Information recorded in his 1910 notebook and known only to Casement remained secret until 1914 when the notebook was found by British intelligence who subsequently exploited its potential as testimony to ‘authenticate’ the invented 1910 ‘black diary’.

In the National Library of Ireland there is a long, handwritten document which is the undisputed work of Casement. This is a detailed account of his day-to-day investigation into the Putumayo atrocities in the latter months of 1910. Today this document is called The Amazon Journal. In the UK National Archives there is a handwritten desk diary attributed to Casement, most of which is a partial account of the same period and which contains around 22 references that allude to homosexuality. This is named the Dollard diary after the Dublin stationery firm.

The precise relationship between these two documents has never been fully determined and even where it is proposed that both are Casement’s work, it remains to be demonstrated which was written first. This is necessary because those who hold that both are Casement’s work insist the Dollard was written first and that The Amazon Journal is a later version. The Amazon Journal consists of 128 handwritten, double-sided foolscap pages containing around 143,000 words and it is 10.22 times longer than the entries for the same period in the Dollard diary; it contains no compromising writings whatsoever. Its existence has caused difficulties for those who believe that the Dollard diary was written by Casement, not least because the principal reason for believing Casement wrote the Dollard is a resemblance in the handwriting. Whereas there is evidence that Casement wrote The Amazon Journal in 1910, there is no evidence to show that it was written after the Dollard. To ease those difficulties, it has been suggested that both diaries are genuine and that The Amazon Journal is a cleaned-up version of the Dollard. Therefore it is the inclusion in the Dollard of the contentious references that provides the only rationale for its existence. This, however, does not explain why anyone would write some 14,000 words merely to conserve 516 words of nonsense.

In the introduction to his 1997 book Roger Casement’s diaries: the black and the white, Roger Sawyer claims that the Dollard diary was written by Casement when in Peru in 1910; it was his original diary complete with compromising entries. At the same time Casement was also composing the much longer Amazon Journal and drawing upon the Dollard as source material or as an aide-mémoire. According to Sawyer, The Amazon Journal was intended as preliminary material for a book. This explains why it contains no compromising references; ‘evidently it was written in the hope that it would eventually form the basis of a published work and … it had the initial value of being a useful aide-mémoire for the official report … ; as he writes a fuller, official, version eventually intended to form the basis of a published work.’

Sawyer is rightly concerned with sequence because the first written seems to have a strong claim to authenticity. It is counter intuitive to compose a false document first and then compose an authentic document ten times longer expanding on most of the events in the false document. The supposed later Amazon Journal seems to share its undisputed authenticity with the supposed earlier document. Sawyer does not contest Casement’s authorship of the Journal but he does not explain why two diaries were supposedly written by one person to record the same period of time save to suggest that the diarist intended to record erotic experience in the Dollard. Yet this is unconvincing because only 3.6% of that diary might be described as alluding to erotic matters. It will therefore be necessary to expose how Sawyer deploys specious reasoning and manipulated chicanery but will reveal precisely how and when the Dollard diary with its fake erotic evidence was manufactured.

Sawyer’s book refers to entries in the Dollard diary as follows: ‘On three occasions in the Black Diary, the author seems to be alluding to the White Diary (4, 21, 29 October), and on the blotter facing 6-8 October he actually quotes from it.’ While it is true that these allusions to the Amazon Journal do appear in the Dollard, it is misleading to claim the blotter text quotes from The Amazon Journal; only two words of 79 on the Dollard blotter appear in The Amazon Journal. In fact Casement left a blank space in the Journal where that text was intended. That blank space is intentionally omitted in Sawyer’s published version of The Amazon Journal (which he also calls the White Diary). Indeed Sawyer’s entire Amazon Journal entry for 8 th October does not correspond to the version published by Angus Mitchell which is considered authoritative. The motive for that omission will soon become clear since it is consistent with Sawyer’s manipulation of the original sequence of events recorded in his published version of The Amazon Journal entry for 8th October.

Here is the text on the Dollard blotter which Sawyer counts as of great importance:

‘On 8th Oct at Ultimo Retiro. Measurements of one man & a woman. The man’s name Waiteka, ‘the fearless skeleton’ of my Diary, who denounced the ‘cepo’ Age about 35-40. Weight, say 120lbs. Height 5’6’’. Chest 35’’. Thigh 17’’. Calf 11 1/4 ‘’ – (his ankle in cepo just fitted.) Biceps 9 1/2 ‘’
Forearm 8’’ Stomach 32’’.

Woman Theorana by name. Age say 22 yrs. Weight 104. Height 4’7’’. Chest below breasts 31’’. Stomach 33’’. Thigh 19 3/4 ’’. Calf 12 1/4’’ . Biceps 9 1/2 ’’. Forearm 8’’.’

The ‘cepo’ is the wooden punishment stocks used to torture and kill the native slave gatherers of rubber. Since the details cited above seem authentic their provenance must be established. In The Amazon Journal, however, these details are not present and there is merely the phrase ‘I was smiling with pleasure that this fearless skeleton had found tongue …’ That the phrase ‘’the fearless skeleton’ of my Diary’ appears in the Dollard confirms that the diarist has seen The Amazon Journal but that fact does not identify the diarist who Sawyer alleges is Casement. The source of the detailed measurements in the Dollard is certainly Casement which fact appears to identify Casement as author not only of those measurements but also of the entire Dollard diary. That impression remains intact until the true source of the details is revealed which will expose the Dollard diary as another example of manufactured evidence.

Sawyer at once runs into contradiction. He claims that the Dollard entry for 8th October was written before the same-date entry in The Amazon Journal yet he asserts that the Dollard diarist found the fearless skeleton reference in the 8th October entry of The Amazon Journal. But that entry, according to his thesis, had yet to be written. In fact this contradiction of which Sawyer is quite unaware establishes definitively that The Amazon Journal was written before the Dollard. It entirely escapes Sawyer that ‘the fearless skeleton’ phrase in the Dollard could just as logically have been lifted from the already-written Amazon Journal. In addition, the Dollard diarist blunders again by citing the name ‘Waiteka’ which does not appear in The Amazon Journal entry. Indeed that name comes from a source known the diarist and to Sawyer and concealed by both. It is the reference to ‘my diary’ that betrays the 8th October Dollard entry as an embedded authenticating device. Close scrutiny demonstrates that it fails. The Dollard entry derives an illusory authenticity from the authentic Amazon Journal by identifying the source of the words ‘fearless skeleton’ in The Amazon Journal. The parasitical mechanism creates a deceptive correspondence between statements in both documents so that the authenticity of the statement in one document passes imperceptibly into the statement in another document. But the repetition of the same words in the second document does not demonstrate that one person wrote those words in both documents.

The Amazon Journal consists of loose foolscap sheets which require a stable support hence only written when circumstances permitted and mostly indoors at night. Thus his Amazon Journal account of events at the stocks was written some time after his investigation earlier that day in the company of commission members. The physical measurements taken at the stocks were certainly noted in writing at once since such detail could not be recalled by memory later. It is confirmed that Casement used notebooks when outdoors as he was on this day inspecting the stocks. That he intended to insert these details later in The Amazon Journal is demonstrated by the incomplete locution in The Amazon Journal entry – ‘Here are it’s measurements … His name was …’ Conspicuously, Sawyer does not publish this locution in his manipulated version of the White Diary entry for 8th October.

When the Dollard diarist refers to ‘the fearless skeleton of my Diary’ he is confirming that The Amazon Journal entry of 8 th October precedes the Dollard entry written on the blotter for 8th October. It is not clear when Casement wrote that 8 th October Amazon Journal entry but at the earliest it would have been late on the 8th . It follows that the Dollard diarist wrote ‘’the fearless skeleton’ of my Diary’ after 8th October. The fact that Casement did not include the measurements of the ‘fearless skeleton’ in The Amazon Journal can be explained by the information being already recorded in situ in the green notebook referred to in both The Amazon Journal and the Dollard diary.

Confirmation of Casement’s use of notebooks when on the move is found in the Casement-Roberts Correspondence at Rhodes House. Brit. Emp. S22. When responding to MP Charles Roberts on 27th January, 1913 Casement referred to The Amazon Journal as follows; “…I have not read it for two and a half years!… Also I have two notebooks in which are other portions of the diary and sometimes letters are to go in when I have left blanks…. The mass of writing I had to do…generally carried me far into the night. … you have the diary … If you get it well typed I can fill up from my other notebooks any discrepancies or omissions.” That correspondence also confirms that Roberts made two typed copies of The Amazon Journal he received from Casement and in June, 1913 one of these was given to Casement along with the original. Thus the manuscript plus the typed copy plus the notebooks were in Casement’s possession in mid 1913 and would later have been stored in his luggage either at Ebury Street or at Allison’s warehouse.

It is now widely accepted that Casement’s luggage was seized in late 1914 by either police orintelligence officers. Sawyer himself and many other forgery deniers have long accepted that the luggage was in police possession long before the 1916 arrest; Dudgeon seems to be the only exception. Therefore intelligence officers were able in 1914 to examine both the manuscript and typescript Amazon Journal plus the notebooks. The names and physical measurements in the notebook would have made little sense until cross checked with either version of the Amazon Journal in their possession and the full context understood. The intelligence officers would note the ‘fearless skeleton’ sentence in the Journal and would see that the names and measurements from the notebook had not been entered in the blank space reserved for them in the Journal. This was an unexpected prize; they had found genuine information in late 1914 from a unique source known only to them and which would remain known only to them. Those details from the notebook would eventually appear in the 1916 Dollard typescript and later in the manuscript ‘black diary’ where they would ‘authenticate’ both. Obviously none of Casement’s notebooks have survived; a great deal of ‘tell-tale’ Casement material was destroyed soon after the execution.

Like the other ‘black diaries’, the Dollard is now demonstrated to be a definitively proven forgery. Sawyer’s consistent dishonesty over several decades was masked by a veneer of old-world courtesy performed with self-effacing modesty to deceive the unwary. However, where Sawyer went wrong was that his determination to deceive readers made him overlook the fact that copying a Shakespeare quotation into one’s diary does not demonstrate that Shakespeare wrote the diary.

Paul R. Hyde. September 2025.