This book does not begin with a monster. Open it, and the first thing you find is a letter a young man wrote to his sister.
The writer is Robert Walton. He is English, and he has left home to find a way to the North Pole. The reader is his sister, Margaret Saville, who lives in England. The letters carry dates, but the year keeps only its first two digits, 17, and the rest is struck out. All we can tell is that this happened in some year of the eighteenth century.
A Cold Wind in Petersburg
On the 11th of December, the day after he reaches St. Petersburg in Russia, Walton writes his first letter. His sister has dreaded this voyage from the start. So the first thing he tells her is that all is well.
Walking the streets, he feels a cold wind from the north on his cheeks. He takes it for a breeze from the very land he is heading toward, and that alone makes his heart race.
To him the pole is not a land of ice and desolation. It is a place where the sun circles the horizon and never sets, where snow and frost are gone and a calm sea spreads out. Trusting a little in what earlier sailors have said, he paints it as a land of beauty and delight.
He wants three things. First, to set foot on land no human foot has ever touched. Next, to learn the secret of the power that draws the compass needle. Last, to find a passage near the pole that would bring distant countries close, countries that now take many months to reach.
Even if every guess before that proves wrong, he writes, it does not matter. Find the passage, or uncover the secret of the magnet, and mankind will benefit down to its last generation.
Having written this, he feels the trembling he began with die away. Nothing calms the mind so much, he adds, as one clear purpose.
Uncle Thomas’s Library
The dream began when he was a child. Uncle Thomas’s library held nothing but accounts of voyages of discovery. Walton, who never had proper schooling, read those books day and night.
The more he read, the sharper his regret. His father, dying, had told his uncle not to let the boy become a sailor.
For a while the dream changed. Swept away by the poets, he became a poet himself and lived for a year in a paradise of his own making. He believed he too might win a place in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are honoured.
As his sister knows, that dream failed, and he bore the disappointment heavily. Just then he inherited his cousin’s fortune, and his mind turned back to the sea road it had wanted first.
Six Years of Preparation
Six years have passed since he gave himself to this undertaking. He still remembers the hour he decided.
He began by hardening his body. He went out with the whalers to the North Sea many times and chose to endure cold, hunger, thirst and sleepless nights. By day he worked harder than the common sailors, and by night he studied mathematics, the theory of medicine, and the branches of natural science most useful to a sailor.
Twice he hired himself out as an under-mate on a Greenland whaler. When his captain offered him the second place on the ship and begged him to stay, he admits he felt a little proud.
Then he asks his sister a question. He could have lived in ease and comfort, but he chose glory over every temptation wealth laid in his path. Does he not deserve to accomplish something great? He wishes someone would answer yes.
His courage and resolve are firm, but his hopes often waver and his spirits often sink. On a long voyage he will have to lift the spirits of others, and when theirs fail, hold up his own alone.
The letter moves on to Russian sledges. Gliding over the snow beats an English stagecoach, and wrapped in furs the cold is bearable. In two or three weeks he will go to the northern port of Archangel to hire a ship and gather sailors used to the whale fishery.
When will he return? He cannot say. If he succeeds, it will be many months, perhaps years. If he fails, she will see him soon, or never.
At Archangel
Three months later, on the 28th of March, Walton writes his second letter from Archangel. Shut in by frost and snow, time passes slowly. He has hired the ship and is gathering the crew, and the men he has already chosen seem dependable and fearless.
Yet one want remains unfilled.
“You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend.” (Letter 2)
When he glows with success, there will be no one to share his joy. When disappointment strikes, no one will hold him up. He can put his thoughts on paper, he writes, but paper is a poor way to pass on feeling. He wants someone whose eyes would answer his.
The friend he pictures is gentle yet brave, both learned and broad of mind, with tastes like his own. Someone who would approve his plans, or amend them.
Walton knows his faults. He is too ardent in what he does and too impatient with difficulty. Until he was fourteen he ran wild on the village common and read only his uncle’s books of voyages, and he realised far too late that he needed other languages.
Now he is twenty-eight, he confesses, and knows less than many schoolboys of fifteen. He thinks more than most and his daydreams are grander, but they lack what painters call balance. So he wants a friend with sense enough not to scorn him as a dreamer, and affection enough to steady his mind.
A Master of Few Words
He will find no such friend on the wide ocean, Walton concludes, nor in this port of merchants and seamen. Still, he notes that noble feeling beats even in these rough men.
His lieutenant is wonderfully brave and wildly eager for advancement. They first met on a whaler, and since the man was out of work in the city, Walton hired him easily.
The ship’s master is gentle by nature and known on board for mild discipline. Walton has always hated the brutality usual on ships. He puts it down to a boyhood spent in his sister’s gentle care.
He heard the master’s story from a lady who owes him the happiness of her life. Some years ago the master loved a young Russian woman of modest fortune. Once he had saved a good sum in prize money, her father agreed to the match.
When he saw her before the wedding, she was in tears and threw herself at his feet. She loved another man, she said, but he was poor and her father would never consent.
The master stepped aside on the spot. He gave his rival the farm he had bought to spend his life on, and added the rest of his prize money for stock. Then he went to the young woman’s father himself and asked him to let the two marry.
The father refused, saying he was bound in honour to the master. So the master left the country and came back only when he heard she had married the man she loved.
Walton imagines his sister crying out what a noble fellow he is. He agrees, and then adds one line at once. The man is wholly uneducated and silent, and that takes away from the interest his remarkable conduct would otherwise command.
No Albatross
Walton reassures her again. A little complaining does not mean his resolve is wavering. It is fixed as fate, and the voyage waits only on the weather. The winter has been severe, but spring looks early, so he may sail sooner than expected.
He writes one sentence to put her mind at rest. She knows him well enough to trust his prudence whenever the safety of others is in his care.
Then he confesses a trembling, half pleasure and half fear. He is going to the land of mist and snow, he jokes, but he will kill no albatross. In Coleridge’s poem the old sailor who shot one wanders the sea under a curse and comes home worn and woeful.
He shares a secret too. Perhaps that poem is why the dangerous mysteries of the ocean draw him so. He is a steady, hardworking man, he writes, but somewhere in him is a love and belief in the marvellous. It drives him off the common paths of men, out to the wild sea and lands no one has visited.
At the end he asks his sister to write by every chance she gets. And if she never hears from him again, he asks her to remember him with affection.
In a High Latitude
The third letter, dated the 7th of July, is short. He sends a few hurried lines with a merchant ship heading home from Archangel.
The ship is already in a very high latitude. Sheets of ice keep floating past, but the crew is not afraid. It is high summer, and the southern winds are warmer than he expected, pushing the ship quickly north.
Nothing worth a letter has happened. A stiff gale or two and a leak, things an experienced sailor would hardly bother to record.
Walton promises once more that, for his own sake and for hers, he will not rush into danger. He will be cool, persevering and prudent. A few lines later his writing changes.
Success shall crown his efforts, he writes. The stars themselves have witnessed his triumph and traced a safe road over the pathless sea, so why not go on? What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?
His full heart poured itself out, he writes, and he hurries to put down his pen.
No One Met Yet
Nothing has happened yet in these three letters. No monster, no laboratory, not even the name Frankenstein.
What stands there instead is a man. He has carried one dream since boyhood, staked his body and his fortune on it, and chosen glory over a comfortable life. And in the same letter he writes that he will be prudent and that nothing can stop him.
He wants a friend. Someone to share his joy, hold him up in disappointment, and amend his plans.
In the next letter Walton pulls a man off the ice. The story that man will tell begins with a dream very like Walton’s own.
If there is something I would give up comfort to achieve, what is it, and why?