The names of fictional characters are the fruit of the imagination of their creators, but the sources of inspiration for them can vary greatly. In 1953, when the British writer Ian Fleming needed to give a name to his character, a secret agent and commander of naval intelligence in Her Majesty’s service, for his novel Casino Royale, he did not choose a name at random, but borrowed it, without the author’s permission, from a bird guide he used. So it was that the American ornithologist James Bond (4 January 1900 – 14 February 1989) unsuspectingly saw his name eclipsed by that of the most famous fictional spy of all time.
James Bond, the real one, was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family. He was fascinated by nature as a child, as many children are, but more so since his father set off on an expedition to the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela when Bond was 11. His childhood and adolescence were marked by the death of his mother, his departure with his father to England, where Bond studied, and his subsequent return to the US. There he went to work in a bank, as befitted his position, but within a few years he left banking to turn his hobby into his career. In 1925, he joined an expedition to the Amazon led by the ornithologist and aristocrat Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee, under the auspices of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
As a result of this trip, Bond published his first papers from his position as curator of ornithology at the Academy. But the speciality to which he devoted his life was the avifauna of the Caribbean islands. He visited more than 100 islands, collected 294 of their 300 species and published more than a hundred books and scientific studies. His name designates an imaginary line separating the North American and South American origins of West Indian birds. Despite his wealthy background, he inherited little of his family’s fortune, so he travelled in precarious conditions, sailing from island to island on banana boats, with a canister of arsenic to preserve his collected specimens, a shotgun and a knife.
The birth of the mythical spy
In 1936 he published his field guide, Birds of the West Indies, which became the reference work on the subject, used by every bird enthusiast in the region. One of them was a former British naval intelligence officer named Ian Fleming, who owned a property in Jamaica called Goldeneye. The name, which also refers to a species of bird, was a reference to an operation Fleming had led during the Second World War, a plan to prevent the Nazi invasion of the British colony of Gibraltar in Spain, should the dictator Francisco Franco enter the war on the side of the Axis powers.
Shortly after his marriage, Fleming began writing a spy novel in Jamaica, for which he created a secret agent based on several real-life individuals he had met during his time in the military. The novel was entitled Casino Royale. And to name his character, Fleming did not use his imagination, but found the perfect name in the bird guide he had on his desk. Thus was born James Bond 007.
In 1961, the real Bond was reading a review of the latest edition of his guide in a London newspaper when he noticed something very strange: the references to the author talked about sex, handguns and other aspects far removed from his life. It was then that Bond discovered that his name had been usurped for a collection of books that were very popular in the UK, but still little known in the US. When his wife, the successful writer Mary Fanning Wickham Bond, wrote to Fleming to chastise him for using her husband’s name for that “rascal,” the author justified himself on the grounds that he did not want a flashy name for his character, but the opposite: “It struck me that this name, brief, unromantic and yet very masculine, was just what I needed.” In an interview with The New Yorker in 1962, Fleming confessed that he was looking for a normal name for “an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened,” and that James Bond was “the dullest name” he had ever heard.
To make amends, Fleming offered Mary Bond that her husband could use his name as he wished, even to christen “a particularly horrible species of bird”. He invited the Bonds to his home in Jamaica, and the meeting finally took place in 1964, during which Fleming presented the Bonds with a dedicated copy of his latest novel, You Only Live Twice. In his 1958 novel Dr. No, the writer referenced Bond’s ornithological work by placing a large bird sanctuary on the fictional Caribbean island where the story is set. And in the film Die Another Day (not based on a Fleming book), starring Pierce Brosnan, 007 arrives in Havana posing as an ornithologist with a copy of Bond’s field guide to birds.
The real Bond was never bothered, except on occasions, such as when officials thought his passport was forged, or bank tellers refused to cash his cheques, or young women phoned his home late at night asking for 007, to which his wife would reply: “Yes, James is here. But this is Pussy Galore [one of the heroines of the collection] and he’s busy now.”
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