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Fowke has found some unpublished material about Hatley in our national archives at Kew, and also in Spain, so his book contains original research, although aimed at a non-specialised audience,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’.
Despite these ingratiating phrasings, we are able to follow the thread of Hatley’s story through the web of adventures of his better known fellow sailors. Hatley, as well as Dampier, was aboard Rogers’ ship when it found the solitary Selkirk at Juan Fernandez, ‘a Man cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who looked wilder than the first Owners of them’, as Rogers described the original Robinson Crusoe.
That is, of course, Selkirk’s story, but the same expedition that retrieved Selkirk from Juan Fernandez lost Hatley a few months later in the Galapagos, thus providing Hatley’s own adventure. In a captured bark, with a handful of men under his command, he became separated from Rogers’ ship and sailed perilously across the Pacific to Quito (modern Ecuador).There he was captured, ruthlessly tortured and imprisoned, before conversion to Catholicism in Lima and consequent release.
It was as a survivor of this adventure, and on a subsequent voyage, that Hatley made his literary impact. His captain, Shelvocke, sets the scene in his Voyage. The ship was struggling to round Cape Horn against a ‘continued series of contrary tempestuous winds’, in sleet and snow, with no sign of life in sight,
except a disconsolate black albatross, who accompanied us for several days, hovering about us as if he had lost himself, till Hatley (my second Captain) observing, in one of his melancholy fits, that this bird was always
hovering near us, imagined from his colour that it might be some ill omen.
Despite Hatley’s superstition, the albatross had no previous reputation as a bird of ill omen. Nevertheless, Hatley,
after some fruitless attempts, at length shot the albatross, not doubting (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it.
Thus ‘melancholy’ Hatley unsympathetically shot the ‘disconsolate’ albatross and achieved literary fame; but he must share the credit with Shelvocke, who wrote the story imaginatively, and with Wordsworth, who remembered it on the Quantock Hills, and with Coleridge, of course.
But what of Fowke’s part in all this? His narrative, quaintly subtitled ‘Pirates and Poesy on the South Seas’, successfully connects Hatley at Cape Horn with Coleridge on the Quantocks, and it does tell a readable tale of adventure at sea — though melancholy Hatley still remains, for better or worse, as mysterious as the Mariner himself.
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