by Mary Shelley
Bâl Gangâdhar Tilak (1856–1912), an astronomer and lifelong student of the Vedas (the ancient Sanskrit scriptures, probably first recorded in 1500 BCE), contended that they describe the destruction of an original Arctic home ca. 10,000 to 8000 BCE. Tilak’s theory was embraced by John G. Bennett, in his paper “The Hyperborean Origin of the Indo-European Culture,” in Systematics 1, no. 3 (December 1963), http://www.systematics.org/journal/vol1-3/SJ1-3c.htm. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, writing in Isis Unveiled, claimed, “Tradition says, and the records of the Great Book explain, that long before the days of Ad-am and his inquisitive wife, He-va, where now are found but salt lakes and desolate barren deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himalayan range, and its western prolongation. An island, which for its unparalleled beauty had no rival in the world, was inhabited by the last remnant of the race which preceded ours … the ‘Sons of God’ ” (Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology [New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877], Vol. 1, Science, 589).
Bailly actually believed that Atlantis, queen of all lost realms, was in the far north, probably on the islands of Spitsbergen and Greenland, and the Novaya Zemlya archipelago (Letters Upon the Atlantis of Plato, and the Ancient History of Asia: Intended as a Continuation of the Letters Upon the Origin of the Sciences Addressed to M. de Voltaire [1779; translated by James Jacque, 1801, and published in 2011 by the British Museum]). See Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996), for a more detailed analysis of Bailly’s and Blavatsky’s thinking, as well as other sources of the myth of a northern paradise.
8. Polar exploration of the period was largely driven by searches for what were termed the Northwest Passage, a sea route from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean along the northern coast of North America, and the Northeast Passage (also known as the Northern Route), a sea route from the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait along the northern coast of Russia. Walton is referring to the latter.
Focused exploration of the Northern Route began in 1553, with an expedition led by Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor along the northern coast of Canada. Willoughby’s ships were held fast in the ice off the Kola Peninsula, and all aboard perished; Chancellor’s ships landed at Archangel and returned safely to England. It was not until 1556 that Steven Borough, the master of Chancellor’s ship, made it as far as the Kara Sea, where he turned back, dismayed by the prospect of a “great and terrible abundance of ice.” In 1576–78, Martin Frobisher explored the western parts of the region, and in 1585–88, he discovered and explored the Davis Strait, to the west of Greenland, as well as many other points of interest. In 1610, Henry Hudson sailed into Hudson’s Bay, and in 1615, William Baffin explored Baffin’s Bay, both areas critical to the fur trade for the next two centuries. Hudson had distinguished himself earlier, when, in 1607, he penetrated to 81° 60' north, the closest proximity to the North Pole recorded to date. Also noteworthy is the 1596 expedition of the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz, who discovered Spitsbergen, the 15,000-square-mile island off the northwest coast of the Scandinavian peninsula, and Bear Island.
Czar Michael I closed the Mangazeya seaway in 1619 to limit English and Dutch incursions into Siberia. As a result, most seventeenth-century exploration in the region was carried out by Siberian Cossacks. In 1648 Fedot Alekseev and Semyon Dezhnev explored the entirety of the Chukchi Peninsula by sailing eastward from the mouth of the Kolyma River around the peninsula and into the northern Pacific Ocean. In the process, they demonstrated that there was no land bridge connecting that peninsula (part of Asia) and North America (at what is now called the Seward Peninsula). Eighty years later, Danish-born Vitus Bering voyaged from Kamchatka to the north as far as the Bering Strait, the passage previously found by Dezhnev. The history of many of these expeditions and the stories of the explorers’ tragic fates are told in Helen S. Wright’s The Great White North: The Story of Polar Exploration from the Earliest Times to the Discovery of the Pole (New York: Macmillan, 1910).
The first complete passage of the Northeast Passage, from west to east, did not take place until long after Walton’s voyage, in 1878, when Finnish-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Lieutenant Louis Palander of the Swedish Royal Navy accomplished the trip in the Vega.
9. The North Magnetic Pole exists as a function of the Earth’s magnetic field, the spot where the field points straight downward, causing a compass needle to do the same. Such a phenomenon was projected by the English physician and natural philosopher William Gilbert in 1600, who also suggested that the planet acted as a giant magnet. However, the actual spot was not visited until 1831, by British naval officer and explorer James Clark Ross. The location moves over time as the magnetic field varies (as well as traversing a daily elliptical orbit of about 50 miles [80 km]). In 2001, the Geological Survey of Canada sited it near Ellesmere Island in northern Canada at 81.3°N 110.8°W. By 2005, it had moved to 83.1°N 117.8°W; in 2009, its location was 84.9°N 131.0°W, and by 2012, the pole had moved to Russian territory at 85.9°N 147.0°W.
10. See notes 6 and 8, above.
11. Surely the core of Walton’s uncle’s library was English geographer Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (first published in 1582, and expanded in subsequent editions in 1589 and 1600), an extensive work: the 1886–1890 Goldsmid edition is sixteen volumes (see http://www.hakluyt.com/hakluyt _census.htm for a history of the various editions). The library would have also included Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), Samuel Purchas’s four-volume collection of travel stories, a continuation of Hakluyt’s efforts, which incorporates Robert Juet’s journal of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage, transcribed at http://www.halfmoon.mus.ny.us/Juets-modified.pdf), and accounts of Baffin’s travels. Perhaps Uncle Thomas may even have owned—though it was only published in German and was clearly not a “history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery”—Gerhard Friedrich Müller’s Sammlung Russischer Geschichten (St. Petersburg: Kayserl. Academie der Wißenschafften, 1758), a pioneering nine-volume account of Russian history that describes Dezhnev’s and Bering’s voyages.
12. Walton would have inherited his cousin’s fortune at age twenty-one. He is unlikely to have taken a whole year to resolve on his undertaking, making him twenty-seven at the time of writing this letter and his later claim to be age twenty-eight a slight exaggeration.
13. As late as 1780 and presumably later, “Greenland” in the context of whaling actually meant Spitsbergen, originally “Spits-bergen” (“pointed mountains”). It was identified with the large island of Greenland to the west and was referred to under that name among the Dutch and English who soon visited it regularly.
Commercial whale fishing off Greenland, as contrasted with what is now termed aboriginal subsistence whaling—that is, the capture of whales by locals for sustenance—can be traced back to the ninth century CE, in the accounts by Alfred the Great of the voyage of Ohthere of Halgoland, in northernmost Norway: “no man abode north of him” (The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great [Oxford and Cambridge, UK: Messrs. J. F. Smith and Co., 1852], Vol. 2, Book I, chapter 1, p. 46, https://goo.gl/mRf1sm). The first confirmed English whale hunting (off northeastern Canada) was in 1594, and after Hudson’s visit to Spitsbergen in 1607, the merchants of Hull, England, quickly established a vigorous business of it there. The Dutch followed in establishing whale fisheries in Spitsbergen a few years later.
By 1788, according to the Rev. William Scoresby’s account of the ebb and flow of British whale fishing in the region, British ships sailed for the whale fishery from over twenty ports. A crew generally consisted of forty to fifty men, “comprising several classes of officers, such as harpooners, boat-steerers, line-managers, carpenters, coopers, etc., together with fore-mast men, landmen, and apprentices” (Scoresby, The Arctic Regions and the Northern Whale-Fish
ery [London: The Religious Tract Society, 1799], 48, https://goo.gl/TNNrrS).
Dutch whalers near Spitsbergen, by Abraham Storck (1690).
The principal tools of the whale-fishers were the harpoon (propelled by hand or gun), the line (rope), and the lance. The whale would be first wounded with harpoons attached to lines, and when the whale was sufficiently exhausted from its attempts to flee, the vitals of the whale would be pierced repeatedly with lances until it expired. The cadaver of the whale would then be secured and typically processed at sea, cut up and reduced to whalebone and oil, the principal commercial products.
Scoresby, to whom references can be found in Moby-Dick and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, among other works, does not flinch from the details of the brutality of whale hunting or the risks to the crew. He cheerily remarks on the providence of God in making the victims so tame and timid and, quoting Genesis, delights in the evidence that God indeed did give man “dominion over the fish of the sea” (72–73). Contrast this with a recent letter issued by Greenland’s Ministry of Fisheries, Hunting and Agriculture, discussing the government’s policies regarding “aboriginal subsistence whaling”: “Cannons with harpoon grenades are used for the main part of the hunted whales. This ensures a rapid and humane death of the whale. The grenades are very costly—600 to 800 English pounds pr. grenade—so money is a necessity, that is—if animal welfare considerations should be taken into account and that is a requirement according to Greenlandic law.” Strict quotas are imposed as well, and whale hunting is justified as follows: “Whale meat is a natural product that does not need any anthropogenic produced fertilizers or pesticides, i.e. it is a 100% environmental-friendly source of ‘green food.’ The subsistence whaling reduces the need for our import of western food; which also helps in reducing the global CO2-emissions. By a higher level of utilization and local distribution of our own resources, we will also reduce and limit modern life style diseases that are occurring more often in Greenland” (http://naalakkersuisut.gl/en/About-government-of-greenland/Whaling-in-Greenland).
William Scoresby, from an engraving by E. Smith (1821).
14. The first coaches in England were simple boxes on wheels, and because the roads were so poor, journeys were extremely uncomfortable, even if the coach box was suspended from leather straps. In the late eighteenth century, C-shaped steel springs were added, and an advertisement could proclaim that a new stagecoach would “for the better accommodation of passengers be altered to a new genteel two-end glass-coach machine being on steel springs and exceedingly light.” It was not until the early nineteenth century, however, that elliptical springs were introduced, greatly reducing the jolting, and, as highways improved, the ride became more like that of Walton’s sledge.
15. That is, the principal route of mail carriers.
16. On today’s highways, this is a distance of 783 miles (1,261 km), requiring about sixteen hours. The Russian postal-road system of St. Petersburg was begun in 1703 by Peter the Great and his advisers. Taxes were imposed on the general population for the upkeep and maintenance of roads. John Randolph, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, describes how the system worked: “[A]t the heart of the day-to-day operation of the system lay a special social group known as the iamshchiki (‘post riders’ or ‘coachmen,’ we might say in English, although women and children were part of this obliged class as well). These iamshchiki were granted agricultural lands and paid small per-trip fees. In return for these wages, their villages were supposed to staff and maintain the postal stations, providing drivers, horses, mounts and wagons in turn. (In the tax jargon of the day, 28 iamshchik ‘souls,’ that is adult males as counted by the census, made up a unit of taxation called a vyt’; and each vyt’ had to provide 3 horses and a driver, for periodic service as managed by an elected elder.)” See http://russianhistoryblog.org/2012/01/imagining-the-petersburg-moscow-road-in-the-late-18th-century/.
17. The signature here is a touch formal for a brother—“R. Walton”—but this may be forgiven as an addition made by Mary Shelley.
LETTER II
To Mrs. SAVILLE, England.
Archangel,18 28th March, 17—.19
HOW slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow; yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise. I have hired a vessel, and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend, and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.20
But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize21 with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! I am too ardent in execution, and too impatient of difficulties. But it is a still greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common,22 and read nothing but our uncle Thomas’s books of voyages. At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power to derive its most important benefits from such a conviction, that I perceived the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native country.23 Now I am twenty-eight,24 and am in reality more illiterate than many school-boys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping;25 and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.
Well, these are useless complaints; I shall certainly find no friend on the wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among merchants and seamen. Yet some feelings, unallied to the dross of human nature, beat even in these rugged bosoms. My lieutenant, for instance, is a man of wonderful courage and enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory.26 He is an Englishman, and in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the noblest endowments of humanity. I first became acquainted with him on board a whale vessel: finding that he was unemployed in this city, I easily engaged him to assist in my enterprise.
The master27 is a person of an excellent disposition, and is remarkable in the ship for his gentleness, and the mildness of his discipline. He is, indeed, of so amiable a nature, that he will not hunt (a favourite, and almost the only amusement here), because he cannot endure to spill blood. He is, moreover, heroically generous.28 Some years ago he loved a young Russian lady, of moderate fortune; and having amassed a considerable sum in prize-money,29 the father of the girl consented to the match. He saw his mistress once before the destined ceremony; but she was bathed in tears, and, throwing herself at his feet, entreated him to spare her, confessing at the same time that she loved another, but that he was poor, and that her father would never consent to the union. My generous friend reassured the suppliant, and on being informed of the name of her lover instantly abandoned his pursuit. He had already bought a farm with his money, on which he had designed to pass the remainder of his life; but he bestowed the whole on his rival, together with the remains of his prize-money to purchase stock, and then himself solicited the young woman’s father to consent to her marriage with her lover. But the old man decidedly refused, thinking himself bound in honour to my friend; who, when he found the father inexorable, quitted his country, nor returned until he heard that his former mistress was married according to her inclinations. “Wh
at a noble fellow!” you will exclaim. He is so; but then30 he has passed all his life on board a vessel, and has scarcely an idea beyond the rope and the shroud.31 But do not suppose that, because I complain a little, or because I can conceive a consolation for my toils which I may never know, that I am wavering in my resolutions. Those are as fixed as fate; and my voyage is only now delayed until the weather shall permit my embarkation. The winter has been dreadfully severe; but the spring promises well, and it is considered as a remarkably early season; so that, perhaps, I may sail sooner than I expected. I shall do nothing rashly; you know me sufficiently to confide in my prudence and considerateness whenever the safety of others is committed to my care.32
I cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking. It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart. I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow”; but I shall kill no albatross,33 therefore do not be alarmed for my safety.34
Shall I meet you again, after having traversed immense seas, and returned by the most southern cape of Africa or America?35 I dare not expect such success, yet I cannot bear to look on the reverse of the picture. Continue to write to me by every opportunity: I may receive your letters (though the chance is very doubtful) on some occasions when I need them most to support my spirits. I love you very tenderly. Remember me with affection, should you never hear from me again.