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
William Wales (astronomer) a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1776. Amongst Wales' pupils at Christ's Hospital were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb. It has been suggested that Wales' accounts of his journeys might have influenced Coleridge when writing his poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The writer Leigh Hunt, another of Wales' pupils, remembered him as "a good man, of plain simple manners, with a heavy large person and a benign countenance". He was appointed as Secretary of the Board of Longitude in 1795, serving in that position until his death in 1798. He was nominated by the First Lord