In setting forth this result as very remarkable, it is with reference, it should be observed, to the instrumentality and _capital_ employed. It is no uncommon thing for a sum like this, or much greater than this, to be realized in commercial enterprises; but, in such cases, there are generally many instruments and a large capital employed in the business. But here, under the one individual direction, there was but one ship employed, involving an investment of capital of from 6000_l._ to 12,700_l._, or, on an average, not exceeding 9000_l._, and this small investment yielding, through a series of about thirty years, no less a sum than 3000_l._ a year, being at the rate of 33⅓ per cent per annum on the capital employed. SECTION V.—_Unusual Capture of Walruses._ This incident, which belongs to the period of the Fame’s voyages, is here introduced, in conclusion of the general series of my Father’s Northern adventures, as presenting something of novelty in the modern whale-fishery. The _walrus_ or _sea-horse_, as the whalers designate it, is one of those extraordinary animals so prevalent in the Arctic regions, in which, like the whale, are comprised the mixed characteristics of the inhabitants of sea and land. The body, generally, from its extensive conformity, might be supposed to be that of a huge seal; but the head is peculiar, approaching the nearest, but only in rude and diminutive resemblance, to that of the elephant, as being somewhat square-faced, with a hard and massive skull, scarcely pervious to a musket-ball, and with two large external tusks pointing downward. The fore paws may be compared to webbed hands; the hind feet, in their ordinary position when at rest, form an expansive tail. The skin, covered with short hair, is of remarkable substance, so as to produce a strong, but rather porous leather, of about an inch in thickness. A thin layer of fat lies beneath the skin. As met with on the coast of Spitzbergen, this animal is found of the length, ordinarily, of twelve to fifteen feet, and eight to ten feet in circumference. But specimens elsewhere found on the coasts of some Arctic countries, are represented as extending to twenty feet in length. The Spitzbergen animal, full grown, is about the bulk of an ox; its weight, as I have estimated it, being from fifteen to twenty-four hundredweight. But a twenty-feet walrus could hardly weigh less than three tons.