Simon Hatley

Who is Simon Hatley?

Simon Hatley 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.