On 28 June 1806, John Fubbister (aka Isobel Gunn) left the port of Stromness having signed on as a labourer with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Isobel Gunn was born in Orphir in 1781, and disguised as a man, she signed on with the Hudson Bay Company for 3 years where her brother George was also employed.

Although HBC did employ First Nation women, it did not permit European women to work for them. It was a harsh environment but for Isobel to earn £8 a year was far more than she could get working in Orkney.

Apparently Isobel’s disguise was a success, even when working in the remote location of Martin Falls and then on to the HBC outpost on the Red River at Pembina in modern North Dakota, a distance of more than 2,900 kilometres (1,800 mi) .

Clearly her disguise did not fool everyone because on the morning of 29 December 1807 she gave birth to  a baby boy at the home of Alexander Henry the younger, the chief of the North West Company‘s Pembina post, after having fallen ill and begging Alexander Henry for shelter. According to Henry’s journal:

I returned to my room, where I had not been long before he sent one of my own people, requesting the favour of speaking with me. Accordingly, I stepped down to him, and was much surprised to find him extended out upon the hearth, uttering most dreadful lamentations; he stretched out his hand towards me and in a piteful tone of voice begg’d my assistance, and requested I would take pity upon a poor helpless abandoned wretch, who was not of the sex I had every reason to suppose. But was an unfortunate Orkney girl pregnant and actually in childbirth, in saying this she opened her jacket and display’d to my view a pair of beautiful round white breasts… In about an hour she was safely delivered of a fine boy, and that same day she was conveyed home in my cariole, where she soon recovered.

HBC employee James Scarth was the father. He had been on the same ship that brought both of them out to the North West. It is said that under threat of her disguise being revealed that he sexually assaulted her.

Eventually Isobel Gunn, now under the name Mary Fubbister, was returned to Scotland with her son. In Stromness her life was one of hardship and poverty, knitting stockings and mittens . She died in 1861.

Stromness: The First and Last Port of Call

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