The Portico has a copy of Captain James Cook’s Voyage towards the South Pole and round the world:
1772, 1773, 1774, 1775, illustrated by the expedition’s artist, William
Hodges. Cook’s two ships, The Resolution
and The Adventure, sailed from
Plymouth on the 13th July 1772, the same year that the poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge was born. The expedition was charged with searching for the
Southern Continent and testing a version of the John Harrison chronometer for
longitude determinations. The expedition sailed further south than any mariner
had ever done, and it must have been inspiration to many young men of
Coleridge’s generation.
One of the book’s illustrations is entitled The Ice Islands, seen the 9th January
1773, and on seeing this, my
first thought was that it must have been the inspiration for the crucial
incident in Coleridge’s Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, where the Mariner shoots an albatross, albeit with a crossbow:
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald
. . .
with my crossbow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
The
Princeton Library also has a copy of the book, and you can see the engraving on
the Princeton website: http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/pacific/cook2/ice-islands.jpg
Richard
Holmes’s biography, Coleridge, Early
Visions, confirms that Cook’s Voyage was one of the sources for the Mariner and also that throughout his
life Coleridge ‘was obsessed with travel books’. However, I think Cook’s
voyaging was more than just one source among many, for in his 1956 paper Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Cook’s
Second Voyage [Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 19, No. ½ (Jan.-Jun., 19560], Bernard Smith notes
that William Wales, the astronomer and meteorologist on the Resolution, taught mathematics
at Christ’s Hospital when Coleridge was there.
In a long
and fascinating paper, Smith deduces from a copy of the manuscript Journal Wales
kept during his time on the Resolution that the course of the Ancient Mariner’s
voyage was determined to a large extent by Coleridge’s recollections of
accounts of Cook’s second voyage, either as they were told to him by Wales, or
read in books at the school, and that the precision and clarity of Coleridge’s
atmospheric imagery derives much from the precision and clarity of Wales’s
astronomical and meteorological observations.
Smith concludes:
“But perhaps the most remarkable feature of
all is the preservation in the poem of the broad pattern of the Resolution’s
voyage, so that, to some extent, the order of sequence of events in the poem
follows the order of sequence of the relevant events of the voyage. The fair passage
of the N.E. Trades, the squally passage of the S.E.Trdaes, the mast-high ice,
the glint of the ice, the noise of the ice splitting, follow the same order in
the poem as in Wales’s Journal; and later in both the poem and the journal
accounts of the heat, the calm, and the sea-snakes agree in their sequence.”
Neither
Smith nor Holmes mention an illustrated edition of the Voyage, but, knowing that a poem needs not only sources, but also a
trigger, I wonder if sight of Hodge’s illustration, perhaps in Tom Poole’s
library at Stowey, triggered the writing of The
Rime?
Sheila Wild, Chair, Book Committee
