Simon Hatley was an English sailor involved in two hazardous privateering voyages to the South Pacific Ocean. On the second voyage, with his ship beset by storms south of Cape Horn, Hatley shot an albatross, an incident immortalised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
1876 Gustave Doré illustration for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Some modern editions use a revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it is often considered a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.
The Mariner up on the mast in a storm. One of the wood-engraved illustrations by Gustave Doré of the poem.
Frontispiece by William Strang for a 1903 edition of Coleridge's poem.
Engraving by Gustave Doré for an 1876 edition of the poem. The Albatross depicts 17 sailors on the deck of a wooden ship facing an albatross. Icicles hang from the rigging.
"The Albatross about my Neck was Hung," etching by William Strang, published 1896
