The beginning of this novel reveals a series of letters from the explorer Robert Walton to is sister, Margaret Saville. Walton, a prosperous Englishman with a passion for seafaring, is a captain of a ship, which is on a dangerous voyage to the North Pole. In this letter, he tells his sister of the preparations leading him to his departure and the passion in him to accomplish "some great purpose"-discovering a northern passage to the Pacific, revealing the source of the Earth’s magnetism, or simply setting foot on undiscovered territory.
Letter 2 & 3
In the second and third letter, Walton laments his lack of friends. He feels isolated and lonely. He feels he's too sophisticated to comfort his shipmates and too uneducated to find a sensitive soul with whom to share his dreams. He shows himself a Romantic, with his “love for the marvelous, a belief in the marvelous,” which pushes him along the perilous, lonely pathway he has chosen. In the brief third letter, Walton tells his sister that his ship has set sail and that he has full confidence that he will achieve his aim.
Letter 4
In the fourth letter, the ship stalls between huge sheets of ice. Walton and his men spot sledge guarded by a gigantic creature about half a mile away. The next morning, they encounter another sledge stranded on an ice floe. All but one of the dogs pulling the sledge is dead and the man is abnormally lean, weak and starving. Despite the man’s condition, he refuses to board the ship until Walton informs him that the ship is heading north. Before the man is able to speak, he is taken care of be Walton and the crew for two days. The crew is very curious, they wish to ask the man many and various questions but Walton knows that the man is still very weak, so Walton delays the interviews. As time goes on, Walton and the man become friends, the man then agrees to tell Walton his whole story. In the end, Walton’s farming life ends and the stranger’s life begins.
