John "Jack" Renton Birthplace, 6 Melvin Place

DIFFERENT CATEGORY - a Category B listed house marking a birthplace, thousands of miles from where the murder actually happened, not an inscribed stone or wayside marker; included on the same basis as this archive's Hannington, Patteson and Fenton entries. Found via a Historic Environment Scotland full-text search for 'murdered'. LOCATION DISCREPANCY: the listing's own summary says Renton was 'taken to the Solomon Islands' and was murdered there in 1878 - but Wikipedia's 'Jack Renton' article and the Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia both place his death at Aoba/Ambae Island, in the New Hebrides (modern Vanuatu), a different island group entirely, albeit one he reached via his Solomon Islands connections; worth treating the listing's geography as loose rather than precise. The real story, per Wikipedia and several press retrospectives (dubbing him 'The White Headhunter'): in 1868 John Renton, a young Orcadian seaman, deserted the American ship Renard with several others and drifted 2,000 miles in an open boat before landing at Maana'oba, off Malaita in the Solomon Islands. He was enslaved by a local bigman, Kabbou, for eight years, during which he learned the Lau language, took part in local culture, and reportedly became a headhunter himself - the only European known to have done so, and the first European to live on Malaita for an extended period. He was rescued by the Royal Navy in 1875 (his freedom reportedly bought with tomahawks, calico, pipes and tobacco) and returned to Orkney as a minor celebrity, before going back to the Pacific to work regulating the recruitment of Melanesian labourers for Queensland - a role largely aimed at preventing 'blackbirding' (coercive/deceptive recruitment amounting to slaving). He was killed in 1878 while serving on the ship Mystery. On hearing of his death, Kabbou and Renton's former island community mourned him by sacrificing 300 pigs, telling stories of his life for three days, and building a reliquary shrine in his memory that reportedly stood for 85 years until it burned down in 1963.