What Russian port does Walton's expedition depart from?

Walton’s expedition departs from Archangel, the historical English name for Arkhangelsk, a Russian port on the White Sea.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Walton writes his early letters to his sister from Archangel while preparing a voyage toward the North Pole. He travels there because it is a practical launching point for Arctic exploration, where he hopes to find a northern passage and expand geographical knowledge.

Archangel is not the same place as Moscow, Russia’s inland capital, or St. Petersburg, the major Baltic port. Murmansk is also a northern Russian port, but it was not Walton’s departure point in the novel and did not become a city until the twentieth century. The book’s opening letters establish Walton’s ambition before he encounters Victor Frankenstein among the Arctic ice.