IT was in this week in 1861 that one of the most extraordinary Scotswomen of her time died at her home in Orkney. Isobel (or Isabel) Gunn was around the age of 80 when she died on November 7, 1861. Her date of birth has been stated as August 1, 1781, but there are no records to prove it.

Gunn was notable because she was the first European woman to travel to the west of Canada and was also the first woman to give birth to a European child in that then largely unexplored part of the Americas.

What made those distinctions even more remarkable is that she did so after living as a man for two years. Her ruse was only discovered when she gave birth to her son.

Gunn’s fascinating story began when – like so many Orcadians – she enrolled in the Hudson’s Bay Company at the age of about 15. Born Isobel Gunn, she adopted the pseudonym John Fubister or Fubbister when she signed on soon after her brother joined the company. She passed herself off as a native of Tankerness east of Kirkwall and contracted herself to the Company for three years at the princely – or should that be princessly? – sum of £8 per year.

The company was then setting up the routes to and from the western side of Canada for the lucrative fur trade and the other commodities they exported to Europe, and the work of their staff was dirty and dangerous, which is presumably why the company had a policy of not recruiting European women. They did, however, employ indigenous women.

Though Britain claimed all of Canada, the western part of the country was effectively foreign territory occupied by the native tribes, not all of whom were friendly.

Gunn sailed to Hudson Bay on the company’s ship the Prince of Wales in August 1806, along with a group of young Orcadian men and a cargo of chickens and geese.

She arrived at the company’s Moose Factory landing inside what was then known as Prince Rupert’s Land and was immediately taken on a smaller boat to Fort Albany, one of the oldest outposts of any European settlers in Canada.

Let the Hudson Bay Company itself take up the story: “In early September, Gunn was sent up the Albany River to Henley House with provisions and trading goods. The boat returned before the end of the month, bringing down wood for building boats.

“The following May, she was part of a larger brigade taking inland cargo upriver. In June, the boat came back from Martin Falls with furs and castoreum, a valuable extract from the beaver’s scent glands which was used as a pain killer. Gunn was then sent on a 2900-kilometre canoe trek to Martin Falls, and later down to Pembina in the fall [autumn], helping to ship goods and supplies to Company posts.”

She laboured in this way for two long years with Hudson’s Bay Company, helping to support the fur trading business. No one objected that she was not pulling her weight; quite to the contrary: Hugh Heney, who led one of the brigades Gunn travelled with to Pembina, reported that she “worked at anything and well like the rest of the men”.

Then came the day she was discovered. There is a story that Gunn went to Canada to follow her lover John Scarth. Whoever it was that impregnated her, Gunn was able to conceal the pregnancy to its end.

Alexander Henry was in charge of the company’s post at Pembina, now in North Dakota, USA, but then in Prince Rupert’s Land. He had no suspicion at all about John Fubister until the night of December 29, 1807. Fubister had taken ill during the day and in the evening came to his door seeking help. Henry showed him in to sit by the fire, only for screaming to start after Henry retired to bed.

He recorded in his journal: “I was much surprised to find him extended on the hearth, uttering dreadful lamentations; he stretched out his hands toward me, and in piteous tones begged to me to be kind to a poor, helpless, abandoned wretch, who was not of the sex I had supposed, but an unfortunate Orkney girl, pregnant and actually in childbirth.”

Gunn named the child James Scarth, but the company was concerned about her deception and her illegitimate child. Though she had worked and lived as a man quite successfully she was now demoted to the role of washerwoman.

She stuck it for a year before the Company returned her to Orkney in 1809, where she became a stocking and mitten maker in Stromness.

She returned to being Isobel Gunn and never married, living out her life without apparently ever travelling further than Orkney again.

Isobel Gunn’s story has been told in song and poetry and was turned into an eponymous novel by Audrey Thomas, published in 1999, while The Orkney Lad: The Story of Isabel Gunn, is a documentary directed by award-winning filmmaker Anne Wheeler.