The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that the poem may have been inspired by the voyage of Thomas James into the Arctic. According to William Wordsworth, the poem was inspired while Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy were on a walking tour through the Quantock Hills in Somerset. The discussion had turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading, "A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea" (1726) by Captain George Shelvocke. In the book, a melancholy sailor, Simon Hatley, shoots a black albatross: As they discussed Shelvocke's book, Wordsworth proffers the following developmental critique to Coleridge, which importantly contains a reference
Bartram's Travels sympathetic description of the Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Choctaw Indians, which challenged presumptions that the Indians were primitive "savages." In addition to the "Travels" Bartram wrote other documents concerning his impressions of the southern Indians and the necessity of a humane public policy toward them. Among Bartram's admirers in England were the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By his own account, Coleridge had "Bartram's Travels" in mind when he devised the exotic imagery in his poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan". "Bartram's Travels" appeared in Europe when an edition was published in London in