James Bond was born on this day in 1900 -- just not that James Bond. In 1953, in the midst of writing the first 007 novel, Casino Royale, author Ian Fleming picked up a copy of Birds of the West Indies, written by a renowned scientist named James Bond. And Fleming decided that James Bond would be the perfect name for an English spy: "brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine," as he explained in a letter to Bond's wife, Mary Fanning Wickham Bond, several years after the fact. "And so a second James Bond was born."
"In return, I can only offer you or James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purposes you may think fit," Fleming added. "Perhaps one day your husband will discover a particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion by calling it Ian Fleming." There's no record that Bond ever took Fleming up on that generous offer.
But the real James Bond led almost as adventurous a life as his fictional namesake, starting with an expedition to the Amazon with the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1925, and visited more than 100 Caribbean islands cataloging bird species and describing their habits and behavior. He collected specimens of 294 of the 300 known bird species in the Caribbean, leaving history to ponder the question of which Pokemon Go team he would have chosen. Bond never averted a nuclear war or thwarted a supervillain -- that we know of -- but he did prove that the bird species that now populate the islands of the Caribbean originally came from North America, not South America. He remains famous for that in academic circles, though the rest of the world knows his name for very different reasons.
The ornithologist Bond did eventually meet the writer who made his name a household word; Bond and his wife met Fleming at his home in Jamaica in 1964, where Fleming gave them a first British edition of his novel You Only Live Twice, signed "To the real James Bond from the thief of his identity." In 2008, years after Bond's death, the book sold at auction for $84,000, accompanied by a dust jacket from Birds of the West Indies.
And the producers of Die Another Day gave a couple of subtle nods to the man behind the iconic spy when 007 (Pierce Brosnan) flips through a copy of Birds of the West Indies, with the author's name conveniently unreadable. Later in the movie, Bond introduces himself to NSA agent Jinx Johnson (Halle Berry) as an ornithologist.
The ornithologist James Bond died on February 17, 1989; the spy James Bond lives on.
