Conan Doyle

[StephanPickering@cs.com]

       "Hung", in English, is acceptable, as is "hanged" (cf. OED), being a past participle/past tense verb. Either way: Mr Casement was killed by the British government on the basis of fabricated documents. The research of  Seamas O Siochain (St. Patrick's College, Maynooth) has resulted in a prodigious manuscript, supplemented by the work of Eoin O Maille's team using the original diary manuscripts and detailed comparisons with manuscripts actually written by Mr Casement. The work of Angus Mitchell has been pivotal. So, too, the research of the anthropologist Michael Taussig on the extermination by governments in the Amazon against Brazil's Movimiento Sem-Terra.  One of those implicated in killing Mr Casement on 3 August 1916 was, to be sure, Basil Thomson (the "discoverer" of the diaries), who was dismissed in 1922 as head of Scotland Yard's CID!
 f!
!
or forgery. Together with Reginald Blinker, head of naval intelligence, Mr Thomson created the "diaries" purporting to show Casement having numerous gay lover. Why was Mr Casement murdered by a government? Together with E.D. Morel (Arthur Conan Doyle's "E.D. Malone" in The Lost World) and Mark Twain, Mr Casement lead an energetic campaign in exposing the genocide in the Congo and in the Amazon (from the latter area, Mr Casement sent ACD descriptions of the flora and geography as a paradigm for Maple White Land). In the Congo, it was Belgium; in the Amazon, the ruthless exploitation of the peoples was primarily perpetrated by the UK  government...and it was the UK government (who allowed millions of Irish to starve to death, and, during the Holocaust, thwarted efforts to save 6+ million Jews from slaughter by joining the US government in erecting "paper walls") who did not want their activities in the Amazon thoroughly exposed.In the first few years of the 20th ce!
nt!
!
ury, the UK controlled the Amazon rubber trade supplying tyres for automobiles. Since 1994, numerous documents re: Mr Casement have been released to the National Archive of Ireland and at the Kew Public Office, all being subjected to rigorous linguistic fingerprint analysis by Mr O Maille's team.
       What does this have to do with dinosaurs? Everything, in a way, because behind  ACD's novel were events which inspired him to transpose two heroic activists, Mr Casement and Mr Morel, into a world of dinosaurs and pterosaurs. It is a source of sadness for me that: 1) ACD's original manuscript at the New York Public Library is not being released for scholarship and publication (it is far longer than the subsequent book, much richer in character development); 2) that ACD never learned the "diaries" were fabrications (he had far too much faith in the Victorian government). Within a few years, Willis O'Brien would change dinosaur history with his scinematic adventures. But the heroic figure of Roger Casement/John Roxton needs to be illuminated (lost in the BBC's television adaptation of a few days ago, despite the Framework Store's remarkable CGI dinosaurs).
       Mahzel tov.