Kerry County Museum buys Roger Casement map

Kerry County Museum has paid more than €10,000 at auction to buy a Treasure Island-style map drawn by Sir Roger Casement to show where he had buried gold and other valuables after landing at Banna Strand on Good Friday 1916.

The map, and accompanying notes, kept by an agent in Britain’s MI5, went under the hammer at Chorley’s Auctioneers in Cheltenham, England on Tuesday with a top pre-sale estimate of £2,000 (€2,500). But, after what auctioneer Simon Chorley described as “frenzied bidding”, the hammer fell at £7,000 to an unnamed telephone bidder.

Yesterday, Kerry County Museum’s curator Helen O’Carroll confirmed that she had acquired the map and note for the museum’s collection with financial support from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

When the buyer’s premium is added to the hammer price, the cost, at current exchange rates, will be about €10,600.

She said: “It’s a lot of money but this is going to be with us long after the 1916 centenary.”

The map, which Casement drew at the insistence of his interrogators in Scotland Yard, will go on public view in an already-planned exhibition, Casement in Kerry, at the museum in Tralee to be opened by President Michael D Higgins on April 21st.

Gold and silver

The map shows that Casement had buried valuables including gold and silver “under some fern bracken and bramble” in a rath (fairy fort) close to Currahane Moat near Ardfert, Co Kerry, shortly after he disembarked from a German U-Boat on April 21st, 1916. He was later hanged for treason.

The accompanying note by Maj Frank Hall, the infamous MI5 agent code-named “Q”, reveals that Casement’s valuables were divided up among his interrogators, including two Royal Irish Constabulary officers in Kerry, Sgt Thomas Hearne and Constable Bernard Reilly, who received Casement’s money – £50 in gold and silver coins.