Simon Hatley

Simon Hatley
Born	27 March 1685 , Oxfordshire, England
Died	After 1723
Nationality	British
Occupation	Sailor
Known for	Inspiring The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Simon Hatley (27 March 1685 – after 1723) was an English sailor involved in two hazardous privateering voyages to the South Pacific Ocean. Both times he was captured and imprisoned by the Spanish. In 1709 he sailed with Alexander Selkirk, a likely model for Robinson Crusoe, and William Dampier, favoured in Gulliver's Travels as a mariner comparable to Lemuel Gulliver.

Yet Hatley is best remembered for the single act of killing an albatross during the second voyage in 1719 when his ship was buffeted by storms off Cape Horn, an episode immortalised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a narrative poem called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The oldest child in a family of haberdashers of hats, Simon Hatley was born on 27 March 1685 in , Oxfordshire, England. The family was a prosperous one, owning a large house and three other rental properties on the High Street. The residence was pulled down and rebuilt in 1704, after he had left home. Fittingly for the family of a son with piratical leanings, it was said to have been built with stones pilfered from the nearby construction site of Blenheim Palace.

Literate in Latin as well as English, he would have attended the Woodstock Grammar School located up the road from where he lived. Some time around 1699, he was apprenticed as a pilot in Bristol, completing his formal training in 1706 at the latest. Two years thereafter, at the age of twenty-three, he signed on as third mate of the Duchess. The vessel was then being readied for a long and difficult journey to the Pacific coast of South America.

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