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.
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