Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Sair Dowdy and I'm w chuckerboarding and suns. During
Speaker 1: this podcast, I've really come to love talking about some
Speaker 1: of the sketchier figures in history. And it took me
Speaker 1: a while to get there. Remember the old Marie Laveaux
Speaker 1: episode and the Mad Trapper episode. They really frustrated me,
Speaker 1: just because they're so obscure and you can't tell what's true.
Speaker 1: And Marie Levo, I mean, there might have been more
Speaker 1: than one Murray Levo. It's it can be kind of
Speaker 1: frustrating when you first get into it. But by the
Speaker 1: time I got to like the Emperor Norton episode or
Speaker 1: spring Heeled Jack last fall, I was pretty sold on
Speaker 1: the idea of these sketchy historical figures because sometimes it's
Speaker 1: really just as interesting to learn about the life someone
Speaker 1: invents than the life that they really lead. Yeah, but well,
Speaker 1: today it may be pretty easy to self invent through
Speaker 1: the Internet and new media. For example, it was kind
Speaker 1: of tricky in the early eighteen hundreds in rural England.
Speaker 1: You were probably really limited in where you could go
Speaker 1: for one thing, who you could meet also, and what
Speaker 1: you could do, Yeah, especially if you were a young
Speaker 1: poor woman like Mary Wilcox, who were going to be
Speaker 1: talking about today. She ran away from home, she worked
Speaker 1: a bunch of odd jobs, she got fired, she had
Speaker 1: a fowling hospital baby who died, She took to begging,
Speaker 1: and it all seems like a pretty dismal life path
Speaker 1: until Holy Thursday or Good Friday, depending on what account
Speaker 1: you read, in eighteen seventeen, when she wandered into the
Speaker 1: village of Almondsbury and became a princess. Of course at
Speaker 1: the time, and nobody recognized her as Mary Wilcox. She
Speaker 1: was just a semi exotic looking young woman with long
Speaker 1: dark hair, brown eyes, and very white teeth, and a
Speaker 1: turban kind of set her apart. Yeah, it kind of
Speaker 1: made her stand out a little bit in this village
Speaker 1: outside of Bristol. And she was also where in a
Speaker 1: plain black dress and carrying all her belongings in one bundle,
Speaker 1: and she seemed to be starving and distress kind of
Speaker 1: worse for aware. But what really made her stick out
Speaker 1: like a sore thumb is that she was speaking a
Speaker 1: language no one could understand. Yeah, so that confused the
Speaker 1: locals and and they were thinking, okay, well, maybe she's
Speaker 1: just your standard foreign beggar, you know, some country that
Speaker 1: might be well known. Somebody in town might speak the language.
Speaker 1: So they took her to the porthouse, and no one
Speaker 1: there could understand her either, So she was taken to
Speaker 1: the county magistrate's house Samuel Warrell, who was also known
Speaker 1: as Devil Wharrel, who had a Greek Man servant who
Speaker 1: was fluent in a few different languages, but nobody there
Speaker 1: could understand her either, And Devil Wharrel was kind of skeptical.
Speaker 1: In the first place. He thought she might just be
Speaker 1: a beggar who had a really elaborate hoax, and asked
Speaker 1: for any paper she had. She didn't have any. She
Speaker 1: just had a few a few small coins, including a
Speaker 1: counterfeit coin. That right was a big no no. But
Speaker 1: that was one thing that made them start thinking she
Speaker 1: might have been the real deal, because she didn't seem
Speaker 1: at all concerned by the fact that she had a
Speaker 1: counterfeit coin. It didn't seem to be a significant problem
Speaker 1: to her. So well, Devil Wahrel was a little bit skeptical.
Speaker 1: His American born wife Elizabeth was pretty enchanted by this
Speaker 1: young woman. It was it was kind of an exotic
Speaker 1: addition to this sleepy town. Yeah, so they put her up,
Speaker 1: this mystery woman. They put her up in a in
Speaker 1: the village's public house. And it's here where the first
Speaker 1: clue of her origin or so called origin emerged. She
Speaker 1: saw a print of a pineapple on the wall and
Speaker 1: got really excited, and she identified it as a nanna.
Speaker 1: So she's from some tropical locale. People are thinking now
Speaker 1: she recognizes a pineapple and is calling it by name,
Speaker 1: symbol of home. And that night at the lodging house
Speaker 1: she acted even stranger. She didn't eat, but she drank
Speaker 1: tea and performed a prayer over every cup. She didn't
Speaker 1: seem to recognize the purpose of a bed either. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think a landlady's daughter had to demonstrate to her. Look,
Speaker 1: how comfortable the bed is. You can sleep here instead
Speaker 1: of on the floor. But the next day Mrs Whirl
Speaker 1: comes by the lodging house, picks her up, brings her
Speaker 1: back to Knowl Park, which is the estate where they live,
Speaker 1: and started to investigate the girl's origins by going through
Speaker 1: books that the couple owned and and the mystery woman
Speaker 1: seemed especially drawn to pictures of China in books, and
Speaker 1: also to the Chinese furniture and little Chinese knickknacks that
Speaker 1: the world's had in their home, so it seemed like
Speaker 1: maybe she had some kind of Asian connection. She also
Speaker 1: identified herself as Cariboo, so we have a name now too,
Speaker 1: to to put on this mystery woman. But she was
Speaker 1: still behaving really strangely, and she wasn't really eating, and
Speaker 1: nobody could understand her. So after a few days she
Speaker 1: was finally presented to the Portuguese sailor Manuel and Nestso
Speaker 1: and this was really the first big break in in
Speaker 1: who this woman might be. Yeah, he said he could
Speaker 1: understand her language, and he told the following story. Her
Speaker 1: name is Cariboo, and she's a princess from an island
Speaker 1: called Java Sioux in the East Indies. She's she'd been
Speaker 1: stolen by pirates and had escaped to the Bristol Channel. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the worlds are pretty impressed by that story. That
Speaker 1: sounds incredibly romantic, and were of course right in the
Speaker 1: thick of the romantic era right now too, so so
Speaker 1: they were into it. They invited friends over. They wanted
Speaker 1: people to to see this woman and educated friends to
Speaker 1: who might build a piece together more information about her background.
Speaker 1: So Cariboo spent the summer at Noel Park entertaining her host,
Speaker 1: and she really seems to have had a pretty good time.
Speaker 1: And when we discussed the real woman's actual background, some
Speaker 1: of this is gonna add up a little bit. But
Speaker 1: she was very good at fencing and at archery. She
Speaker 1: made her own bow and arrow. Actually, she would dance
Speaker 1: and carry around a gong which she would play. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: She'd also pray from the tree tops. She also swam
Speaker 1: naked in the lake and cooked a chicken curry, So
Speaker 1: good stuff for a guest to do. Multitalented, and she
Speaker 1: also met with the world's learned guests who extracted even
Speaker 1: more of her story from her and had her copy
Speaker 1: out examples of her writing. And finally, a doctor Wilkinson
Speaker 1: from Bath even examined her head and found that there
Speaker 1: were strange incisions there that could only have been the
Speaker 1: work of Oriental surgeons, is how he put it. He
Speaker 1: also helped identify her language as ray Jane from Sumatra. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so word of this exotic princess obviously got out there.
Speaker 1: All these guests coming over and the world's certainly are
Speaker 1: trying to promote this woman staying with them. And so
Speaker 1: when the news finally makes it into the national papers,
Speaker 1: they hear from somebody and it's it's not good news.
Speaker 1: It's not somebody confirming her story. It's a Mrs Neil
Speaker 1: from Bristol who said she knows exactly who this Princess
Speaker 1: Cariboo is. She's Mary Wilcox, who is the daughter of
Speaker 1: a cobbler from the village of Witherage. And Mrs Neil
Speaker 1: says that the woman has stayed in her lodging house
Speaker 1: before and would even entertain her with this made up
Speaker 1: gibberish language, and whenever she would leave the house she'd
Speaker 1: go out on the turban. So it seems pretty likely
Speaker 1: it's the same lady. Yeah, and Cariboo finally confessed, yes,
Speaker 1: it is true. The news went crazy over this confession.
Speaker 1: They were actually kind of impressed by the fact that
Speaker 1: it was such an elaborate fraud and an embarrassment for
Speaker 1: the middle class. Yeah, it was kind of. It put
Speaker 1: the whorls in a bad place, and all of these
Speaker 1: so called experts who had been chatting away with with
Speaker 1: Princess Cariboo and trying to decipher her culture. But now
Speaker 1: that we know she's really Mary Wilcox, what's this lady's story?
Speaker 1: Why did she start this elaborate ruse in the first place,
Speaker 1: and where did she pick up the skills that that
Speaker 1: made it so convincing. I think if I was trying
Speaker 1: to pretend to speak a foreign language, I wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to do it for more than an hour or so.
Speaker 1: Or pretend not to understand English, I think that would
Speaker 1: be would be even dr So. Mary Wilcox was baptized
Speaker 1: November twenty three see right in England. According to her
Speaker 1: father about of rheumatic fever had left her a little
Speaker 1: off in the head from a from a pretty young age. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but she had been an active kid. She worked, she
Speaker 1: was kind of a tomboy and at nineteen she ended
Speaker 1: up leaving home. By the time she got to London,
Speaker 1: she was actually really sick and had a fire cupping
Speaker 1: therapy done at a poorhouse hospital and that's where those
Speaker 1: weird scars that Dr Wilkinson had found came from. She
Speaker 1: picked up some knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish customs when
Speaker 1: she worked as a nursemaid for a family who lived
Speaker 1: next door to a Jewish household, And she also used
Speaker 1: that opportunity to practice storytelling to the kids. So that's
Speaker 1: kind of where she picked up some of her skills
Speaker 1: in that department. Yeah, and and from there she lived
Speaker 1: her a time at a Magdalene hospital for reformed women,
Speaker 1: so a prostitutes home or reform prostitutes home. But she
Speaker 1: was kicked out when it was discovered that she hadn't
Speaker 1: in fact been a prostitute. I read in our view
Speaker 1: of one of the more recent books on Princess Carabell
Speaker 1: a lot of the information comes from an old narrative
Speaker 1: by John Matthew Gooch, but in a newer accounts it's
Speaker 1: just said, well, somebody who lied this much. Maybe we
Speaker 1: shouldn't entirely believe some of these details about her life.
Speaker 1: Maybe she was kicked out of the Magdalene home for
Speaker 1: for other reasons, not because she she was too too
Speaker 1: pure to be living there. Yes, well, regardless of what
Speaker 1: happened there, we know that after that she may have
Speaker 1: spent some time in France, and by February eighteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: she had had a baby, which was identified first with
Speaker 1: as the child of Exeter Bricklayer John Edward Baker and
Speaker 1: later as the child of a Frenchman that she had
Speaker 1: supposedly met in a book shop, So another really sketchy
Speaker 1: up in the air detail. But by late in the year,
Speaker 1: the baby head unfortunately died at the Faumiling hospital and
Speaker 1: Mary ultimately ended up back in Devon, where she told
Speaker 1: her parents that she was off to Philadelphia. Yeah, she
Speaker 1: took her time getting to Bristol, though, which is where
Speaker 1: she would have failed to a America, And she was
Speaker 1: begging along the way and just sort of just sort
Speaker 1: of working her way up the road, begging and hanging
Speaker 1: out with gypsies too, which is certainly where she picked
Speaker 1: up some of her modes of dress and some of
Speaker 1: her customs that were so convincing to to the people
Speaker 1: she ended up with. But finally in Bristol, she decided
Speaker 1: she'd get her ticket to Philadelphia, and she set about
Speaker 1: raising the money she needed for the passage. But she
Speaker 1: noticed while she was begging and trying to raise the
Speaker 1: money that the Breton girls, who were also begging in
Speaker 1: their traditional lace head dresses, were doing a lot better
Speaker 1: and they were getting a lot more money, and she
Speaker 1: decided that she wanted to to figure out a way
Speaker 1: to put herself apart too, So she designed a turban
Speaker 1: something Mrs Neil later remembered and pretended to be French,
Speaker 1: and again with the lying she would sort of change
Speaker 1: her identity if she ran into somebody who actually spoke French,
Speaker 1: then she would be Spanish, and and vice versa. Just
Speaker 1: sort of her game the best she could and eventually
Speaker 1: making her way up to Almondsbury where she has her
Speaker 1: dramatic evolution into Princess Cariboo. So ultimately, the key to
Speaker 1: her success seemed to be the fact that she actually
Speaker 1: knew a few languages and she could understand, speak and
Speaker 1: imitate them, and also her ability to convincingly not understand
Speaker 1: English at all. Yeah, that ability to feign ignorance of
Speaker 1: her native language really did help, because after experts started
Speaker 1: hanging around and they honestly believed that she could not
Speaker 1: understand them, they would would discuss things they had seen
Speaker 1: and quiz her, and she could pick up on what
Speaker 1: they were saying and the books that they were showing
Speaker 1: her and sort of do what was expected of her,
Speaker 1: follow the customs that they thought a princess from this
Speaker 1: part of the world might actually do. So really good
Speaker 1: memory came into play there too. Yeah, she she definitely
Speaker 1: had a good memory. But after her discovery, after her outing,
Speaker 1: Mrs Worrell did spring for a ticket to America. Mrs
Speaker 1: Worrell seems like a pretty nice lace. I know, that's
Speaker 1: really generous. And when she got there, Mary was met
Speaker 1: by crowds at the dock, but her attempt to perform
Speaker 1: as Princess Cariboo with a showman actually didn't go so well,
Speaker 1: so she ended up coming back to London in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty four to try the same exact act, but also
Speaker 1: with very little success. I mean, I'd guess the Princess
Speaker 1: Cariboo if she was still doing her archery and her
Speaker 1: gong dances and stuff. I don't know. Maybe maybe the
Speaker 1: show just wasn't as impressive as the real deal. But
Speaker 1: by eight she was back in Bristol and married. And
Speaker 1: so what is this former princess, this impostor going to
Speaker 1: do with the next thirty years of her life if
Speaker 1: she can't tour as Princess Cariboo get into the leech business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she sold leeches to the Bristol infirmary and was pretty
Speaker 1: good at it too. She was really successful and then
Speaker 1: she had her new little family, tried to play down
Speaker 1: her whole Princess Cariboo pass and lived a long, happy
Speaker 1: life until eighteen sixty four. Yeah, and I'm a little
Speaker 1: curious about what selling leeches really entails in the first place.
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to do some more research on that,
Speaker 1: because well, I don't know, or maybe not. It's kind
Speaker 1: of gross. And I know, when I think about it carefully,
Speaker 1: maybe you could just ask someone to write in about
Speaker 1: the leech business. Maybe if you have persand knowledge of
Speaker 1: the leach selling business, let us know it and let
Speaker 1: us know how, because we're really curious to know why.
Speaker 1: You know that? Definitely, Um, But I mean, I think
Speaker 1: this is an interesting story again, these these sort of
Speaker 1: sketchy people who reinvent their lives, or it's just interesting
Speaker 1: to weigh the combination of factors that are probably involved,
Speaker 1: possibly a little mental illness or as her father said,
Speaker 1: some kind of effects from her rheumatic fever. As a youth,
Speaker 1: she seemed way too smart. She did seem really smart,
Speaker 1: and and I had a lot of initiative to to
Speaker 1: sort of make herself into into something she couldn't be.
Speaker 1: But of course she also seems like a convulsive liar,
Speaker 1: and there's a huge element of fraud and in betrayal
Speaker 1: behind it because she she did betray people who were
Speaker 1: quite kind to her. Um, it's just there's so much
Speaker 1: going on. I think it's it's a strange story. I've
Speaker 1: never seen the movie. I think I might have to.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it either, look it up now. I
Speaker 1: vaguely remember the title kind of fascinating me as a
Speaker 1: little kid because it had a princess with a crown
Speaker 1: on the cover in the movie story. Now, do you
Speaker 1: ever have like the covers that you can remember? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do, but I usually watched the movies. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: never saw the movie. But um, maybe someday you could
Speaker 1: also let us know if it's actually worth my renting it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you can write to us or at History Podcast
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com, or you can look
Speaker 1: us up on Twitter at myston history or on Facebook. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that brings us to a listener mail. So this
Speaker 1: seme is from Dave, and I thought it was completely
Speaker 1: appropriate for this podcast because it's about a made up language.
Speaker 1: If only only Princess Caribou had convinced a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of other people to speak her language. She might have
Speaker 1: had a case here, but Dave wrote in high Ladies,
Speaker 1: I absolutely love the podcast. I've been a listener for years,
Speaker 1: but first time emailer. Have you ever considered doing an
Speaker 1: episode on Esperanto. It's a quote constructed language created in
Speaker 1: seven by a Polish man named L. L. Zamenhoff, with
Speaker 1: an incredible history. Meant is a culture neutral international language.
Speaker 1: It's the only such language that actually gained a lasting
Speaker 1: following which still exists today. Esperantos were targets of the
Speaker 1: Nazis and Soviets, and many were killed in World War Two.
Speaker 1: Salmenhoff was Jewish. It has a very rich literature, including
Speaker 1: many many books originally written in Esperanto. Both the life
Speaker 1: of Zamenhoff and the resulting Esperanto movement is just endlessly fascinating. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: and it is mentioned in the media, it is usually
Speaker 1: dismissed as somehow like culling on. So this is this
Speaker 1: is pretty interesting. I'm I'm curious to look into it.
Speaker 1: I just learned one of our coworkers knows a little
Speaker 1: bit about Espronto, so we might have to consult with him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and find out a little bit more about it. I
Speaker 1: disagree with you, though. I don't think Princess Cariboo would
Speaker 1: be into this too many people, too many people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she was. She was concerned about her true identity being exposed.
Speaker 1: I don't know if she wanted to followers. Yeah, she
Speaker 1: would have wanted something. I think that nobody else could
Speaker 1: catch on too. She was a little bit of a
Speaker 1: fibber so and speaking of FIBs, we have an article
Speaker 1: on our website called how lying Works, So if you
Speaker 1: want to dissect that topic a little more and find
Speaker 1: out maybe how Princess Cariboo was able to use it
Speaker 1: to advantage, you can look it up on our homepage
Speaker 1: at www dot how Stuff works dot com. Be sure
Speaker 1: to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Speaker 1: Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
Speaker 1: promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The Houstaffords iPhone app
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