the north-west Amazon. Genocide among the Amazon Indians has continued, but external investigations of this kind have been rare. The way in which Roger Casement carried out his work is still relevant to all kinds of humanitarian and whistle-blowing activities. It is also a key text charting Casement's transition from observer to anti-imperial revolutionary and Irish independence leader, culminating in his execution by the British government in August 1916 after the Easter Rising."

Executed by the British in 1916 for treason, Roger Casement is one of Ireland's most colorful, mythologized, and controversial figures. His infamous Black Diaries, with their homosexual materials, were famously published by the Olympia Press in a suspect edition in 1959. In 1903 when he was a British consul, he left his base on the Lower Congo River and made a Conrad-like journey through the "heart of darkness" regions of the Upper Congo to personally investigate reports of alleged atrocities (Conrad found Casement to be "most intelligent and sympathetic"). His subsequent report gained him fame by exposing the appalling cruelties of the colonial and commercial regime there, and was a crucial instrument in the British government's efforts to bring about change in King Leopold's Congo Free State. He later exposed similar exploitation in Niger, Mozambique, and South America. This carefully edited work brings together Casement's report, as well as his diary of that year, with previously excised names restored and explanatory notes provided. The editors provide an overview of Casement's career and a thorough historical background to these documents. Seamus O Siochain teaches at the National University of Ireland and is completing a major biography of Casement. Michael O'Sullivan was at Dublin City University until his death in 2002.