Letter 3 — under sail at last

A very short third letter, July. The ice has broken; the ship has cleared Archangel and is moving north. Walton writes briefly to Margaret to reassure her. The wind is fair. The crew is in good spirits. There have been no accidents. He has fallen back into a familiar tone of self-confidence; the loneliness of the previous letter has been displaced, for the moment, by the satisfaction of the voyage actually being underway.

He acknowledges, briefly, the dangers ahead. The high latitudes are uncharted; the ship may be locked in ice. He has done what preparation can be done. He trusts the season and the equipment. He signs off without ceremony — "Adieu, my dear Margaret. Be assured that for my own sake, as well as yours, I will not rashly encounter danger."

The letter does the same kind of pacing work the novel's opening was doing: it moves us forward without delivering the encounter the novel is preparing. By the time we begin Letter 4, Walton has been on the ice for over two weeks, the ship is trapped, and the surrounding plain has filled with strange figures moving across it. Mary Shelley is good at this — three short letters, each one shorter than the last, and then the sudden detail of Letter 4.