Forgotten

Who we are is closely tied to what we—and others—know about ourselves. These stories offer examples of how that might be taken to the extreme.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Newcomers to a community are often intriguing, especially
when that community is small and everyone knows one another.
For example, new neighbors can either be a blessing or
a curse, depending on how loud they play their music

(00:48):
or how rambunctious their children are. Change is difficult to accept,
and what is new is often mistaken for bad. But
sometimes a fresh face is just what a sleepy town
needs to jolt it wake, and that's exactly what one
small English town got in eighteen seventeen when Almondsbury welcomed
a certain royal figure. It began when a local cobbler

(01:09):
found a strange young woman on his doorstep. Her clothes
made it clear she was not from around town. She
wore what people at the time had described as exotic,
including a turban which had been wrapped around her head.
The cobbler asked if there was anything he could do
to help the struggling young woman. She replied in a
language he had never heard before, but through hand gestures,

(01:30):
she was able to convey that she was in need
of food and shelter, which was also evident by her condition.
She was dirty and disoriented, as though she had been
out on her own for quite a long time. Since
he could not communicate with her in any meaningful way,
the cobbler took the woman to see Samuel Warrel, the
town's overseer of the poor. Now, the overseers job was

(01:50):
to help those in need on behalf of the government.
People in this role often provided financial assistance, food, and
clothing to individuals without the means. Woman was able to
tell Worrel and his wife two things. First, she pointed
at a picture of a pineapple and said ananas, a
word that translated to pineapple in multiple languages, including Indonesian.

(02:12):
She also used the word Caribou, which they determined to
be her name. It was believed that she had come
to Almondsbury from China. Caribou showed that she enjoyed drinking
tea and ate only vegetables as well, but that was
all they knew about her, and without anything else to
go on, Mr Warrell brought her to the police, believing
she was a beggar only out for money. Then she

(02:34):
was held for several days until she met a Portuguese
sailor named Manuel Anesso. He claimed he could speak the
woman's native tongue and even translated for the authorities. Anesso
listened to her story, a roller coaster tale about how
she found her way to England. She was Princess Caribou
of Javasu, a tiny island somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

(02:55):
Her father had come from China and was quite wealthy,
while her mother had been killed when she was a
little girl. The woman had been walking in her garden
by herself when she was taken by pirates. They stayed
on their ship until it reached Bristol Channel, when she
jumped overboard and swam to the shore. Her story was
published in the local newspapers and she became quite the celebrity.

(03:16):
Her prison cell was replaced with a warm bed. She danced,
prayed to a god named a La Tala, swam in
lakes in the nude, all of which was observed by
her new hosts as unique behaviors from a culture they'd
never seen before. She also demonstrated her skills and archery
and fencing. Cariboos fame led her to receiving the royal

(03:38):
treatment as well. Not only was a ball held in
her honor, but she also had a portrait of herself painted,
which was then published by the press, so the rest
of England could know the mysterious Princess Caribou a little better. Unfortunately,
her portrait made her even more of a celebrity, and
not in the way she had hoped. A woman who
ran a boarding house in Bristol wreck ignized Caribou. The

(04:01):
landlady had given her a place to stay months earlier
and called her out on her ruse. Suddenly the princess
knew how to speak perfect English. It turned out that
Princess Cariboo hadn't come from an island in the Indian
Ocean after all, nor was her father a member of
Chinese high society. Her name was Mary Baker and she
had been a servant. She had invented the persona of

(04:23):
Princess Cariboo as a way to break out of her
working class life, which she certainly did. Mary left England
for America, a trip furnished by Mrs Warrell. She lived
there for seven years until she finally returned home to England,
where she lived out the rest of her life, selling
of all things leeches. Leeches were often used for medical purposes,

(04:44):
such as the removal of toxins through the blood. Mary
Baker manufactured and identity to seem interesting to the people
who had shunned her before. Sadly, despite her notoriety, she
died in relative obscurity in eighteen sixty four, and she
was aried in a small cemetery in an unmarked grave.

(05:16):
Our lives are a collection of events and memories, the
things that shape us into who we become. Opening a
coveted toy on Christmas, a first kiss, turning the key
on a first home. These are the occasions we treasure
and look back on through the years. But what happens
when you lose those memories? What happens when the people
you know become strangers to you and you no longer

(05:37):
recognize the places you go every day? For one English musician,
he learns the answers to those questions every thirty seconds.
Clive Wearing was born in the UK in nineteen. Much
of his career was dedicated to studying and teaching the
music of the Sight and twenty centuries. During his active years,
he formed large ensembles sung in quis and perform all

(06:00):
over Europe. However, in Wearing contracted a virus that affected
his central nervous system and, perhaps more importantly, his brain,
the hippocampus to be exact, the part of the brain
that dealt with memory. Wearing recovered from the illness, but
it left him with a terrible side effect. He was
no longer able to make new memories. He was diagnosed

(06:21):
with a condition known as entarograde amnesia, and in short,
it means that every thirty seconds his mental slate was
wiped clean. To this day, he holds no recollection of
what transpired only half a minute ago. As his wife
once described it, he did not seem to be able
to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed,
if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a

(06:44):
new scene. When the symptoms first presented, Wearing believed that
he had woken up from a coma, or that he'd
been dead and resurrected. If someone handed him an object.
Seconds later, he'd looked down at it, amazed that it
had miraculously appeared in his palm out of nowhere. People
he met became strangers in an instant, and he often
found himself stopping in the middle of conversations, only to

(07:06):
restart them again from the beginning. He would even reintroduce
himself to the people he was speaking too. Sadly, Wearing
was also diagnosed with another condition called retrograde amnesia. Unlike
the terrograde variety, which prevented him from forming new memories,
retrograde amnesia affected his past memories as well. Vast portions
of his upbringing, his career, even memories of his children

(07:29):
were erased. For example, he knows he has children from
his first wife, but he is unable to remember their names,
and each time his mind resets, he is filled with
a rush of love for his second wife, whom he
married a year before the illness set in. He knows
that she is important to him, but her name escapes him.
Yet every few seconds he meets her for the first

(07:50):
time all over again, and his love is renewed. But
not all of his past life is lost. He is
aware of his past as a musician, and that he
had a musical edge. Cation In fact, sit him at
a piano and he can play it perfectly, even long
and difficult compositions from years back. His muscle memory is
still very much intact. He also knows the names of

(08:11):
foods he likes, but he can no longer associate their tastes,
meaning when he eats chicken, he knows he's eating chicken,
but not what chicken is supposed to taste like until
it touches his tongue and wearing. Has the ability to
learn new things despite his lack of short and long
term memory, but despite watching a video every day, he
can anticipate certain things happening on subsequent viewings, though he

(08:35):
doesn't know why, and he's able to learn certain new
skills by performing the same action over and over again.
He is aware of the layout of his home as
he moves through it, but don't try asking him to
describe it. He lives his life as a series of
patterns and routines, like getting ready in the morning and
dressing himself. His brain just knows how to do certain things,

(08:57):
despite his inability to explain them in words or why
he has that knowledge. It sounds difficult, to say the least,
especially for those around him. Living with a condition that
reboots one's brain after thirty seconds can be exhausting, But
for Clive Wearing, there is a silver lining. Every minute
is a fresh start. Every minute is the first day

(09:20):
of the rest of his life. I hope you've enjoyed
today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.

(09:41):
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Ye