Letter 2 — Walton at Archangel

Three months later, Archangel, March. Walton has hired a Russian whaler and most of his crew and is waiting in port for the ice to break. The letter is shorter and sharper than the first. He writes about a sailor he met in the town — a Russian who, having loved a woman, gave her his entire fortune and then her family's so she could marry someone else, then enlisted on Walton's ship. Walton presents the story without much comment; it is one of his first encounters with the kind of generosity he himself is not capable of.

The body of the letter, however, is about loneliness. Walton has a competent captain and a dutiful lieutenant. He has men who will obey him and admire his money. But he has no friend. No one on board with whom he can share his thoughts. He longs, he writes, for a man "whose eyes would reply to mine" — someone who could correct him, encourage him, share the difficulty of the voyage with him.

The line is one of the novel's planted clues. Within twenty pages a stranger will be picked up off the ice, and Walton will think briefly that the wish has been answered. But by the time we read the second half of the letter, we are already learning the shape of Walton's mind: ambitious, romantic, untested, and conscious of his own isolation in a way that prepares him to receive the older traveler's warning when it comes.