Fonds MSG 259 - Edmund James Peck Fonds

Edmund James Peck was born on April 15, 1850, in Rusholme, England, and died on September 10, 1924. He was known in Inuktitut as Uqammaq, meaning ‘the one who talks well.’ Peck joined the Royal Navy at the age of fifteen after his parents died, and in 1875, studied Greek and theology at the Reading Institute of the Church Missionary Society in Islington, England. One year later, John Horden, the Bishop of Moose Factory recruited him for mission work in Hudson Bay. During the three-month voyage to Canada, he taught himself Inuktitut by comparing a Moravian Inuktitut New Testament to the English bible. Peck worked as an Anglican missionary in the Canadian North on the Quebec coast of Hudson Bay and on Baffin Island. He founded the first permanent mission on Baffin Island, Nunavut, and developed Inuktitut syllabics (derived from the Cree syllabary) and the first substantial English-Inuktitut dictionary. In 1905, Peck and his family moved to Ottawa where he served as Superintendent of Arctic Missions. He travelled North occasionally on supply vessels in the summer.