My name is Robert Walton, and I am writing to my sister from a ship locked in the ice north of Archangel. For weeks we saw nothing but white plain. Then one morning we made out a sledge drawn by dogs crossing the ice to the north, driven by a creature of gigantic stature. The following day we took aboard a European, half frozen and terribly wasted, who had been pursuing that same sledge. He would not eat until he had asked where we were going. When I told him that I meant to reach the pole, he said that I was chasing the same knowledge that had destroyed him, and he began to weep. I have never met a man I admired so much, nor one so plainly ruined. He has agreed to tell me his history, and I shall write it down as he speaks.