The Crime of The Ancient Mariner

A centuries-old murder mystery, bust wide open

I’ve uncovered something huge, and I need your help.

Through a combination of circumstances I can’t now recall, last week I was reminded of Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We’ve all heard of it, of course. Back in the day children at school were made to read such things in order to make them sad and bored. Thankfully now all teaching is done via SnapTweet and AI.

I realized however that I had no memory of the poem apart from the fact it had something to do with an albatross, and in an idle moment decided to re-read it.

I discovered there’s an unsolved mystery here, a secret we’re not being told.

The story of the poem

To save you the trouble of reading it — for a poem it’s quite long, maybe too long honestly, though the lines are quite short — I shall summarize it here:

A man’s at a wedding, chilling, having a great time, when some ancient geezer with thin hands comes up, button-holes him, and refuses to go away until he’s told him a story. We’ve all been there, it’s usually someone’s uncle. The old dude claims that years ago he was a sailor. His boat went off to sea, got stuck in ice and fog. Everybody’s starving, it’s not cool. Then suddenly an albatross appears (huge great bird) and flies up and down. Quite soon after that the weather gets better and the ship can move again, and the sailors decide the bird had something to do with it, so it’s now their favorite fowl. The Ancient Mariner, however — the guy telling the story — decides to shoot the thing with his cross-bow, for no apparent reason.

Things go tits-up again for the ship, and the sailors blame the Mariner, going so far as to hang this massive bird around his neck. Old times Cancel Culture, basically. It all gets even worse and everybody’s so messed up with dehydration they can’t speak. But then out of the fog a ship appears, the Mariner bites his own arm to wet his lips with blood so he can call out to it (I’m not making this up) — and hurrah, the boat comes over! Except, not, because it turns out it’s a ghost ship. On board are DEATH and LIFE-BY-DEATH, two types of death that are different somehow. Apparently they’ve been gambling for the Mariner’s soul, and LIFE-BY-DEATH won.

All the other sailors die — falling with thuds to the deck. The boat floats around for a while until one morning the Mariner sees some sea snakes and suddenly decides that all of God’s creation is beautiful. This insight is allegedly enough to make the albatross fall off the Mariner’s neck and to move everything on to the next bit of the poem, where the boat finally makes it close to land, where he’s rescued by a man, his son, and a hermit (not sure what a hermit’s doing out in a boat, I thought they lived in caves and whatnot, but that’s what it says).

The Mariner’s saved. But condemned to wander the world telling people this story, otherwise he gets sick. Now he’s done that he buggers off, and the wedding guest gets back to the party. Though the next morning the guest feels sad. Probably a hangover.

Best lines in it

Now, this is a famous poem, and we’re just going to have to accept that. For years people were made to read it and even memorize parts. Some of its lines have therefore become quite well-known. Including:

“Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.”

“Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.”

And of course the whole deal of “having an albatross around your neck” has become a way of saying people are dogged by the consequences of the dumb shit they do. Some of you may also have heard of this bit:

“He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.”

Which is a bit “global warming” and blah blah, tree-hugger, but that seems to be the point of the whole thing, and probably why the poem got famous in the first place, because back then people didn’t give a crap about the planet and so it was, like, “Whoa, game-changer”. The endless “we’d better be nice to the environment or bad things will happen” vibe makes the whole thing tiresomely woke at times, to be frank.

Honestly my favorite line is “Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”, the reaction of the wedding guest when the Mariner first plucks at his sleeve and starts unspooling his cockamamie tale. Which brings me to...

But hold on just a minute here...

It says in the poem that the Mariner can tell who he should tell his story to:

I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.

And this is what got me thinking.

If you have to go around telling this story, why choose a wedding guest who clearly just wants to get on with having fun and scoring hot sex with one of the bridesmaids? Said guest is not paying attention, that’s why, and probably drunk.

That’s very telling. Because if you read the poem closely, as I have, one thing becomes undeniably clear: it’s horseshit. Honestly I’m stunned this alleged Mariner wasn’t locked up the first time he told someone his ludicrous tale. “I was on a boat and shot a big bird which meant everybody died, but after a ghost won me in a card game I saw the light and came home.” I mean, it’s clearly bollocks, yes? This never happened.

What I started to believe did happen, however, was that people actually did die... but at the hand of the Ancient Mariner himself. He was a mass murderer who killed all the people on his ship and blamed it on some albatross (an innocent bird, which, you’ll note, no living witness ever saw). When he got back to shore he realized he’d have to explain this unhinged massacre, hence all the nonsense about ghosts. To you and me his alibi sounds self-evidently ridiculous, but people were much stupider back then.

And now further consider the following. Coleridge was a poet, who rhymed things for a living. (That used to be a real job). This poem itself is called a “rime”, which is a weird spelling, which made me realize it might be a clue. Coleridge being a poet means he was concerned with how things sound. Where does all the action take place? The sea. What letter does “sea” sound like? “C”, of course.

Put that “C” in front of the title of the poem and what to you get?

“rime” + “C” = “Crime”

A confession, right there, because...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Murderer

My thesis, which I believe you’ll find impossible to refute, is that rather than the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge himself was the mass murderer. To cover his tracks he put a confession into the mouth of a fictional character, surrounding it with so much woo-woo that nobody would take it seriously.

Once the poem got famous and popular he became a poet influencer, and was able to hide behind that for the rest of his life. In a way, it’s genius.

But he’s got away with it for long enough now, and it’s time for this deadly scribe to be brought to justice, even if he’s already annoyingly dead. I beseech enthusiastic amateur detectives out there to scour the records for mass fatality events in the years prior to the publication of this “poem” in 1798. The text mentions “Four times fifty living men” as dying, which is two hundred, but that could be either an exaggeration or an under-estimate, or both. It would be safest to include any death, anywhere, from any cause, at any time, as a possible clue. Please factor that in.

Also bear in mind that rather than relating to one single event, the poem could be Coleridge’s attempt to cover up a reign of terror as a serial killer over the course of years or even decades. In some ways I think this might be the most likely explanation, because you’ll note that the Mariner offers no explanation for why he slays a perfectly friendly bird in the first place: an admittance, perhaps, that Coleridge himself was compelled — without motive or remorse — to kill, and kill again.

I wonder in fact whether he might be the real Jack the Ripper. There are minor problems with this theory — like the fact this alleged poem was written a century too early — but diligent investigation may prove enlightening. They could just have got the date of the poem wrong. You know what elitist academics are like.

I would do this research myself but I have been temporarily restrained for “further tests” and my Internet access has been heavily restricted “for my own protection”. It’s becoming all too clear that I have stumbled upon something They don’t want you to know, and I call upon you to help me uncover the Truth.

God speed, and thank you.