Page 23 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 2 Winter 2013

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Pelicans (Pelecanidae)
Pelicans feed on fish, which the brown
species obtains by plunging into the
sea, the white by scooping in shallow
water. They are remarkably buoyant,
due to their thin, hollow bones and air
reservoirs that permeate and envelop
their bodies.
t is the brown variety that most intrigued the
author of these words, for it is native to the
West Indies, the province of James Bond of the Form
of 1918, distinguished ornithologist, writer, adventurer,
and the man whose name Ian Fleming surreptitiously
appropriated for his much-better-known, fictional spy.
Years before Fleming happened to notice the author’s
name on a favorite bird-watching book and immediately
purloined it, the real James Bond experienced a minor
encounter with espionage, when, just down from a
remote mountain during a solo ornithological expedi-
tion on Haiti during World War II, he was interrogated
by American intelligence agents about his encounter
with a German recluse. Apparently Bond’s motives
were purely bird-related, although his university,
Cambridge, was to soon be revealed as a viper’s nest
of Soviet double agents.
But more later on the Bond connection.
With an interest from age five in birds and butterflies,
our James Bond was inspired toward his career, accord-
ing to his obituary in The Auk, the journal of the American
Ornithologists’ Union, “by his rather dashing father,
Francis E. Bond, who led an expedition to the Orinoco
Delta on behalf of the ANSP [Academy of Natural
Sciences, Philadelphia] when James was 11.” Or his
influence could have been the wallpaper in his boyhood
bedroom, with its tropical bird motif.
From his wealthy Philadelphia home, young James
matriculated as a First Former at St. Paul’s School 101
years ago, an appropriate setting, described by Digby
Baltzell ’35, a fellow Philadelphian and popularizer of
the term WASP, as “the oldest, largest, and wealthiest
of the Episcopal Church boarding schools . . . in the tra-
dition of Harrow.” James’s brother, Francis Jr., followed
him to St. Paul’s one year later, in 1913.
After less than two years, however, and the death of
his mother, James and his brother were removed from
the School and taken to England by his restless father,
accompanied by a new stepmother. The young men
found themselves situated, inevitably, in Harrow School
in Northwest London. “Life at an English boarding school
was a torment for James at first,” writes David Contosta,
professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadel-
phia, in his biography of the naturalist, The Private Life
of James Bond.
“The English boys mocked his American accent, all the
while insisting America was a savage and uncouth land
filled with wild Indians and the dregs of European
society. The worst of this teasing stopped only after
Jim became so enraged that he grabbed a penknife
and stabbed one of his tormentors in the arm. From
then on, most of the boys respected him for standing
up and fighting back.”
From Harrow, Bond enrolled at Cambridge, where
he earned a degree in economics before returning to
Philadelphia to become a junior banker with the Penn-
sylvania Company. He was a tall, slender, attractive
young man, whose accent was, and remained, “an
amalgam of New England, British, and upper-class
Philadelphian,” according to the Auk obituary. Intel-
ligent and well educated, he was apparently destined
for success in finance, but, Contosta writes, “It was not
long before Jim came to despise his job. His work . . .
was boring and he missed spending several hours every
day tramping around the English countryside.”
In 1925, after a banking career of less than three
years, Bond began his true life’s work, accompanying
his friend Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee – who also
became a noted ornithologist – on an expedition for
the ANSP to South America, where in Brazil’s lower
Amazon, “they obtained many live animals, including
birds and snakes, as well as over 500 bird skins for
the Academy’s collections,” as reported by S. Dillon
Ripley ’32, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in
de Schauensee’s 1984 obituary.
In this first trip, Bond and de Schauensee seem to
have gathered their live specimens by purchasing them
from the Amazonian natives, selling them upon their
return to the States. The Philadelphia Zoo bought their
21-foot anaconda and several birds. “Although they
made no profit on the adventure,” recounts Contosta,
“they managed to break even – in addition to having a
good time.”
I