"Under the heading 'Spontaneous Conversion' I found at Number 11 a 'Simon Hatey' who was from 'Yudstock'. "I knew Hatley was lost at sea and had then been picked up by a Spanish ship and taken to Lima, where I suspected he had become caught up in the Inquisition."įinding an account that suggested Hatley was tortured in South America, Fowke travelled to Madrid to search through the Inquisition's official records. "The more I discovered, the more exciting it was," said Fowke. "Scholars have always known what gave Coleridge the idea for the poem, because Wordsworth said they had talked together about a book by Captain George Shelvocke during their walk, but nobody has ever taken up the story," said Fowke this weekend.Įxamining both Captain Shelvocke's A Voyage round the World by way of the Great South Sea (1726), and another seafaring volume by William Bettagh, Fowke has pieced together the life of the sailor, Simon Hatley, who is said to have shot down "a black albatross" while on board a ship called the Speedwell.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is thought to have come up with the idea of writing about a sailor who is becalmed at sea after shooting an albatross in 1797, while he was out walking with his friend William Wordsworth in the hills above his home in Nether Stowey, Somerset.Ī statue of the mariner stands in the harbour of the nearby town of Watchet, marking the place where Coleridge is supposed to have stared out across the sea, imagining the plot of his poem.
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