Whelen, Bill. 
Another Road to Xanadu: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his teacher William Wales & Cook’s second voyage. 
Steele Roberts. 
2023. 
ISBN 9781991153838. 
226 pages.

One of the most famous and popular poems in English is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was published in 1798 as part of Lyrical Ballads with a Few Other Poems.  For many years, there was speculation as to where Coleridge had drawn his inspiration.

In this book, Whelen meticulously details how the knowledge of Coleridge’s sources has come to be realised, especially the role of William Wales.  Whelen informs us that early scholars believed Coleridge learned everything from the numerous books he had read, as exemplified in J.L. Lowe’s 1927 book The Road to Xanadu¹—Whelen’s title is a reference to this work.  In the 1950s, Bernard Smith, the acclaimed Australian art historian and critic, identified the connection between Coleridge and Wales.²  However, Smith’s conclusions were ignored for about 30 years, possibly because he was an art scholar and not a literary one.  Slowly, though, some of those literary scholars have come round to acknowledge Smith’s conclusion and Wales’s role in the story.

William Wales travelled in HMS Resolution as Astronomer during James Cook’s Second Voyage to the Pacific.  Afterwards, in 1775, he became a mathematics teacher at the Royal Mathematical School, part of Christ’s Hospital School in Newgate Street, London.

Coleridge attended Christ’s Hospital School from 1782 for nine years.  While it appears that he only briefly studied mathematics, it is hard to imagine that he did not come under the influence of Wales who was a teacher at the school for the whole period.  It is believed that Wales was popular, regaling the boys with accounts of his time sailing in the Pacific.  He was known affectionately as the “old navigator”—possibly “the ancient mariner” in Coleridge’s poem.  Thus, Coleridge and his contemporaries were very much acquainted with the events on Cook’s voyage.

Whelen provides extensive examples of the text from the various narratives of the Second Voyage, including that of Wales, to show similarities with lines and passages that make up The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  He does not suggest that Coleridge drew upon only Wales; for example, the writings of George Shelvocke are acknowledged as being another, albeit smaller source.

After reading this excellent book, everyone will be convinced of William Wales’s role in influencing Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  An interesting appendix lists 54 poems inspired by Cook’s voyages.

John Robson

References

1. Lowes, John Livingstone.  The Road to Xanadu.  Houghton Mifflin.  1927. 
2. Smith, Bernard.  “Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Cook's Second Voyage” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.  1956.  Vol. 19, no. 1/2.  Pages 117–154.

Originally published in Cook's Log, page 24, volume 48, number 2 (2025).