Avast, me hearties!

Now Spencer Rosie, chairman of Kirkwall Community Council, is behind a campaign that has raised 60,000 to move Gow’s Folly and "go public" on the story of Britain’s last homegrown pirate.

"We’re aiming to have it rebuilt in the grounds of the Orkney Museum by summer, so the story of Pirate Gow can take its rightful place in history," Rosie says.

Gow’s Folly was built nearly 300 years ago by a wealthy merchant laird to celebrate the capture and hanging of the pirate who had terrorised merchant shipping and led the British Navy a merry dance, only to be betrayed on home ground by a one-time friend. It’s pretty safe to say that the catchphrase "Aaaar, Jim lad" and other Long John Silver-type expressions would never have seen the light of day if Robert Louis Stevenson - whose father, uncles and grandfather built most of the famous lighthouses round Scotland - hadn’t had his imagination fired by seafaring stories from the old sea dogs he met. Top of the list was the notorious Pirate Gow.

John Gow grew up in Stromness at the turn of the 18th century. Stromness, an intercontinental link for ships from many nations, made a seafaring career inevitable and, at 26, Gow was second mate on the Caroline, trading in Santa Cruz. Working conditions aboard merchant ships were appalling and mutinies were common, but what led the mutineers on the Caroline to move into outright piracy, nobody will ever know for sure. Gow’s role is equally vague, but when the captain and officers had their throats cut, his seafaring abilities swung it when it came to taking command of the ship.

Two very profitable pirating years later and the Caroline - now the Revenge - had been dodging British naval men-of-war in the Mediterranean, so Gow decided to lie low in more familiar Northern waters. In 1725 the ship, now renamed the George Galley, sailed into Stromness harbour and the town’s prodigal son (posing as a rich merchant seaman) was wined and dined by the cream of Orkney society.

Gow didn’t hang about. In a matter of weeks he’d set up some lucrative business deals and secured the hand in marriage of the beautiful Helen Gordon, daughter of a local clergyman. To convince her of his honourable intentions, Gow arranged for horses to take the couple to Stenness, where the proposal was sealed by joining hands through the Stone of Odin and swearing to be true until death. Once done, there was no backing out of the marriage. In future generations an ad-hoc arrangement with the Stenness Kirk was put in place, where couples could back out of the arrangement by going in together through one door and coming out separately through another, but this wasn’t available to poor Helen Gordon when the inevitable happened.

With a price on their heads, it was only a matter of time before some of the crew decided to cut their losses and turn Gow in to the authorities in the hope of earning some leniency for themselves. Gordon’s feelings weren’t top priority when the pirate’s cover was blown. Keeping up appearances was now irrelevant and a quick booty collection at the Hall of Clestrain where Gow had been staying, was followed by a brief sojourn at Sheriff Honeyman’s estate on the island of Graemsay after the Revenge left Stromness.

Gow’s involvement in the abduction of serving wenches - put ashore the next morning apparently clutching compensatory baubles - remains open to conjecture.

Gow’s luck had run out. Heading up through Orkney’s North Isles, he’d overestimated his old friendship with James Fea on Eday and underestimated the tides and currents. When he ran aground on the Calf of Eday, Fea made a citizen’s arrest and arranged for a man-of-war to collect the pirates and drop off the reward money.

Gow’s request to his one-time friend to at least do him the courtesy of shooting him dead wasn’t complied with, but the bloodstains still seen on the wood floor of Carrick House testify to a fairly bloody capture scene. Carrick House’s present owner, Rosemary Joy, is adamant that the stains refuse to budge no matter what cleaning agents and polishes are used (and nobody would blame her for not trying too hard). She’s never experienced any ghostly happenings around the place, though she thinks that the bloodstains help to keep Gow’s memory alive.

At the time, that was Helen Gordon’s problem - a lifetime of haunting by the spirit of her dead partner until she broke the ‘till death’ vow by clasping his dead hand. Nothing for it but to make the journey down to London, by which time he would be hanging very dead, but helpfully preserved in a heavy coating of tar - as was the custom for freshly deceased Newgate Prison inmates.

Even at the end, Gow’s dispatch wasn’t straightforward. Anxious to speed up the hanging process, his friends had jumped up to grab his ankles and the rope had broken. Still alive, Gow had to remount the scaffolding a second time.

These unsavoury titbits are known through a journal of events written in the Newgate Review by Daniel Defoe, who can’t have made a lot of money out of Robinson Crusoe if he was reporting on court cases. He produced another book out of the Gow story though, as did Sir Walter Scott nearly a century later. Scott did a lot better with his and The Pirate was a bestseller.

As for Gordon, the experience of hiring a dinghy and rowing out to clasp hold of whatever was left hanging from Wapping dock must have made her seriously consider her lifetime of haunting option. She did the grisly deed though, then came home, married somebody else and raised a family.

Meanwhile, Gow’s fair-weather friend James Fea did all right, with his king’s bounty of 800 guineas and a third of the Revenge and its cargo. He gave the ship’s ballast to his friend James Traill to build a folly in his townhouse garden, to show off that this was all that remained of the notorious pirate ship. Nearly 300 years later, there it still stands.

The Hollywood film industry has been known to look to Scotland for inspiration. If the money men are looking for another sea-faring story to repeat the success of Master and Commander or Pirates of the Caribbean, they won’t get better than this.