Iquitos 1910: Roger Casement and Alfred Russel Wallace on the Amazon

By William Bryant

Iquitos 1910 is based on the underground gay classic--Roger Casements description in his own of his voyage of investigation in the Putumayo region of the Amazon, with related passages on Alfred Russel Wallace who explored the same region in the mid 19th century. Memo Strozzi, aspiring writer and amateur entomologist, travels in the Amazon in search of Casement and Wallace, reaching Iquitos and later Tabatinga in Colombia where he is captured and gang raped by FARC guerrillas. Later, escaping, he makes his way up the Putumayo where he visits the old rubber stations. Iquitos 1910 also contains the Memos secret diaries, much like Casements in tone. This is a book of personal exploration, natural history, travel, eroticism and literary fun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465333476

William Bryant

William Bryant was born and grew up in Southern California. He has lived and worked in the Middle East since before the Gulf War. In 1991 he was on assignment with the Saudi Navy, based close to the Iraqi border—experiences extensively described in Dark Desert Hot River. Bryant has written biographies of Roger Casement and Alfred Russel Wallace as well as Ross, a novel based on the later T. E. Lawrence, parts of which appeared in Evergreen Review.

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Copyright © 2003 by William Bryant.

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Contents

SATYRS, NYMPHS & SCARABS

INTRODUCTION

ROGER CASEMENT DIES AND IS BORN: THE BACKGROUND

ROGER CASEMENT ON THE AMAZON

MEMO STROZZI BEGINS

HERBERT WALLACE ON THE AMAZON

WALT

ALFRED AND HERBERT

ATROCITIES IN PARADISE

IN SEARCH OF ROGER CASEMENT ON THE AMAZON

JUNE IN IQUITOS

JUNE IN IQUITOS

HOMER’S STORY

THE DEATH OF HERBERT WALLACE

ROGER CASEMENT ON THE LIBERAL

ROGER CASEMENT’S PUTUMAYO DIARIES

WALT, HOMER, HERBERT & HOPE

For T

SATYRS, NYMPHS & SCARABS

Introduction to the Introduction

Memo Strozzi explored the Amazon and the river towns for many months, following in the footsteps of Roger Casement and Alfred Russel Wallace. He later came to London where he continued research at the British Museum, the Public Record Office (conveniently near Kew Gardens), and the Linnean Society, the latter institution much more to his liking as an amateur entomologist. Memo not only gathered invaluable information on the life and activities of Roger Casement during his period on the Amazon, but compiled materials for The Birds of Paradise, my biography of Wallace.

Memo died in London on 2 May 1999, just two weeks short of his twenty-sixth birthday. He left the complete manuscript of TOO (The Beethoven Fallacy and Kandinsky’s Blunder, two short comic novels) as well as an autobiographical novel Pichi Gonzaga Storyteller and extensive notes for other works he would not live to complete.

Memo wrote my Introduction.

INTRODUCTION

Toward the end of 1996 I placed a classified ad for a rather specialized research assistant. It was a stab in the dark. The research was primarily to be based on Roger Casement, primarily during 1910-11 when he was in South America investigating the atrocities committed against the native rubber gatherers in the Putumayo. This project had temporarily derailed my study of Alfred Russel Wallace, the great Victorian naturalist, who fifty years before Casement had collected in the area. Since Casement and Wallace had visited much of the same places on the Amazon, I hoped to get on with both projects at the same time. I required a researcher with guts, exceptional intellect, and one who would work cheap. It was also essential that he have a deep interest in natural history as well as literature. A tall order indeed.

Wanted research assistant for assignment Amazon River and possible Congo for biography of Roger Casement. Male under 25 with literary ambitions, bi-lingual Spanish/English, preferably blond, open to new experiences. An interest in Victorian Science and Natural History desired.

My assistant would amass data, sightings, and impressions, register the life on the Amazon and the grubby river towns, filter out the bullshit and come home with the meat. I would be using the resources for only part of the biography of Roger Casement, but a key episode in his life. If things worked out, my assistant could work in Europe with me later. At the same time I would make use of much of the same material for my book on Alfred Russel Wallace [The Birds of Paradise]. Casement and Wallace had different agendas and were radically different personalities. Still, what my assistant came back with would serve to validate my theories concerning both men.

I received a couple of dozen replies to the ad, some absurd and imploring. Few were worth following up. One however was particularly interesting. Memo Strozzi answered from California, where he was working at a local library for a minimum wage. Memo was twenty-three. He was a writer—without the usual ambition and lust for fame—and an amateur bugger (his phrase), with a thing for beetles. His mother was American of Irish extraction, his father—who deserted the family when Memo was three—a Cuban immigrant, a Mestizo of Swiss heritage who was later murdered in Miami. Memo’s mother died of alcoholism in Mexico City when Memo was fifteen. By then he had been out of school for a year. He was bi-lingual. He spent most of his time on the street and in the public library, mad for books. His mother’s death came as no surprise. Well before this he was already on his own.

Memo included a snapshot with his letter. He was a beauty, blond with just a hint of brown in his skin. Although he was 23, he looked at least eight years younger—a rather depraved 15-yearold. He knew what was up.

We met in San Diego, where Memo was hunting beetles for what I afterwards found was an outstanding, if esoteric, collection. We came to an agreement immediately. Within a fortnight he was on his way to Lima and from there to Iquitos and the Putumayo.

ROGER CASEMENT DIES AND IS BORN: THE BACKGROUND

1

In 1916, Roger Casement arrived back home from Germany, where he had been recruiting—unsuccessfully—an Irish Brigade from prisoners of war to help in the uprising for Irish Independence that was planned for Easter Sunday.

He was arrested by the British and imprisoned in the Tower. They charged him with High Treason.

While Casement was in prison the British were destroying Dublin and slaughtering the Irish in the Easter Uprising which Casement had been trying desperately to call off, since the Germans had reneged on their aid.

The treason trial was an absurdity. It was charged that Roger Casement did unlawfully, maliciously and traitorously commit high treason without the realm of England in contempt of Our Sovereign Lord the King and his laws.

They hanged him, as they had intended to do from the first. The notorious Black Diaries, illegally confiscated by Scotland Yard from his London digs during his stay in Germany, were more than incidental in bringing about his death. Casement’s inept lawyer, a nervous wimp called Sergeant Sullivan (excused from continuing on the fourth day of the trial, on medical grounds), refused even to look at them and thought Casement had better hang than be involved in such filth.

It was widely believed that Casement was a very sick man. They said that his morals had grown worse over the years, a steady psychological degeneration. Medical experts differed. They said he was abnormal, but not insane.

It did not occur to them that in his maturity he might have been even less promiscuous than he had been in his youth, and that this was the miserable end of a fabulously normal existence.

The Negro Fellowship League in the United States begged for Casement’s pardon. William Randolph Hearst defended Casement and attacked the British. Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador in Washington, was alarmed and alerted the British government that the Hearst press was about to launch a campaign for Casement’s reprieve. On 11 October 1916 the British government banned the Hearst press from the use of the cables and mails—followed by a similar ban in France and in Canada. Reading a Hearst newspaper could get you a $5000 fine or up to five years in prison.

President Wilson, of Ulster Irish stock, was also apprized of Casement’s sexual anomalies, as were key figures in government and journalists. They refused to help. The Black Diaries were excerpted and handed around. The view of many was that no one with such habits deserved to live. The distinguished American lawyer, John Quinn, disagreed, and wryly noted the illegalities involved in the treason trial. He knew.

2

The Congo was Casement’s school. He went out to Africa in 1884 as a purser for a the Elder Dempster shipping line. His uncle, Edward Bannister, was in charge of the West African operations of the line.

Roger began in the Elder Dempster offices. These were on the docks in Liverpool. He was supposed to learn the business. He was in his teens.

Chores in the offices of the Elder Dempster Line were deadly: lists of cargo, schedules of arrivals and departures. In his spare time Roger sat on the warm docks and dreamed. The dreams were not all of exploration.

The docks were fanciful places. The warehouses were dark and smelled of mysterious goods. Beautiful men worked in shipping, their bodies like wire and hemp. Once a Black from Oman, about 16, thin and loosely put together, stopped Roger in the evening near the offices. They chatted familiarly. The boy’s name was Salem. He worked on a British tub, recently arrived and soon to leave. They went for a drink together and then to the boy’s bunk, where Salem showed him numerous artifacts he had brought from home. It was hot in the bowels of the ship and you could hear the rat-like scurrying of feet. All of the sailors were African.

Salem walked him back along the heavy wharves. Beside a warehouse they stopped. A fire seemed to be starting across the water. Sounds of night birds came from below. They pissed together, crossing streams. When they were finished they waited expectantly in the darkness. Salem shook himself lightly. Then he grinned. Roger stared at him. The boy was hard, extremely long and beautifully circumcised. Then Salem raised his chin, asking. It was quiet, and there was a smell of feathers and fish and salt. Roger crouched, holding the Black boy by his hard little buttocks. They fit together beautifully. Salem’s body smelled of sweat and urine. Roger liked Salem very much. When it was finished ("Moya, moya," Salem warned) the boys kissed for a long time. The kisses were the best, Roger decided, the best of all because of how they tasted.

Roger scouted. The docks were hot. Soon he found a pair of young sailors recently in from West Africa, one a tall skinny Congolese, the other short and ugly but with a lovely smile. They hailed him. He knew what they wanted.

They chatted with Roger for a few minutes about the exotic countries they had visited and, laughing, of the bestial things they had done on board ship. The boys grew very excited, showing stiff as they talked. Finally, the tall skinny boy moved close and, in a soft voice, asked. As he did so he reached out and caressed Roger’s behind. Roger agreed at once. The other kept an eye out while his friend, without preliminary, went in deep. Pausing, he asked a question, whispered into Roger’s ear. Yes, Roger said, oh yes please. Roger liked it very much once the pain had stopped. When the first one was finished—"Bismillah," he said as he wiped himself—the second boy, laughing, plunged in. Roger enjoyed him even more. The African boys were astonishing.

Roger fell into it naturally. He watched for the subtle signs of wanting. Men often exhibited their erections down the left or right leg, fingering themselves enticingly. They also showed themselves off in the pissing place. They would get hard and ask him—nodding at their stiff organs, without speaking—or draw his hand to them so he could feel how big they were. The sailors of all races prided themselves on their size. Roger was not afraid, and grew to love the extremes, making notes of measurements in his secret diaries. Sometimes they would scout for a place, a cubicle in a warehouse, an aisle between bales, the darkness behind an open door, where they could strip him naked. He was a slim and very lovely boy, and none of them, no matter how enormous or malformed, were too much for him. He strolled the streets searching. More often though he went to the urinals and simply waited. Men would come in and, pausing, smile meaningfully at him. Often they were ready when he arrived. Some would whistle softly to him when he passed by and he would skip inside.

He soon lost his shyness. He did it, hungry for it (as they laughed), without much caring who watched. Sometimes two or three sailors would be lingering there and agree to take turns. Their bodies were hard, they were muscular and bony. Some of the boys had incredible amounts. One Irish seaman, afterwards, said he had been saving it up for three months. You’ll be having a baby in nine months, Robbie, he said with a grin, still showing hard under his dungarees.

By the time he was 19 he had done everything.

3

Uncle Edward was anxious for the young Roger Casement to learn the West Africa trade. That was where the Elder Dempster money came from. As a junior clerk, Roger was restless, he was always out on the docks. When the Bonny, a company ship trading with West Africa, advertised a need for a purser, Roger asked to be assigned. That was 1883, when he was almost 20. The crew of the ship was very young and totally depraved. The pay was bad but the food was worse. The captain was a drunk and a notorious sodomite.

Work aboard ship was boring, he soon found, under the cranky Captain Goodenough, often drunk and often demanding. There were compensations in the seamen, some of whom became good friends. During 1883 Roger made three round trips to Africa. All of the trips were full of emotional wreckage and drowned aspirations. The pandemonium of sailors’ lives, the insistent physical demands, the emotional chaos were debilitating. If clerical chores aboard ship were tedious the black seas in contrast were bliss. Africa was the best time of his life, he said. The boys in Cape Town were glorious and some of the Congolese were immense. When he got an offer from the African International Association, run by the Belgian King, Leopold II, he grasped at it as at a life raft. The vast Congo was opening up to him, the hot body of the Dark Continent.

As Casement later wrote to Edmund Morel, who had also worked for Elder Dempster, I went out to Africa in the service of the African International Association and stayed with them until 1888, when I left to go elephant shooting, with a friend of mine, Fred Puleston. (Casement had never learned to shoot a gun.) "Later that year I directed the advanced survey of the Congo Railway Company. In 1889 I returned home, an old Africa hand at the age of 25. In 1900 I was back out in the Congo. At the request of Major Parminter I organized the transport of the Lower Congo for the Belgian authorities. King Leopold again.

"The Congo was a military enclave, a fort. King Leopold had maneuvered world opinion shrewdly, including the innocents in the United States. The Berlin Conference dropped a vast territory into his hands; the other World Powers, for their part, also acquired land which they hoped would be profitable. Trade was the thing, for Britain, Belgium, France and Germany, the major players. The natives were nothing. Trade was all.

"I realized the facts. Young, only twenty, I wanted simply experience. Experience included the body, it was the body. My native boys were brilliant. We laughed a great deal in the forest. Yet matters were growing desperate: on the river whole communities had been destroyed. At first I ignored the seriousness of the situation. After all, one worked and work was one’s life, twenty-four hours of life. There were moments of desperate beauty.

"The blacks often acted as masters overseeing the work of the natives. They were the worst of the lot. The practice of employing native soldiers in isolated posts in the Congo never stopped. Usually, when death and new recruits allowed, Europeans would accompany all military contingents, and the force publique was rigorously disciplined. However, because of a shortage of white men black soldiers were allowed to work by themselves in remote outposts. The actions of these native overseers were often savage, out of control. Rubber was supreme in importance, followed by ivory, and the territory was scoured. The official whose district yielded the best, the largest supply, was certain of advancement. The Belgians became rich. Similar things were happening in Putumayo region in the Empire of Brazil.

"Leopold II was a constitutional monarch, like the Old Queen. He was, however, absolute monarch of his Domaine privé. He was the law, he could solicit the aid of Arab slavers, he could condone mutilation and murder, he could overlook immorality and bizarre sexual behavior. He plunged into debt—and the debts were repaid: by 1901 the Congo was generating 18 million francs from rubber alone. Brussels became a magnificent showplace, transformed by Congolese capital. The facades of the palaces were bathed in marble.

In the Congo the huts were blackened and dead, with pools of blood surrounding them.

"I had a job to do. I did my part and ignored what I must. By 1900, when I went out again, I was furiously into it. We were free in Africa to do as we liked. It was the best time of my life, I loved the jungle and the boys were beautiful. The men I admired, colleagues in the service like Fred Puleston and Herbert Ward, knew little or nothing about my private life. Perhaps they also had their secrets.

None of my friends, even the closest ones, could have dreamed that my life was richer than theirs, or that my body was adrift in waters they had never ventured upon. I kept my ‘real’ life apart. Everything else was boredom.

It is 1885, near Boma. Fred Puleston, holding his butterfly net, stands just inside the forest, staring at the darkness in which a slim white boy is squatting. The forest is silent. The white boy is immobile for a moment, his flesh phosphorescent. He seems to be adjusting something below him. Casement is squatting over Sami, one of his carriers, who lies full length on a bed of vegetable debris. Puleston smiles. He licks his glasses and polishes them. Then he puts them on again, as if contemplating a specimen to be netted.

Casement is imprinted forever in Puleston’s mind at precisely this moment. He has not seen the young Irishman before: this is a revelation, like the first time you see a blue Morpho or a bird of paradise or someone recently dead.

Sami holds himself at the root. Casement moves slowly down upon this plum-colored length until a soft bump of flesh against bone announces that he has taken him all. Casement says something. Sami grins. The air is green. A bird rustles above, in the cancerous bromeliads. The boys, Puleston notes, have an exquisite iridescent mottling like the metallic shimmer of butterflies. Then two black hands encircle Casement’s little rump. A sound of flesh smacking flesh quickly, of lips touching, subtle, nothing. Casement curves down, Sami curves up. The boys are dripping silver drops of sweat. Their movements are deft and in unison yet powerful. After a few minutes Casement cries out a warning. His hands crush the black boy’s strong shoulders.

His white sperm flashing against Sami’s black chest is a shock.

Puleston, laughing softly, turns.

4

Who could even imagine the horrors taking place in the Congo. King Leopold’s agents ripped entrails out, whacked off hands, sliced off ears and genitals, shot and shot and shot. The most significant import to the Congo during the nineties was bullets. Cap guns were the sport. When young girls had lost their charm as concubines or slaves, or merely sickened, they were executed—shot and dragged away for meat. The international press reported hideous facts. The King reacted violently to these accusations, smothering journalists with money so that they would report favorably of the situation in the Congo. The French were not much better I later found, though the Congolese fled to the French side wholesale.

The Congo was declared bankrupt in 1895. The Belgians however at this point resisted outright annexation. They arranged for another loan. During the Boer War the Belgians sided with the Boers, ironical considering King Leopold’s the family ties with Queen Victoria’s horde.

The Oil Rivers Protectorate was my real opportunity for advancement. I had been drifting like a raft on young waters, an adventurer for the most part. Now, in 1892, I became aware of the world of international commerce and the part I could play in it. I entered the Service there, not in a consular capacity—he wrote this to E. D. Morel later—but in a branch of the public service that was administered by the Foreign Office through consuls and vice-consuls. He decided in the Oil Rivers Protectorate what would, in his words, be his chance to set himself up in the world of exploration and trade. On 31 July 1892 he was appointed member of staff of the Survey Department. At twenty-eight I was Assistant Director-General of Customs at Old Calabar. He had a spacious and airy home, a kaffir boy, and time on his hands. The frontier—and Old Calabar was a frontier—was hot. General Claude MacDonald, he later remember, wrote a splendid report of my work. He said it would be difficult to find anyone in everyway more suited to the work of exploration. Exploration was based on Trade.

From the Customs Department, Roger went on to become General Service Manager. He was prime meat for a government career, and although he lacked university training he was bright and willing to go along with the ambitions of the Empire makers. Slavery was still common in Africa. Illicit sex was common, too, and sodomy, endemic in human societies.

Pederasty was beautifully managed, he said, in the Oil Rivers Protectorate. I spent three years there, and not a day passed that we did not enjoy the ultimate. His kaffir boy was named, ironically, Salem, and (like most of the officials in the area) Roger had paid the boy’s customary lobola, or bride-price. This meant that Salem played the passive role in intercourse. Gifts to the boys were common, and one thing would lead to another. Young black boys were wonderfully attune to sodomy and other acts of bestiality. Salem usually ejaculated during the act—which was generally frowned upon—but later I allowed the boy to enjoy himself more lavishly at my expense, Roger wrote, using his native imagination and often, as was often the custom, inviting other boys to take part. Salem certainly developed at an amazing velocity. The boy was huge, Roger noted dryly, "and he knew what to do. It was certainly not for me to teach sodomy to the blacks. They had been into it for centuries, the Zambezi being especially hot. The Chinese laborers popularized sodomy, and they imported, for their entertainment, bugger-boy actors to take part in their theatrical performances.

"I was in Africa during