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George Shelvocke (baptised 1 April 167530 November 1742) was an English Royal Navy officer and later privateer who in 1726 wrote the memoir A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea based on his exploits. It includes an account of how his second captain, Simon Hatley, shot an albatross off Cape Horn, an incident which provided the dramatic motive in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
On 25 May 1720 the Speedwell was wrecked on the island of Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández Archipelago. Shelvocke and his crew were there for five months but managed to build a 20-ton boat using some timbers and hardware salvaged from the wreck, in addition to wood obtained from locally felled trees. Leaving the island on 6 October, they transferred into their first prize ship, renamed the Happy Return, and resumed , despite the war having ended in February and rendered their letter of marque invalid. They continued up the coast of South America from Chile to Baja California, capturing more vessels along the way, before crossing the Pacific to Macao and returning to England in July 1722.
Shelvocke nevertheless went on to re-establish his reputation and died on 30 November 1742 at the age of 67, a wealthy man as a result of his activity. His chest tomb (since removed) in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford, London, by the east wall eulogised "a gentleman of great abilities in his profession and allowed to have been one of the bravest and most accomplished seamen of his time." A wall tablet in the chancel commemorates his son, also George Shelvocke, who died in 1760 and accompanied his father on the journey round the world before becoming Secretary of the General Post Office and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Much the greatest part of the story was Mr Coleridge's invention; but certain parts I myself suggested: for example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the old navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime, and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvock's Voyages a day or two before that while doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or fifteen feet. "Suppose," I said, "you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary deity of those regions take upon them to avenge the crime. The incident was thought fit for the purpose and adopted accordingly."
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