This settlement harboured between two glacial cliffs near the cold sea’s jewel-green waters. On the western escarpment, I took up my observations of the mercantile activity below. At night I prowled like a phantom among the rude shops and barracks fronting the water. During my reconnoiterings, I heard a bearded Kit in sealskin leggings call the village Janalach.
A Russian vessel lay at anchor in the bay. Fully rigged and masted, its sails were furled in horizontal cocoons. It had wintered in Janalach. Its captain and sailors patiently awaited the brief Siberian summer and the short-lived retreat of the ice. Cossack seamen and Yakut nomads conferred amid the mud- and slush-defiled streets with Yukaghir traders, a polyglot scene both festive and fraught with disaccord. The sun’s wan eye had thawed not only the harbour ice but also the heretofore frozen hatreds and cupidities of all those gathered there. I witnessed quarrels, cozenings, fisticuffs, and sanguinary mayhem. That Frankenstein had viewed my behaviour as singular and tantamount to depraved began to impress me as a provincial narrowness of vision. Had he never remarked the reprehensible doings of his own kind?
Soon I became aware that a speculator of Scottish descent had voyaged aboard the Russian ship, the Tamyr Princess, to this bleak coast. The Cossack sailors called him Angus Ross, pronouncing his family name Roos, as if he had ties to their motherland more binding than the crassly mercantile. They also chaffed him about his ruddy face and his unruly muttonchop whiskers. Ross habitually answered with a swearing surliness that they rightly took as bluster. His Russian was of the inept pidgen variety that provoked further ridicule and general merriment. The sailors, it seemed, viewed him as their mascot. He got on better with the Yukaghirs in Janalach than did most of the Russians, however, and, despite his brusqueness, rarely fell into a serious quarrel with anyone.
I once ventured close enough to witness Ross’s dealings with a Yaket clansman working a movable forge in the lean-to of a smithy. The smith converted various metal articles supplied by the sailors-belt buckles, fisk hooks, hatch rings, and so forth-into cooking wares and weapons for his tribespeople, trading animals skins and trinkets for the wherewithal of his craft.
Ross bartered crisply with the Yaket for a set of small metal polar bears. The smith would accept nothing for them, as, I surmised, Ross had known from the outset of their negotiations, but the old pistol wedged in his belt. The works of the pistol had long since rusted, and its trigger would not pull. At last, however, the men made their trade, whereupon the Yaket stoked the engine of his forge and proceeded to work from the flintlock’s barrel a handsome tobacco pipe. Ross watched the process (as did I, albeit clandestinely), with evident appreciation of the smith’s handiwork. Soon, after all, the nomad who acquired the pipe must return to Janalach for tobacco.
Upon quitting the lean-to, Ross walked to a set-apart jumble of boulders near the water. To gloat, perhaps, over his booty, he disposed himself on a rock and arranged his iron figurines upon it between his legs, as a child would deploy a regiment of tin soldiers. I approached Ross from behind, covered his mouth and muttonchops, and impelled him irresistibly to his back; his toys fell like dominos. Ross essayed a scream, which my hand muffled. Additionally, the backwards force I imparted to his chin warned that further struggle would snap his neck. I regretted the subterfuge, but deemed it necessary to quiet him. He subsided beneath me, the horror engendered by my countenance evident in the wildness of his eyes.
“When do you return to your own country?” I asked Ross in English.
“What manner of creature are you?” he replied, when I provisionally unstopped his mouth. “Why this attack?”
“Because only you among all those gathered here speaks the language in which I now address you,” I said.
“Then for the first time I curse my birthplace,” Ross whispered. “Pray, let me go.”
“When do you next plan to visit your homeland?”
“In the fall,” Ross said. “As soon after the Tamyr Princess has put in at Murmansk as I may book passage.”
“Passage to where?” I asked.
“I have family in Kirkcaldy upon whom I have not laid eyes in five years,” he said. “I pray that I am not to be denied a chance to see them again, ever.”
“I wish you no harm, Angus Ross of Kirkcaldy. Rather, I desire from you a not unreasonable boon.”
“I am at your service.” At this confession, I smiled, perhaps for the first time since my rebirth; the Scot drew away from my smile as if from an unsheathed dagger. “Pray, sir, tell me what you would have me do.”
“First, Mr Ross, what I ask, I ask for another’s sake. Also, I have waylaid you as I have because I well know the hateful, even violent response that my unforeseen appearance among your kind everywhere excites.”
Through gritted teeth Ross said, “That I understand.”
I released him. He made no move to bolt, and I put a finger to my lips. “Know,” I whispered, “that once you leave here, sworn to secrecy about both your charge and its author, I have no power to guarantee your faithfulness to it. Should you abandon the task, you need fear neither my following curse nor the eternal prospect of retribution. What I ask, I trust you to do from a sense of honour.”
“A mighty trust,” said Ross, whether to commend or belittle it I could not tell. He deposited his figurines in a bag of waterproof fishskin. I, in turn, took from my pocket the letters that I wanted Ross to deliver to Mrs Saville. I outlined for him his charge and gave him the packet. Although I could hardly enforce his compliance, I asked that he refrain from trumpeting any word of our talk or even of his unexpected meeting with me here in Janalach.
“But who are you?” Ross asked. “Aye, what are you?”
“Because you have agreed to carry these letters, I give you leave to read them,” I said. “They explain, not always fairly or compassionately, what I do not choose to reiterate on this dreary shore. Fare thee well, Mr Ross. I thank you in advance for the brave accomplishment of your errand.” With that, I leapt away into a nearby crevice and scaled its chimney, for atop the cliff I had hidden my sire in a fortress of glacial debris.
Ross, I observed, stood rooted to the spot where I had accosted him. Had he imagined my unlikely manifestation? At length the packet in his hands persuaded him otherwise, and he ambled bemusedly back into the company of men.
As I learned years later, Ross fulfilled his humanitarian charge. The letters entrusted to him-nay, my copies of those letters-he delivered to Mrs Saville, a neighbour of the Godwins in Holburn, on his trip home to Kirkcaldy. Later, in a quest for solace, Mrs Saville passed them along to a member of that family, either to peruse and destroy or to bring out under the imprimatur of M. J. Godwin & Co.
Ross had told Wilton ’s sister that he had received the copied letters from a giant much resembling the creature delineated therein. Mrs Saville, knowing the handwriting for a good but imperfect forgery of her brother’s, rejected the Scotsman’s tale and his letters as a cruel hoax. She had long ago deduced, and resigned herself to the fact, of Captain Walton’s death. For his part, William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and the novel Caleb Williams, could not steel himself either to destroy or to publish the peculiar manuscript passed along to him by his second wife, the erstwhile Mary Jane Clairmont.
Almost by default, the letters fell into the keeping of the adolescent Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a young woman of enormous wit, independence, and energy. She regarded Walton’s letters as a cabalistic document of Promethean consequence. Even before her “elopement” to the Continent with the married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the summer of 1814, she had struggled to shape a readable story from these materials. Almost four years later, having reworked and abridged my copies of the letters, Mary allowed them, with more revisions by her husband, to appear anonymously in three small volumes from the little-regarded publishing house of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones.