This book presents an alternative view to the arguments expressed in The Road to Xanadu by J.L. Lowes in 1927, when he discussed the sources Samuel Taylor Coleridge used when he wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other poems. With painstaking research, Bill Whelen has used hitherto unpublished writings by William Wales, recently published journals kept on the Cook’s second voyage. A clearer picture emerges of the extent and breadth of the influence William Wales had on Coleridge’s early creativity.