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Tessuin
also known to qallunaat as Tessuwin and Tes-u-wane
Tessuin was a highly accomplished hunter, whaler and leader. He participated enthusiastically and skilfully in the whaling business. By 1860, he had acquired at least three whaleboats, which he staffed with Inuit crews and contracted out to qallunaat captains. The Inuit men and their families received meals, clothing and other items from the ship for the duration of the whaling season. In return, the ship's captain expected the right to trade for any whales they killed. On at least one occasion, Tessuin also seems to have worked independently and traded his whales to the highest bidder. When the Scottish woman Margaret Penny met Tessuin at Kekerten in 1857, she described him as a most intelligent man.
When he was not whaling, Tessuin traveled widely by qajaq, umiaq and dog team. He made at least one journey from Qimmiqsut (Nimigen Island) overland to Foxe Channel. He also routinely went down to Hudson Straits to intercept and trade with Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) ships half a century before the HBC came to Cumberland Sound.
In the late 1850s, Tessuin was caught in the middle of several clashes between Scottish whaling captains. His services were so much in demand that two captains tried to hire him in the fall of 1857. The next summer, Captain William Penny asked Tessuin to work at the Nuvujen station over the winter, but after Penny sailed for home, a different captain convinced Tessuin and his wife to come to Scotland. This captain wanted Tessuin to testify in court about an injured whale he had killed in 1856. The ownership of this whale was in dispute because another crew had harpooned it first.
Tessuin had apparently asked at least one captain to take him to Scotland previously, so perhaps he was eager to make the trip. He had lived in close proximity to qallunaat before. He and his wife Pedleatu chose to spend the winter of 1856-1857 on the Scottish whaler Alibi, where they would have presumably participated in singing, dancing and Christmas festivities. The winter in Scotland was very different. In the Edinburgh court, the defence attempted to argue that Tessuin could not testify because he did not believe in God, and therefore there was nothing to keep him from lying. Tessuin stated that he believed in a world after death where he would be punished for lying, and he swore to tell the truth. The court accepted his testimony, but Tessuin was presumably insulted or, at the very least, baffled by the defence's reasoning. Tragically, his wife Pedleatu had fallen ill and was suffering. She died less than two months after their arrival in Scotland. Tessuin returned to Cumberland Sound the following spring and never went abroad again.
In 1861, the explorer Charles Francis Hall reported that Tessuin had found another wife, Neu-er-ar-ping, and was employed by an American whaling captain. Years later, when Tessuin was an old man, an American whaling captain found him living with his family at Naujaqtalik. Tessuin had been very useful to the whalers until around 1877 when his gun went off prematurely and crippled him. He recovered enough to travel across the Sound by dog team, acting as a middleman by transporting skins and other trade goods between qallunaat and Inuit settlements.
NOTES :
Margaret Penny in Ross, ed., This Distant and Unsurveyed Country, 37.
Howgate, ed., The Cruise of the Florence, 24.