Kennedy, William P.

Epithet: of Add MS 36049

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000000576.0x000092

Epithet: MD,of Inverness

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000000576.0x000091

Little is known of William Kennedy’s early life, except that he was the brother of Oliver Kennedy, and that by the 1710s, the Kennedy brothers were living in the parish of St. Michael, Barbados.

In 1725, the Court of Common Pleas of Barbados declared that George Nicholas owed Oliver Kennedy a sum of over £1100. Nicholas also owed money to a number of other creditors. Although he was wealthy enough to own a 316-acre sugar plantation (now known as St. Nicholas’ Abbey) and 130 slaves, Nicholas took great pains to avoid paying his debts, eventually leaving Barbados, having been accused of carrying out a fraudulent scheme with “one Joseph Dottin (“To the Kings most Excellent Majesty in Council,” p. 5).

According to testimony by William Kennedy, Nicholas avoided paying his debts to Oliver Kennedy and others, and enriched Joseph Dottin. The case was further complicated by William Kennedy’s appointment, sometime before 1727, to the position of Deputy Provost Marshal General of Barbados and Deputy Marshal of the Common Plea Courts, which opened Kennedy up to the charge of tampering with records concerning the case, though formal charges were not made until 1748. Dottin died in 1735, and the plantation and slaves eventually passed to his daughter Christian, the wife of John Gay Alleyne (1724-1801), a notable planter and politician. William Kennedy maintained that the Kennedys had not been satisfactorily compensated for the debt, and that Dottin’s heirs, the Alleynes, now owed them money.

The conflict was renewed when, in 1748, Alleyne formally accused William Kennedy of destroying records concerning the case during his tenure as the Deputy Provost Marshal of Barbados, which had ended in 1730. Alleyne alleged that in that year, Kennedy “had either destroyed or concealed” bills of sale for Nicholas’ slaves, which would allegedly have been in his office. Kennedy claimed that such records had never existed. The case was decided in favor of Alleyne in 1752, a decision which William Kennedy appealed to the British Privy Council in 1753. However, the outcome of his appeal is unknown, as is further information on William and Oliver Kennedy after the conclusion of the case.

From the guide to the William Kennedy papers, Kennedy, William papers, 1752-1753, (William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan)

William Kennedy was born in 1814 at Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, the son of a chief factor and a Cree Indian mother. He was educated at St Margaret's Hope on the Orkney Islands before returning to Canada in 1833 to join the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). He spent the next five years in the Ottawa valley, later transferring to the Ungava and Labrador area, before resigning in 1846 over the HBC policy of selling alcohol to the Indians. Moving to Canada West where he began a lobby against the HBC monopoly, he later established a fishery at the mouth of the Saugeen River in 1848, thus becoming one of the founders of Southampton, Canada West.

In 1851, Kennedy was appointed to lead the British Franklin Search Expedition, 1851-1852, sponsored by Lady Franklin and by public subscription to search for Sir John Franklin's missing Northwest Passage expedition in Prince Regent Inlet and in the area southwest of Cape Walker, Barrow Strait. Sailing from Aberdeen in May 1851 in Prince Albert, Kennedy penetrated Lancaster Sound into Prince Regent Inlet. During an attempt to enter Port Leopold on Somerset Island, Kennedy was separated from the ship and was marooned for more than five weeks while his second-in-command Joseph-Ren Bellot took the ship to Batty Bay to establish winter quarters before returning overland to rescue him. In February 1852, Kennedy and Bellot set out from Batty Bay on a dog sledge journey to search the adjacent coasts, sledging south along the coast of Somerset Island and discovering a channel which Kennedy later named Bellot Strait, marking the northernmost extremity of the North American continent. Passing through the strait, the party traversed Peel Sound and continued west, crossing Prince of Wales Island to Ommanney Bay before returning to the ship in May, a journey of some 2,000 km. Kennedy's narrative of the expedition was published in 1853.

In 1853, a second expedition under Kennedy was organized to search for Franklin in the western and Russian Arctic via the Bering Strait but this was aborted after the crew mutinied in Chile. Returning to Canada in 1856, Kennedy resumed his lobby against the HBC, arguing for the annexation of Rupert's Land to Canada, and he became a director of the North-West Transportation, Navigation and Railway Company. In 1860, he settled permanently at St Andrews, Manitoba, where he operated a store with his brother, later serving as a member of the Board of Education of Manitoba and as a magistrate. He died on 25 January 1890 at St Andrews.

Published work A short narrative of the second voyage of the Prince Albert, in search of Sir John Franklin by William Kennedy, W H Dalton, London (1853) SPRI Library Shelf (41)91(08)[1851-1852 Kennedy]

From the guide to the William Kennedy collection, 1851-1856, (Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)