Simon Hatley

Simon Hatley (27 March 1685 – after 1723) 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.

Born in 1685 in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, Hatley went to sea in 1708 as part of Woodes Rogers's expedition against the Spanish. Rogers circumnavigated the world, but Hatley was captured on the coast of present-day Ecuador and imprisoned in Lima, capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, where he was tortured by the Inquisition. He was released and returned to Great Britain in 1713.

Hatley's second voyage, under George Shelvocke, was the source of the albatross incident, and also ended with his capture by the Spanish. As Hatley had, at Shelvocke's direction, looted a Portuguese vessel on the coast of Brazil, the Spanish this time held him as a pirate, though ultimately they released him again, deciding that Shelvocke was the more culpable party. Hatley returned to Britain in 1723, and sailed to Jamaica to avoid trial for piracy. His fate thereafter is unknown.

In 1797, William Wordsworth, having read Shelvocke's account of that voyage, suggested Hatley's shooting of an albatross as the basis of a contemplated joint work with Coleridge. Wordsworth dropped out of the project soon after, but Coleridge continued, and the poem was published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), containing poems by both men, and assuring Hatley a place in literary history.