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William Penny
William Penny was born in 1808 or 1809 in Peterhead, Scotland. His mother was Helen Robertson. When he was only 12 years old, he accompanied his father (also Captain William Penny) on a whaling voyage to Davis Strait. The younger Penny would be drawn to the sea for the rest of his life.
Penny found steady work on Arctic whaling ships and became a captain in 1835. This was a devastating year for the British whaling industry in Davis Strait. Six ships were wrecked, 11 were trapped in the ice and 135 men died of scurvy and frostbite over the winter. Penny never lost a ship, but he became convinced of the need to establish permanent, safe whaling stations.
The only question was where to build them. As a large inhabited inlet that remained ice-free until late in the year, Cumberland Sound was ideal. The whalers had heard of it but did not know exactly where it was. In 1840, the young Inuk Inulluapik navigated Penny into the Sound. It was to prove a hugely profitable whaling ground for qallunaat, but Penny arrived too late to catch any whales and returned home empty-handed.
The British whaling industry was suffering, and Penny had to wait three years to captain another ship. This enabled him to spend more time with his new wife, Margaret Irvine. Their first son died in infancy, but they soon had a daughter, Helen, and would later have three more children together. In 1844, Penny once again set sail for Cumberland Sound.
While working as a whaler, Penny conducted the first searches for the missing British explorer Sir John Franklin. He befriended Franklin's wife, Lady Jane, and obtained command of one of several official search expeditions in 1850-1851. Franklin was never rescued, but Penny learned the effectiveness of dogsled travel and overwintering aboard ships.
Penny then returned to Cumberland Sound in 1853-1854, where he deliberately froze his two ships, the Lady Franklin and Sophia, into the ice at Nuvujen. The next spring, he was the first qallunaaq captain to hunt whales at the floe edge. The voyage was hugely successful, inspiring Penny to overwinter three more times in Cumberland Sound and to establish permanent whaling stations at Kekerten and Nuvujen. In 1857, he brought Matthäus Warmow, a Moravian, the first missionary to visit the Sound. His wife, Margaret, also accompanied him on two of the trips. Penny always wanted to be at the forefront of new developments and technologies, and his second-to-last trip was as captain of a new steam-engine whaler, the Polynia.
In 1864, Penny was forced into retirement. No one would hire him. The Scottish whaling industry was in decline, and Penny was also stubborn, opinionated and full of grand schemes. These same characteristics that had enabled him to explore various whaling grounds and techniques also made him a risk to companies. In 1867, his daughter Janet wrote, "Poor papa tried every way for a ship but all in vain". Still, Penny had achieved much, and he lived to be an old man. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on February 1, 1892, in Aberdeen, only six months after the death of his wife Margaret.
NOTE : Janet Penny in Ross, ed., This Distant and Unsurveyed Country, 219.