Read Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica for Free Online Page A

for a white man in Jamaica was £1,000, while in England it was around £42. This wealth built a large proportion of Britain’s stately homes and contributed substantially to the capitalisation of the Industrial Revolution. So important was Jamaica to the Empire that its defence was prioritised over the suppression of the revolution in North America’s Thirteen Colonies.
    For 150 years after 1700, all the flat land around the future site of Goldeneye would have been planted in cane. The largest estate was Trinity, worked by over 1,000 slaves and consisting of about 5,000acres around Port Maria. The area’s reliable rainfall and proximity to the port made this ‘one of the island’s most desirable properties’. Adjacent to this estate was Frontier, with about 300 slaves working nearly 1,500 acres. To the west of Port Maria lay the plantation of Agualta Vale, owned by the eccentric Hibbert family. At its prime it consisted of 3,000 acres and nearly 1,000 slaves. In the late nineteenth century it would be sold to the Scottish physician Sir John Pringle.
    On the high ground in the interior of Fleming’s parish, near the border with St Catherine, Sir Charles Price, scion of one of Jamaica’s richest sugar families, had built his retreat, Decoy. Price, who could trace his family back to one of Cromwell’s invasion force, owned numerous properties, including jamaica’s most famous Great House, Rose Hall, as well as about 26,000 acres and some 1,300 slaves. Decoy, 2,000 feet up in the hills, provided an escape into cooler air. Here he entertained visitors from England, who could enjoy the surrounding park, grazed by imported fallow deer, in a fantastical imitation of the aristocracy at home. In front of the house was ‘a very fine piece of water, which in winter is commonly stocked with wild-duck and teal’, a visitor reported. Behind was an elegant garden, with numerous richly ornamented buildings and a triumphal arch.
    In fact Price was already heavily in debt by the 1770s, and the family’s fortune was gone by the next generation. The abolition of slavery, combined with natural disasters, endemic war and the planters’ greed, corruption and decadence, saw the industry rapidly decline during the nineteenth century. As the sugar price fell, production in Jamaica slumped from 100,000 tons in 1805 to a low of 5,000 tons just over a hundred years later. In the last half of the century, the number of sugar plantations shrank from more than 500 to just 77. In common with the rest of the island, sugar production in Fleming’s St Mary Parish collapsed after Emancipation. Trinity’s output halved in the ten years after 1838.
    This left the cane fields derelict and the countryside littered with decaying, squatted or abandoned Great Houses and sugar works, quickly reclaimed by vines and bush. Vandalism, hurricanes and fires contributed to the ruin, and almost every old house acquired its own ghost story. And each ruin acted as a visible, melancholy reminder that Jamaica’s heyday was a hundred years in the past.
    This romantic mood was memorably evoked at the beginning of Richard Hughes’s 1929 A High Wind in Jamaica: ‘ruined slaves’ quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses’, where ‘two old Miss Parkers’ had taken to their beds as their plantation house crumbled about them into ‘half-vegetable gloom’. Of course, many other authors writing about Jamaica similarly employed this image of romanticised decay, Fleming included. The melodramatic melancholy suited his temperament to a T. It was also linked to his respect for Jamaica’s ‘aristocracy’, the old families like the Havelocks, who are murdered for their property at the beginning of the short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’. For Fleming, the Havelocks are exemplary white Anglo-Jamaicans: they are tolerant of the clumsiness of their servants, appreciative of nature and snooty about Americans. Their own lands – 20,000 acres given to