Bond and Barbados

Generations before today, Barbados was a special place to my family. My grandparents and their parents had been traveling from upstate New York to the Caribbean to a cottage when their arthritis got bad during the winters; for vacations and summers; for research of birds and plant species. In each of these instances, our family developed ties to the people and the places. From old corals that lived on our bookshelves to beautiful clothes that my mother had saved in her closet, my childhood was marked with elements of the shores for as long as I can remember. Reminiscing around the stories of vases full of tropical flowers to the monkeys to the wonderful friends left behind, the island became a source of history despite being only 169.5 miles squared, which is roughly the size of San Jose, California.

As a girl, my grandmother and mother took my sister and me to the island. Staying in a small beach-side hotel, we traveled around in a little rental car seeing the mountains, tropical forests and going into the grocery stores filled with colorful labels and bright tastes. My mother surprised my sister and myself with neon snorkels which fluoresced in the sunshine. We paddled around, cautiously keeping our eyes peeled for the barracuda that were lurking.

A young, just-turned sixteen Teresa with Nalu, a friend that we met on the island!

Upon the eve of my sixteenth birthday, I returned with my mother to Barbados. We stayed for a week. Despite feeling like ages ago, I remember my mother speaking French with several of the staff and showing me around the island to fly fish bakes. At our beachfront room, we mingled with the most amazing minds who were collecting in Barbados for their holiday. We encountered a young woman who had studied at Dickinson College, a pair of young women with impeccable and classic fashion senses who drifted about the island like something of dreams, and a pair of twins vacationing from England to the island. Each of them, bright, intelligent, complex characters in our story.

When tasked with the mission of creating a yearlong thesis project to encapsulate my three years of college study as well as retain my interest for the following year, I was on the phone with my mother. She had recently been looking for different ways to save the world during her and my father’s retirement. Having just finished watching the Netflix documentary, Chasing Coral, directed by Jeff Orloski, she was on a crusade to figure out a way to get a coral reef into our house and save at least a small portion of the oceans. She was downloading her worries that our sweet family island home of Barbados might be swallowed up with bleached coral seas. To me, building a coral reef seemed like a daunting task, but I knew that there would be something that I could do, as long as I could figure out what form my contribution could take.

At the genesis of my project, One Product, Two Worlds, my mother had just mailed me a copy of Ian Fleming’s (1908-1964) novel, Diamonds are Forever. To this day, she has always loved to highlight, underline, and tab pages in novels. Through her multiple annotations, she had highlighted the phrases where sea island cotton was mentioned. Most of Ian Fleming’s mentions of sea island cotton are brief and passing, where Bond:

“He had shaved, gargled with a sharp mouth-wash, and now, in a battered black and white dogtooth suit, dark blue Sea Island cotton shirt, and black silk knitted tie, he was walking softly, but not surreptitiously, along the corridor to the head of the stairs, the, square leather case in his left hand.” (Fleming, Moonraker)

In the same interest, Fleming proceeds to mention the specific sea island cotton by name throughout his successive novels including Diamonds are Forever, Dr No, The Man with the Golden Gun, and From Russia with Love. In each of these instances, the cotton represented the opulence and class of Bond throughout his adventures.

From the mention, a simple internet search led me to a constantly evolving, feathering tree of questions regarding sea island cotton. The rarest and finest quality in the world, I began to explore the rest of the novels to better understand how the author, Ian Fleming’s time as a navy man, built the textures and natural environments of the Caribbean into his novels.

Ian Fleming was a naval intelligence officer serving for the British during World War II. He traveled throughout the West Indies and Caribbean during this time, collecting inspiration for his novels during his service. While stationed in Jamaica at Golden Eye Resort, later renamed Fleming Villa, the author wrote all twelve James Bond books sitting at a desk made of mahoe wood in his master bedroom. Somewhere in history, a snare was tied between threads of history, as the villa now partly owned by Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, was helped to introduce Bob Marley, the reggae sensation to the world.

Fast forward through literate and cinematic history, Barry Nelson was cast as the first 007 man in 1954 in a television rendition of the Casino Royale novel. Dressed in a cigarette, sharp black tuxedo and concealed pistol, the TV special aired as a single episode adapted the novel to a brief adventure of an international super-agent. Fleming was paid $1,000 as credit for Charles Bennet’s adaptation of his novel and character (007James.com).

Image from the Super Rant

The Bond character was a fictional representation of a super spy, who operates under the MI6 Secret Intelligence Service. Each agent, assigned a code number unique to them, traveled around the world carrying out operations during the war. James Bond was surrounded by characters that Ian Fleming based on the people surrounding him. The foundation for the classic name, now renowned, came from a Caribbean influence from his travels. A keen birdwatcher, Bond encountered an ornithologist named James Bond from America. Authoring a field guide on ornithology and tropical aviators, the simple name was personified by the man who was built by Fleming in the successive years.

Ian Fleming told the New Yorker that “When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument… when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought, ``By God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard.” (New Yorker 21 April 1962). What is interesting about this characterization in retrospect: we never really get to know James Bond, despite having been in our hearts and history for so long. James Bond, whether played by Daniel Craig or Sean Connery, remains a sharp and cutting character with a blank space as a backstory. He acts and reacts to the world around him, but apart from his training and cunning is not otherwise noteworthy. His family history is not provided until the penultimate novel, fictionally developed. Some of the details remain disputed as they are not provided in the books, such as when could Bond have been born?

So, when developing my project, I wanted to track down the answers to these very questions. What other leads did Fleming weave into his stories? How does his blank slate character make him so compelling? How does the development of films past Fleming’s novels maintain ties to their simple origins on the calm beaches of the Caribbean? We will do our best to complete the mission of finding the answers to each of these questions and so many more.