Orsborne was tried and imprisoned for the theft of the trawler; subsequently he claimed that the voyage had been part of an undercover operation organised by British Naval Intelligence.
He assumed the Orsborne name when his widowed mother remarried and moved the family to Aberdeen, where George, nicknamed "Dod", spent his formative years.
[8] His exploits included searching for traces of the American aviator Paul Redfern, who disappeared on a flight over the Brazilian jungle in 1927,[9][10] and later adventures in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
[12] In April 1936, Orsborne and a crew of four, with his younger brother James as an unauthorised passenger, left Grimsby in another Marstrand trawler, the Girl Pat, in what was supposed to be a normal North Sea fishing trip.
[13][14] Nothing more was heard of them until mid-May when the owners, who had by then assumed the vessel lost, received invoices relating to its repair and reprovisioning in the north Spanish port of Corcubión late in April.
[19] After the vessel's capture and detention following a chase outside Georgetown, British Guiana, Orsborne and his crew were hailed as heroes by much of the world's press.
[28] He returned home in March 1946,[29] and in September 1947 was one of two persons rescued in mid-Atlantic from the abandoned ketch Lovely Lady; the other was a stowaway, a Spanish greengrocer.