‘There was a ship,’ quoth he

When Wordsworth and Coleridge were in their collaborative youth, walking one evening in 1797 on the Quantock Hills and contemplating something Gothic, Wordsworth suggested to Coleridge that the Ancient Mariner could be haunted by what he had just been reading about in Shelvocke’s Voyage Round the World — the killing of an albatross by a sailor rounding Cape Horn in 1719.

When Wordsworth and Coleridge were in their collaborative youth, walking one evening in 1797 on the Quantock Hills and contemplating something Gothic, Wordsworth suggested to Coleridge that the Ancient Mariner could be haunted by what he had just been reading about in Shelvocke’s Voyage Round the World — the killing of an albatross by a sailor rounding Cape Horn in 1719.

Robert Fowke’s The Real Ancient Mariner is a quest for this original of the Ancient Mariner, a man called Simon Hatley, who sailed in the era of buccaneering and privateering. This era coinciding with the rise of the novel, Hatley and his shipmates have some other literary connections. William Dampier, Woodes Rogers and Alexander Selkirk were known to Swift, who pretended Dampier was Gulliver’s cousin (for satirical purposes), and to Defoe, who copied their narratives (for fictional purposes). Because of these literary ramifications, Rogers and Selkirk have been biographised before, under the titles Crusoe’s Captain (Rogers) and The Real Robinson Crusoe (Selkirk); but Dampier and Rogers were authors as well as voyagers, literary lions as well as old sea dogs, and wrote their own colonial adventures.

Fowke has found some unpublished material about Hatley in our national archives at Kew, and also in Spain, so his book contains original research, although aimed at a non-specialised audience, for whose benefit, presumably, distant voyages in the 17th and 18th centuries are likened to moon voyages in modern times, and buccaneering — plundering the colonial loot of the Spanish Main — is described as ‘a sort of feeding frenzy’, even when ‘the Spanish had got their act together’.