Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (16 page)

Having reached Jamaica’s north coast, the captain left the ship to do some shopping. In his absence, the crew hit the liquor store and as a result were in no fit shape to prevent the yacht slipping its anchor in a sudden storm and smashing against the reef. According to Ann,
who described the event in a letter to her friend Lady Diana Cooper, it was ‘a genuine coral reef 18th century-print wreck, and only a hair’s breadth that no lives were lost’. She, Ian and Coward were ‘swigging martinis’ when the ‘door broke open and four of the USA’s richest citizens fell into the room snow white and dripping water … from then on it was a blissful blissful night – Noël was able to play “In Which We Serve”, Ian was Masterman Ready and I was “Admirable Crichton”. Noël and Ian rescued the crew while I poured disinfectant into … wounds and handed out rum to dull the pain, and then Noël took the prettiest sailors to the nearest hotel and rubbed them down with brandy – it was a small Mafeking night for the British.’

Less amusing for Ann was the sudden appearance of Rosamond Lehmann. Described by Stephen Spender as ‘one of the most beautiful women of her generation’, Lehmann had just finished a long romance with the poet Cecil Day-Lewis. According to Noël Coward, she now had her sights set on Fleming, who had invited her to Goldeneye clearly in the hope that she would arrive when he was alone there. But with Ann in residence, all hell broke loose, and eventually Fleming had to bribe Coward with his Leica camera to take Lehmann off his hands. Noël agreed as long as the tripod was thrown in as well. (Lehmann would later comment that Fleming ‘got off with women because he could not get on with them’. Coward similarly berated him for ‘the extremely unfeeling use to which he put his great attractions’, even going so far as to call him a ‘c***tease’.)

Ian had about two weeks on his own following Ann’s departure. By now he had explored most of the island and one of the places that most seized his imagination was Port Royal, which lay on an outcrop at the end of a narrow sand spit stretching nearly all the way across the mouth of Kingston Harbour. Here the English had built a fort within a year of their 1655 invasion of Jamaica. The deep, well-sheltered water on its landward side was perfect for a harbour and anchorage. Thus Port Royal became the home base of the Royal Navy in the West
Indies and the centre of naval operations in the region for the next two hundred years.

Fleming loved the navy for its clubbishness, the heroes of its exciting history, and its central role in British ‘greatness’ and the story of the Empire. It was a romantic passion that he would pass on to James Bond. In
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,
Bond reflects that he could listen to M’s yarns about the navy all day, ‘stories of battles, tornados, bizarre happenings, courts-martial, eccentric officers, neatly worded signals’. Fleming almost always dresses Bond in navy blue, and litters his books with naval references. In
Goldfinger,
Secret Service headquarters at night ‘gave you the impression of being in a battleship in harbour’. M has ‘a keen sailor’s face, with the clear, sharp sailor’s eyes’ and a ‘jaw [that] stuck out like the prow of a ship’. For
Bond, a naval association is a sure sign of someone with courage and integrity. In
Moonraker,
the heroine Gala Brand is trusted all the more for being named after a Royal Navy cruiser,
Galatea,
captained by her father. Similarly, in
Live and Let Die,
we know Bond likes and respects Jamaica station chief Strangways because he has ‘the sort of aquiline good looks that are associated with the bridges of destroyers’.

Fleming, who loved being called ‘the Commander’ by his Goldeneye staff, enjoyed the rich naval history of Jamaica and the West Indies, where sea power was absolutely critical. The heroic version of this history includes Admirals Benbow, who died in Port Royal after being wounded in naval action against the French in 1702, Vernon, who in November 1739 had captured Porto Bello in Panama, and Rodney, whose victory at the Battle of the Saints in April 1782 saved Jamaica from invasion.

But it is the ghost of Nelson that Fleming would have most enjoyed imagining at Port Royal. Nelson had been on the Jamaica station from 1777 to 1783 fighting the French, Spanish and Americans. In 1779, he was briefly in command of Port Royal’s Fort Charles, which still stands overlooking the entrance to Kingston Harbour, and boasts a plaque that reads: ‘In this place dwelt Horatio Nelson. You who tread his footprints remember his glory.’ Nelson returned again from 1784 to 1787, and was lucky to leave alive as disease wiped out many of his men. Fleming was very moved to see the memorial in St Peter’s Church in Port Royal to the twenty-five midshipmen who died there of yellow fever in 1787. Nelson returned to the West Indies for the last time in June 1805, chasing the French fleet that he would destroy at Trafalgar four months later.

Fleming idolised Nelson. A miniature of the Admiral he had owned since he was a boy was amongst his most treasured possessions. When M, writing Bond’s obituary at the beginning of
You Only Live Twice,
credits him with ‘what almost amounted to the “Nelson Touch” in moments of high emergency’, we know there can be no higher praise.
Fleming was even teased about his obsession: guests at Goldeneye nicknamed Violet ‘Hardy’ to Ian’s Nelson.

Port Royal is perhaps most famous, though, for Sir Henry Morgan, a figure frequently referenced in the Bond novels. Alongside the naval base grew a substantial town, at that time the second most populous in British America after Boston, and the busiest port. The English rulers of Jamaica sponsored privateers to harass enemy shipping. Greatest of these was Morgan, who in 1670 famously, with ‘divers barbarous acts’, looted and destroyed Panama City, one of the jewels of the Spanish empire. Prize cargoes enriched the Jamaican town along with copious smuggling and outright piracy, and soon there were 800 buildings crowded on to just sixty acres, much of it little more than sand. The streets were full of ‘debauched wild blades’ drinking, whoring and gambling. Half the premises were bars or brothels. One visitor described it as ‘now more rude and antic than e’er was Sodom’.

Then, on 7 June 1692, divine vengeance came in the form of a huge earthquake that liquefied the sand on which much of Port Royal stood. Within three minutes half the town had been plunged into the harbour. Two subsequent shocks left most buildings underwater, with only the tops of houses and the masts of sunken vessels showing above the surface. The next day, the harbour was choked with a thousand bodies.

So the Port Royal of Fleming’s time was much smaller than in its heyday, and he was fascinated by the idea of the houses, brothels and bars of the buccaneers lying like buried treasure under the water nearby. On one visit he brought his snorkel, mask and flippers and swam down to inspect the old brickwork. He was a keen supporter of archaeological efforts, which had produced a mass of pewter plates and goblets, as well as pub signs such as Black Dogg, Catt & Fiddle and Sign of Bacchus.

It was his uncle’s stories of ‘the buccaneers of Port Royal, the most wicked city in the world’ that had first interested Sir Harold Mitchell
in Jamaica. Their story had been told in Hollywood swashbucklers (including Errol Flynn’s breakthrough
Captain Blood
) and provided fuel for the ‘four-penny horrors’ that Fleming said he was raised on. Writing about Jamaica in 1947, Fleming told his readers with relish that the caverns and sinkholes on the island were ‘doubtless stuffed with pirate treasure including Sir Henry Morgan’s hoard’. Of course, the plot for his second Bond novel,
Live and Let Die,
would turn on the discovery of Morgan’s treasure trove on an island based on Cabritta Island in Port Maria Bay. But almost all of his stories would be riddled with references to pirates. They appealed to the Tory part of Fleming’s imagination: they were devil-take-the-hindmost, self-reliant and vigorous. Bond would have this spirit, of course. In
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,
Tracy tells him, ‘I wouldn’t love you if you weren’t a pirate.’ In
Casino Royale,
we learn that the scar on Bond’s cheek makes him look ‘piratical’. (Several women in Fleming’s life would note ‘the slightly piratical air given him by his broken nose’.) In the short story ‘Risico’, Bond’s underworld ally Enrico Colombo is a ‘greedy boisterous pirate’. Kerim Bey, Bond’s much-admired helper in
From Russia, with Love,
is described as an ‘exuberant shrewd pirate’. Kerim goes on to say about his fellow Turks: ‘All this pretence of democracy is killing them. They want some sultans and wars and rape and fun.’

Fleming would later pronounce that: ‘All history is sex and violence.’ For him, Jamaican history was exciting, colourful and exotic – elements epitomised by the exploits of the Maroons. The Maroons are descendants of a much-debated mixture of runaway slaves from the Spanish period, possible Taíno survivors, and escaped slaves from the British plantations. The mountainous interior where they built their villages proved excellent defensive territory. They fought two wars against British soldiers, in the 1730s and 1790s, both ending in bruised stalemate. In 1739, a deal was struck that the British would leave them alone in return for the Maroons handing
back any future slave escapees and assisting the white militia if threatened by invasion or slave revolt.

Fleming’s telling of the Maroon story, in a passage that would be omitted when he republished the
Horizon
article fifteen years later, was full of naïve wonder. In ‘a curious part of the island’, he writes, is the Cockpit Country, ‘known, the map says, by the name of Look Behind’. ‘The terrain has never been surveyed and, if you look at the map you will see a large white patch.’ Here are the Maroons, ‘Spanish negro inhabitants of this province’. Redcoats were sent to quell them, Fleming relates, but they were repulsed, and the Maroons set up their
own government, refusing allegiance to the Crown. ‘They still refuse it,’ he continues, ‘the only corner of the British Empire to do so.’

(As Fleming doesn’t seem to have been aware, there was a still a small Maroon community living on high ground at Scott’s Hall in Fleming’s parish of St Mary, only a few miles from Oracabessa.)

If this was all a bit Rider Haggard, then that was because Fleming’s Jamaica, or at least his first impressions of it, with the pirates, redcoats and admirals, machetes and ghost stories, awoke in him the adventure stories of his childhood. One of the few respites at Durnford prep school was on Sunday evenings, when the whole school would assemble in the hall to hear the headmaster’s wife read tales of exploration and derring-do. Her favourite for a long time was John Meade Falkner’s
Moonfleet,
a story of diamonds, smuggling, phantoms and shipwreck. Also enjoyed by the boys were
The Prisoner of Zenda,
and the Bulldog Drummond stories. Best of all for Fleming were Sax Rohmer’s novels, with fast-paced plots featuring the Yellow Peril’ archetype of the Chinese criminal genius. Fleming later told Raymond Chandler that he ‘was brought up on Dr Fu Manchu’.

Fleming’s own reading included John Buchan, Erskine Childers and E. Phillips Oppenheim, as well as Poe, Verne, Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson – influences that would soon become clear in Fleming’s own writing. Right from the beginning, his Bond books were seen as a modernisation of the ‘Clubland Heroes’ of the 1930s: a reviewer would christen his first novel,
Casino Royale,
‘supersonic John Buchan’.

But according to his friend John Pearson, Fleming’s all-time favourite author was the now-forgotten 1930s novelist Hugh Edwards. In 1963, Fleming tried to persuade his publisher Jonathan Cape to reissue Edwards’
All Night at Mr Staneyhursts,
a story set in the eighteenth century involving treasure, shipwreck and castaways. Cape only agreed on the condition that Fleming, by then at the height of his fame, write an introduction. In this, he outlined the appeal of Edwards’ novels:
their ‘romantic sexuality and the background of high life’. Edwards had served in the West India Regiment before the First World War, and Fleming suggested that his inspiration came from ‘seeing the West Indies in their last rip-roaring days, and his memories of the barbaric splendour – a compound of blood, champagne and pretty quadroons’.