In the following spring he resumed his adventurous course, and completed a very careful survey of the shores of Baffin Sea; after which he repaired to England, and reached the Thames in safety, with his crews in good health, and his ships in excellent condition, about the middle of November 1820. [Illustration: THE “HECLA” AND “FURY” WINTERING AT WINTER ISLAND.] Having done so much and so well, it was natural that Captain Parry should again be selected for employment in the Arctic seas in the following year. He hoisted his flag in his old ship, the _Hecla_, and was accompanied by the _Fury_; both vessels being equipped in the most liberal manner. He sailed from the Nore on the 8th of May 1821; he returned to the Shetland Islands on the 10th of October 1823. In the interval, a period of seven-and-twenty months, he discovered the Duke of York Bay, the numerous inlets which break up the northern coast-line of the American continent, Winter Island, the islands of Anatoak and Ooght, the Strait of the _Fury_ and _Hecla_, Melville Peninsula, and Cockburn Island. During their winter sojourn on Winter Island, the English crews were surprised by a visit from a party of Eskimos, whose settlement Captain Parry visited in his turn. He found it an establishment of five huts, with canoes, sledges, dogs, and above sixty men, women, and children, as regularly, and, to all appearance, as permanently fixed as if they had occupied the same spot the whole winter. “If the first view,” says Parry, “of the exterior of this little village was such as to create astonishment, that feeling was in no small degree heightened on accepting the invitation soon given us to enter these extraordinary houses, in the construction of which we observed that not a single material was used but snow and ice. After creeping through two low passages, having each its arched doorway, we came to a small circular apartment, of which the roof was a perfect arched dome. From this three doorways, also arched, and of larger dimensions than the outward ones, led into as many inhabited apartments--one on each side, and the other facing us as we entered. The interior of these presented a scene no less novel than interesting: the women were seated on the beds at the sides of the huts, each having her little fireplace or lamp, with all her domestic utensils about her. The children crept behind their mothers, and the dogs shrank past us in dismay. The construction of this inhabited part of the hut was similar to that of the outer apartment,--being a dome, formed by separate blocks of snow laid with great regularity and no small art, each being cut into the shape requisite to form a substantial arch, from seven to eight feet high in the centre, and having no support whatever but what this principle of building supplies. Sufficient light was admitted into these curious edifices by a circular window of ice, neatly fitted into the roof of each apartment.”