Simon Hatley was born in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1685. He went to sea in 1708 as part of Woodes Rogers’s expedition against the Spanish. On the second voyage, with his ship beset by storms south of Cape Horn, Hatley shot an albatross. He was captured on the coast of present-day Ecuador and imprisoned in Lima, capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Hatley returned to Britain in 1723, and sailed to Jamaica to avoid trial for piracy. His fate thereafter is unknown.
About Simon Hatley in brief
Simon Hatley was born in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1685. He went to sea in 1708 as part of Woodes Rogers’s expedition against the Spanish. On the second voyage, with his ship beset by storms south of Cape Horn, Hatley shot an albatross, an incident immortalised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He was captured on the coast of present-day Ecuador and imprisoned in Lima, capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, where he was tortured by the Inquisition. Hatley returned to Britain in 1723, and sailed to Jamaica to avoid trial for piracy. His fate thereafter is unknown. The oldest child in a family of hatters, he signed on as third mate of the Duchess, the smaller of Rogers’s two ships. In 1708, at the age of twenty-three, he joined the Duke and The Duchess, with the crews of three ships, including an assistant and a Frencher. The Duke and Duchess sailed from Bristol on 1 August 1708 and called at Cork on 1 September 1708. The Duchess and the Duke sailed from Cork and called on the Irish coast on 1 October 1708 to fill out the crews with the aid of an assistant, Humphry. Humphry and Hatley called at Dublin on 1 November 1708 on the way to the South Pacific. The first such voyage made by Hatley was under the command of Captain WoodesRogers during the War of the Spanish Succession, which found Britain and Spain on opposing sides. The second voyage was under George Shelvocke, and also ended with his capture by the Spanish, as Hatley had looted a Portuguese vessel on the.
coast of Brazil. The Spanish this time held Hatley as a pirate, though ultimately they released him again, deciding that ShelvOCke was the more culpable party. Much of what is known about Hatley’s subsequent life is in connection with the two privateering voyages that he made to the Pacific coast of South America. His mother’s name at birth was Mary Herbert and, her son later stated while imprisoned by theSpanish, she was a Catholic. Her faith at birth possibly meant she was related to the earls of Pembroke, for they were also Catholic with the family name Herbert. The Hatley 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 Simon had left home. According to his sole biographer, Robert Fowke, in 2010, it was said to have been built with stone pilfered from the nearby construction site for Blenheim Palace. In this era, the accounts of maritime explorations were widely published and read, andHatley may have gained a love of adventure from them. The voyage was part of the Rogers expedition to go around Cape Horn into the Pacific, to damage Spanish settlements and along the South. American coast, and to capture booty interests.
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This page is based on the article Simon Hatley published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
