Frankenstein

My dear sister, you will be glad to hear that no disaster has met the start of the journey you feared so much for me.I arrived in St. Petersburg yesterday, and my first task is to tell you that I am well and that my hopes for the expedition are growing.I am already far to the north of London, and as I walk the streets I feel a cold wind from the Arctic that sharpens my mind and fills me with delight.

That wind has blown from the very regions I am travelling toward, and it gives me a foretaste of those icy seas.Others tell me the North Pole is only a place of frost and empty desolation, but I cannot believe it.In my imagination it is a country of beauty, where the sun never sets and a calm sea carries the traveller to wonders no one has ever seen.

There, I believe, I may learn what strange power turns the compass needle, and make discoveries useful to sailors for a hundred years.Above all, I will set my restless curiosity to rest by seeing a part of the world no human being has visited before.Writing this down has calmed the nervousness I felt when I began the letter, and my heart glows with a hope that lifts me up.

This voyage has been the favourite dream of my life since I was a boy.My education was neglected, but I read hungrily, and my uncle's shelves of travel books were my whole school.For one year I tried instead to become a poet, and lived in a paradise of my own making, but I failed, and turned back to the sea.

Since then I have given six years to getting ready for this single purpose.I joined whaling ships in the northern ice, bore cold, hunger, and sleeplessness, and worked harder by day than the common sailors.At night I studied mathematics, medicine, and science, and twice I sailed as an officer on a Greenland whaler and did well.

Now I have come to hire a ship and a crew, and if all goes well we will sail in June.Farewell, my dear Margaret; may Heaven bless you, and keep me safe, so that I can thank you again and again for all your kindness.