McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Peck, Edmund James, 1850-1924
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1850-1924
History
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.
Places
Legal status
Functions, occupations and activities
Mandates/sources of authority
Internal structures/genealogy
General context
Relationships area
Access points area
Subject access points
Place access points
Occupations
Control area
Authority record identifier
Institution identifier
Rules and/or conventions used
Status
Level of detail
Dates of creation, revision and deletion
Revised on July 17, 2024, by Leah Louttit-Bunker